One of few fantasy roguelikes set in norse mythology. Once a commercial product, now a forgotten freeware gem. The game starts when Fimbulwinter strikes. It is sure sign of incoming Ragnarok. Chaos engulfs known world while Jotuns and Valkyries prepare for the epic battle. Gods benevolent to mankind are outnumbered and underarmed. Norns have proclaimed their defeat. However, legends tell about a human hero who shall help the Aesir fight and perhaps tip the scales of battle. Thus your journey begins.

Click to read the full review

Typical roguelike game has wide array of commands to remember, plethora of stuff to use and multitude of mysterious creatures. Add ASCII graphics with several other minor gameplay quirks and you have succesfully scared away another newbie. Over is largely unfinished but it has core elements of roguelikeness implemented. Just a few keys, almost no complexity. This makes it ideal to recommend for newcomer to the genre.

Click to read the full review

…Notably MPRDB bears quite a lot similarites to Rogue. Dungeon is discovered in exactly same fashion. One square of visibility in corridors while whole rooms are revealed upon entering. Dungeoneering hero is described by only two main attributes: body and agility.

Read the full review.

Jhon Spelunky, a young, memory-less, snakephobic archeologist,
thirsty for adventure and treasure,
jumps into a cursed ruins complex full of traps and snakes…
looking for the ultimate artifact.
The amulet of Yendor.

This is a great way to start our biweekly Roguelike Spotlight, bringing you the latest and most exciting releases on the roguelike world!

Today, I give you Derek Yu’s SPELUNKY, a great game which albeit still on development, I am sure you all will enjoy!

My goal was to create a fast-paced platform game that had the kind of tension, re-playability, and variety of a roguelike.  In roguelikes, the gameplay tells the story, and I wanted to give Spelunky that type of a feeling… but make the player rely on their reflexes rather than their brain (or knowledge of what 50 billion command keys do!).  If there’s a best of both worlds, that’s what I was trying to go for.

Did he suceed?

This is much more than a procedurally generated platformer… besides the sweetly randomly generated levels there are many more things that take it close to a traditional roguelike! the fate of that promising character can change in less than you think, from a stuffed archeologist, shotgun and bombs packed, to giant tarantula food or a spike-teared bloody corpse!

The game features a smooth dificulty curve while still keeping things difficult; it is also full of surprises and puzzly situations where you got to make use of your available items, and by the way, you must make good use of them, as you may end up in a dead-end situation.

Following, the roguelikeness evaluation for Spelunky:

• High Value Factors
  • Random Environment Generation: Yes
  • Permafailure (including Permadeath): Yes
  • Turn Based Interaction: No
  • Single command set: Yes
  • Freedom: Yes
• Middle Value Factors
  • Discovery mechanics: Yes
  • Single player: Yes
  • Lots of content: No
  • Complex non-trivial world and object interactions: Yes
• Low Value Factors
  • High ramped difficulty: Yes
  • Monsters are players: Yes
  • Character-based display: No
  • Hack and Slash: Yes

TOTAL ROGUELIKENESS VALUE: 21/27 (78%)

Derek Yu provides us with a worthy cross-over experience, his experience in the indie scene cleary applied to this product. Graphics and Sound are retronice (what else could you expect from the creator of Aquaria?).

SO, download the game, browse the wikia, share some levels and… DISCUSS! :)

A young talented hacker desires fortune. He has a plan how to earn it but it needs time and is going to take a lot of work. Unknown and underequipped but slowly making himself someone in this world.
Money is earned by completing contracts. A client demands that a number of objectives is met upon leaving the target system. Then you get paid, sell any additional valuable information you gleaned “by the way” and your reputation gets slightly changed. If the contract was challenging you also receive skill points.

Read full review

Ooooorrrrcs!
Author: Jakub Debski
Website: http://www.alamak0ta.republika.pl/orcs.html
Language: C++

Grievously wounded after retrieving the famed +3 Crystal Crown of the Orc from the perilous orcish mines you find yourself trapped in a valley of death. Millions of orcs of all kinds to the west, a moonlit darkness to the west into the lands of man. It is time to run, you are being hunted!

A basic, yet challenging game, Ooooorrrrcs puts you in the place of an unlucky adventurer who must go west, west and beyond. The horde of grizzly orcs currently pushes forward (thus you dont even Dare to go back), your motion is all forward by reflex. Some power up herbs and some scattered orc weaklings will let you build your forces and phasedoor yourself into freedom, step by step your blood stains the ground and your strengths fade away. Will you make it?

After THE-HECK-OF-A-LONG run, the brave hero: Slash the Orc Slasher, survived, got to his hometown and stored the valuable artifact on his collection!

Gameplay: Challenging, addictive
Technical Highlights: Non trivial combat, map scrolling to the left, spells, collision resolution.

Andrew Doull, roguelike developer and mantainer of roguetemple’s friend blogsite: Ascii Dreams, has finished a review for the outstanding Angband variant: SteamBand!

Steamband is a Steampunk / Victorian / Pulp variant of Angband, A roguelike ASCII dungeon exploration simulation game. Steamband was based off the 2.9.3 version of Angband source code.

Check out the review, reproduced here at roguetemple with his permission.

Be sure to check too the Verbose Dumps if you want to get a feeling of the game, and the excellent fan-art by ponpoko.

Xenocide

The year is 2129, and man has taken to the stars. With him he had brought all of the wonders and horrors that he was wrought throughout the ages; joy and sorrow, peace and war, life and death. He has also found that he is not alone…

Xenocide the roguelike presents world from distant future. Humanity has advanced far beyond what modern people dream about technology. Then came the discovery of hyper-drive engine enabling rapid space exploration. Man begins to expand his empire, and finally meets intelligent alien race.

The crew of the Columbus attempted to make contact with the alien vessel, but they received no response. They waited for ten long hours, transmitting the same message of greetings and peace. Then, just when most of the crew had begun to suspect that the alien vessel might be abandoned, they received a response from it. The response did not come in the form of a communication, it came in the form of a missile, a missile with an antimatter warhead.
(…)
Thus began the war.

Read the review here

Scrap was entry for 7DRL challenge in 2005 but after deadline author wished to polish it in order to make it more a game than a proof of concept. Later extended version came and finally 1.1 which fixed all known bugs.

You control a robot surrounded by other hostile robots. That is all you get to know about the plot but it is sufficient. Your machine can have up to eight systems plugged in. Any combination with at least one power source is valid. How one collects parts to plug into one’s robot? From other robots of course!

Read the rest of the review

Welcome home adventurer. Latest word from the doctor is not good.The diagnosis is confirmed as dianthroritis. He guesses that your daughter has only 300 mobuls left in this world. It’s up to you, adventurer, to find the only hope for your daughter, the very rare potion of cure dianthroritis. It is rumored that only deep in the depths of caves can this potion be found.

Here comes a classic! One of the first games in roguelike genre is Larn. It has even poorer “graphics” than Rogue because it utilizes only three colors (and third must be activated in options file). Despite that many players enjoyed it. Current maintainer is Copx, who ported Larn to Windows and fixed a few bugs present. I played version 12.3 which still has some problems that 12.4 does not.

Read the rest of the review