Sil, a newish roguelike from the author of All Things Devours. I haven’t delved into it much, but unlike most roguelikes it includes a very nice tutorial.
Oh my goodness, this is nice.
YES!! This roguelike looks very impressive. Unlike other roguelikes, it appears to attempt not to confuse and overwhelm the player. It appears to be informed by IF conventions. I love the mythic First Age Tolkien theme; from my first glance, it appears to be a far more real interpretation than the classic roguelike Angband. I never thought I’d see a roguelike that I liked better than Ancient Domains of Mystery, but this may do the trick!
Aww, it won’t run on my Mac, at least not right now.
Not an IF author, but an excellent roguelike I’ve just discovered is Brogue. Another one that doesn’t attempt to confuse and overwhelm you – it’s even playable without spoilers.
I’m on a Mac too. It crashed when I pressed “Tutorial” on the first run, but I restarted and it’s run fine since. Give that a shot.
I’ve been messing around with Brogue too. The ASCII graphics are somehow very pretty in a way that no other roguelike’s ASCII display is pretty. (That sentence should be mentally adjusted by the reader to take into account my relatively limited experience with roguelikes…)
Experience aside, I think you’re quite right Erik. Brogue happens to use the libtcod library, which has excellent color support, but Brogue’s author Pender also has made a very nice design to take advantage of it.
I’m getting “the Application Sil quit unexpectedly” as soon as I open it. (This happens with a couple other programs too, most notably recently And Yet It Moves.) I’m on OS X 10.5.8 so maybe it just isn’t up to date.
A blast from the past! I haven’t delved deep into the game, but playing around with the tutorial I’m reminded of the stuff I used to play in the early 80’s on a friend’s Apple IIE.
Now, if they could only figure out a way for me to become about 28 years younger . . . .
Robert Rothman
Ah, the famous libcotd! There is a long tutorial on building a complete roguelike with Python and libcotd here, and a much smaller piece with a few links to other projects that use the library here. Some of the linked stuff is pretty neat.
@Matt: I’m on 10.6.8, so perhaps there is an issue there.
It’s a very polished and rewarding little roguelike, definitely an improvement on Angband. Caves of Qud probably still remains my favourite.
The intro text says something about a “Morgoth” but as far as I can tell, the final boss of this game is Gorgol, the Butcher.