Remarkable Roaming: A Roguelike Roundup

I had a tight group of friends in high school and college who were all, to one degree or another, gamers like me.

We had a few places where we hung out, including the local shopping mall (it was the eighties, after all) and the basement of one friend’s house, where we spent hours playing games like M.U.L.E. and watching videos. 

I have a distinct memory of one epic summer gaming night at another friend’s house in a room above his garage. He had a computer there, and the rest of us lugged over various electronic gadgets – another computer, a guitar, a music keyboard. We played games and music late into the night, fueling our marathon session with cold soda and chips.

After everyone else had passed out on a couch or chair, I kept at it – tapping away on one of the computers until the sun came up. I was deep into a game called Nethack, an early “roguelike” – a game from long before the term included the plethora of subgenres, mechanics, and meanings of today.

“Roguelike” as a game genre has a modern definition that encompasses nearly any game built around repeatable, procedural content, usually featuring some degree of meta progression. But originally, the term defined a narrower genre – turn-based dungeon crawlers, often with ASCII graphics. The genre took its name from Rogue, a ground-breaking 1980 title.

To a kid who grew up on D&D, Rogue and Nethack offered deep experiences without high-tech graphics – immersive, challenging, and ultimately unfair dungeon crawls that mirrored the exploration and combat elements of pen-and-paper games. Though the roleplaying and social elements of tabletop role-playing were absent, Nethack and its kin were still a great way to spend gaming time.

Though the definition has expanded over the years, traditional roguelikes are still a thriving genre. I don’t fire up Nethack very often these days, but its replacements and successors still have a permanent place on my computer.

As I slid into the last weekend of November sleepy from my turkey coma, reeling from the triple-A game onslaught of 2023, I found myself wanting a palate cleanser – something that didn’t require the time investment of a Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield.

Below is a list of four of the best traditional roguelikes around – a couple of which can be played on almost any aging computer for the low, low price of “free.”

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup

A direct descendant of Rogue and Nethack, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is free, open source, and still in active development. 

One of the easier roguelikes for new players to get into, DCSS is relatively forgiving. The obscure leaps of logic required to beat Nethack are absent, and most bad situations are recoverable with thoughtful play. 

Yet the challenge is still there for advanced players. Beating the game takes solid knowledge of its systems, especially learning when to run from a fight.

The game’s traditional fantasy theme includes a plethora of races and classes to mix and match. A variety of special dungeon branches makes every run different, and an excellent graphical tileset completes the polished package. It’s one of the most accessible traditional roguelikes for new players – and best of all, it’s completely free.

Jupiter Hell

If the pitch “Doom, but as a turn-based roguelike” is weirdly appealing to you, Jupiter Hell has you covered. A descendant of DoomRL, from a gameplay perspective it sticks closely to the classic roguelike structure – procedural levels in a branching dungeon like Stone Soup, differentiated character classes (though only three), and a surprisingly wide variety of encounters and weapon drops.

The difference, most obviously, is the setting and tone. Instead of defeating orcs with swords and arrows, you’re murdering demons and zombies with shotguns and rocket launchers. Instead of casting fireballs, you’re blowing up explosive barrels and chucking grenades.

The level of polish is high. The soundtrack pulses; bouncy physics applied to chunks of exploding enemies consistently entertains. There’s even a touch of voice acting – a foul-mouthed hero that’s almost more Duke Nukem than Doomguy. 

For players who have always wanted to try a traditional roguelike but couldn’t get past the ASCII look, Jupiter Hell is a superbly playable entry point.

Caves of Qud

Esoteric and imaginative, Caves of Qud is hard to categorize. The world has far more story content than many roguelikes, with an intended sequence through the game (albeit one with plenty of procedural elements at play). There’s a narrative to follow and a sequence of involved quests.

Caves of Qud is a game with near-infinite possibilities. As a “story generator,” it’s the equal of games like Dwarf Fortress. Your character might get an arm chopped off, but end up a mutated cyborg wielding four axes with four arms. You might encounter a living door, which can only be destroyed by fire. You might make friends with a giant ape mecha.

With its quirky science-fiction setting, complex mechanics, and robust and flexible character creator, Caves of Qud is a great next step for players who find games like Dungeon Crawl and Jupiter Hell too simplistic and repetitive. 

UnReal World

This one’s a stretch to label as a traditional roguelike, but I had to include it – it’s simply amazing. More of a survival game than a dungeon crawler, UnReal World has been in more or less continuous development since its first release in 1992 – a remarkable and record-breaking thirty-year history.

A punishing low-tech simulation of surviving in a wilderness bearing a close resemblance to Iron Age Scandinavia, UnReal World is a labor of love from a couple of developers from Finland. If wandering game trails through endless forests trailing after a wounded reindeer, cutting down hundreds of spruce trees to build a crude cabin, and dying by falling through the ice on a lake seem like your idea of a good time, UnReal World is for you.

The game is the opposite of a power fantasy. You start from almost nothing, and end up eventually dying from something mundane – the most heroic end you’ll face is getting mauled by a bear or unceremoniously butchered by a warrior. Yet its day-to-day rhythm of wood gathering, smoking meat, and tanning hides has a hypnotic quality that’s impressively immersive and well-designed.

Roguelikes Forever!

With the inclusion of UnReal World on this list, I’ve stretched my overly narrow definition of “traditional roguelike.” It wouldn’t take much more of a reach to include great titles like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or expend digital ink waxing rhapsodic about Dwarf Fortress.

Instead, I’ll leave it there – a list of four great traditional roguelikes you can get right now, all still actively being developed, each of which will give you endless hours of enjoyment crawling through procedurally generated worlds.

Happy roguelike-ing!

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