Since we're talking about roguelikes, Brogue[0] is awesome as well.

[0]: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE

Brogue is great, but I personally found it extremely hard. I have to admit I'm not a huge gamer, but I did sink a couple dozen hours to Brogue with what felt like no improvement at all.

You see a Jelly in the second floor? You die. You see a Goblin? You die.

Brogue is a spiritual successor to the original Rogue, where the goal is not to Kill Anything That Moves but rather to get the Amulet and escape by any means necessary.

You don't get "experience points" for killing anything, and there's no "leveling up" (though drinking potions of life increases your max HP). You can see your HP (and your nutrition) as liabilities but they're also resources -- if you go several dungeon levels without losing any HP, maybe you're being too picky about your fights. If you end up popping a bunch of life potions in the first few levels, maybe you're not being picky enough.

Stealth is a totally valid tactic (press ']' to turn on a view of the stealth radius, notice that spending a turn waiting reduces your stealth radius to 1/2 normal, and also I like to press '\' to turn off the dynamic light effects to make it easier to see my stealth radius). You can get through the game in leather armor (especially if its a special one that lets you reflect incoming spells or that lets you blithely breathe otherwise-harmful atmospheric effects).

"Mobility" builds that let you be super choosy about your engagements are also workable (lots of obstruction, blinking, and tunneling).

Tank builds where you've got enchanted plate and broadsword and you're smashing everything also work, but really only to a point. You won't win going head-to-head with dragons.

"Mage" builds with a couple enchanted damage staves and a ring of wisdom are fun, but I scarcely ever find the items I need to make it work.

Oddly enough, the majority of my deaths are to eels :\

I love love love Brogue. Read the code too, the author is great about doing things like building gradient descent maps for the dungeon level and only invalidating them when the dungeon configuration changes, that kind of thing.

> Dungeon Crawl

This is a favorite. And just to add, after I got a bit tired of roguelikes I tried out Flare and got hooked on the old version in my distro's repos. It's an isometric 3D action RPG.

Later I found it is still under active development and really fun, with a greatly improved base campaign and community mods available as well.

Be sure to get the AppImage rather than whatever might be in older repos if you're running Linux.

https://flarerpg.org/

Recent presentation by Justin, the lead developer: https://flarerpg.org/2022/02/21/i-love-free-software-day-202...

Blog: https://flarerpg.org/blog/

Forums: https://opengameart.org/forums/flare

I've been playing DCSS on and off for about 12 years now I highly recommend it to anyone even knowing the learning curve is wildly steep and most people probably won't be able to win without putting in a lot of effort.

I played DCSS for a while, but they kept turning it into a different game. I think the real problem with that game is that only the heaviest players take an interest in developing it, and those players eventually get bored with the game as it is.

this has been my experience playing on and off for over a decade now. it's wild to check back in after a couple months/years and learn about how the game has completely changed in some radical way again—"btw no food anymore lol" etc.

Big ups for FreeCiv. I've spent more than a few minutes in that.

DCSS for life.

+1 for Endless Sky. Excellent game!