Rampant Games - Guest Post: The Roguelikes #1

Our own skavenhorde writes a guest post over at Tales of the Rampant Coyote, with a hefty piece on roguelikes. Some history, opinion, reviews and suggestions are all covered in a sort of roguelikes overview 101. A snip:

ADOM is a whole world with quests, plenty of character building, stories to follow and choices to make. It’s closer to a usual RPG than some of the other roguelikes. I’ve played. The charatcer building alone will keep you coming back for more. It offers ten different races and twenty different classes.

I’ve read that this roguelike is brutal on beginners and while I do agree I don’t think of that as a negative. Like other roguelikes it will also punish you through death. It’s the main way you learn from your mistakes. If you don’t like to read spoilers then you will die and die a lot before you figure out what creatures to be careful of and how to deal with them. Everything you first encounter will be a mystery to you and should be treated with kid gloves until you learn more about them. For me, that is part of the appeal to this roguelike or roguelikes in general. There are creative ways to handle situations. For example: are you low on food? Well try eating that corpse of that monster you just killed, but be aware that meat isn’t just meat in this game. There can be some unexpected consequences or bonuses when trying something for the first time.

What makes ADOM stand apart from the rest are its skill system, quests, an honest to goodness plot, monster behavior and other tiny little things like the random bonus you get when creating your character. There are other little things like a wilderness, talking to NPCs to get information about quests, weather and corruption.