Dungeon crawler recomendations

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Rastan is absolutely not a dungeon crawler

Yeah, as much as I appreciate a good action platformer (and we do!), Rastan definitely ain't a first person dungeon crawling rpg. Maybe an accidental post in the wrong thread?

[1000Eyes]

Anyone ever tried out the roguelike Iter Vehemens ad Necem, aka IVAN? It's a Nethack-like with a cult reputation of being rather brutal, but other than that it is rarely discussed. Well, I tried it for 2 hours, so here are some initial impressions:

- Intriguing body-part system, where both you and enemies can have their arms and legs severed, and instant death if vital parts are sufficiently damaged — so if you are still at a decent HP level, you might still die if they kick your nuts too much Too bad that you can't really target enemy body parts (it seems random), so in the early game where I'm at this mostly affects me. It does make the bump combat more tense than usual, as I have to pay attention to a little body display to make sure I won't lose an arm or a leg and disadvantage myself, or if the enemy is scoring too many vital hits. Btw, there are no numbers for individual parts, you have to guess it based on the graphic. I heard that later you can collect body parts to create Frankenstein-style slaves, or even graft stuff on your body. Looking forward.

- No item identify game! Quite a departure for a hack-like. Not sure what I feel about it yet, as I quite like that game, but I need to play till a bit more to find out if it really affects anything. It does feel great to equip whatever I want though.

- God as items. In Hack-likes, gods are like shmup bombs, limited use panic buttons. Here they work a bit more like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup gods, where there's pantheon and they lend you specific skills you can borrow at the cost of not being able to invoke them for some turns without punishment. So you are kinda encouraged to pray a lot as opposed to the last resort common in Hack-likes.

- Full ADOM-style world and quests. There are apparently multiple endings and tons of cool world-building, flavoring. It's quite wry and amusing in tone, terse and satirical.

- Otherwise, seems like a middle ground between ADOM and Nethack in terms of simulation complexity. Definitely scratches that itch more than more pure roguelikes like Stone Soup or even Rogue itself.

Anyway, gotta play a bit more to see where the hard reputation comes from.

[Vanguard]

I've only played a few minutes of IVAN, but I hear it has a Garegga-like dynamic difficulty system where you have to make sure you never convince the game you're doing too well or it will crank the difficulty up to impossible and kill you.

[1000Eyes]

I've only played a few minutes of IVAN, but I hear it has a Garegga-like dynamic difficulty system where you have to make sure you never convince the game you're doing too well or it will crank the difficulty up to impossible and kill you.

Hah, this made me do some research a bit, because that sounds bonkers.

Fortunately (unfortunately?), from this guide and stray posts here and there, it seems to work intuitively: more difficult monster spawns depending on how good your equipment and stats are, especially tied to HP. The only way this might throw you off balanced is if you find a really good HP boosting armor early, or you somehow got very powerful artificial limbs, then it starts spawning kamikaze dwarves. Straight up Yagawa-hack would've given me a heart attack

[Lethe]

Hmm, I hadn't ever played IVAN much either, and I hadn't realized it had such a Hack-like structure. I thought it was just a funny YASD joke game. Maybe it's worth trying it out again, been a very long time.

You've incidentally reminded me that there are (quasi-)humans who actually like DCSS out there. Dear lord, I can't imagine another game that does absolutely everything quite as wrong. Bizarre that it still has any influence at all, but, well... a complete lack of standards is frankly pretty common among RPGers of any stripe.

[1000Eyes]

Heh, interesting opinion, Lethe. Would love to hear some elaboration.

Personally, DCSS isn't my favorite roguelike, but I do admire how pure it is in its all combat philosophy. I think it's combat and progression is one of the more interesting turn based systems out there. Despite having little to do with the original Rogue, that single-mindedness shares more with Rogue than the more kitchen-sink approach that Hack-likes tend to go (and echoed further in games like Spelunky, DF, CDDA). It just feels a little wrong for me in specific a genre that aimed to capture the dungeon life experience to focus so much on the head-to-head tactics aspect and use the auto explore key so much, a crit I'd share with TOME, although that one has its own set of virtues and flaws. All of this is, of course, very subjective.

[Sima Tuna]

I love Caves of Qud because it's like a combination of traditional roguelike dungeon crawler with a sprawling crpg.

[Lethe]

Heh, interesting opinion, Lethe. Would love to hear some elaboration.

Personally, DCSS isn't my favorite roguelike, but I do admire how pure it is in its all combat philosophy. I think it's combat and progression is one of the more interesting turn based systems out there. Despite having little to do with the original Rogue, that single-mindedness shares more with Rogue than the more kitchen-sink approach that Hack-likes tend to go (and echoed further in games like Spelunky, DF, CDDA). It just feels a little wrong for me in specific a genre that aimed to capture the dungeon life experience to focus so much on the head-to-head tactics aspect and use the auto explore key so much, a crit I'd share with TOME, although that one has its own set of virtues and flaws. All of this is, of course, very subjective.

It's a cascading series of effects primarily stemming from the game having zero depth. It's a game where there's nothing but linear combat and a chicken-and-egg relationship with that combat being dogshit. You're forced to take trivial fights seriously because without doing that the game has nothing to offer, but taking a fight seriously is at most a mere resource tax because there's no depth, because the game has nothing but combat, which by extension is making the combat worse... paradoxical tedium spawned from inelegant simplicity. This is baked into the statistical design of the game like how it handles damage numbers, and then that has a two-way relationship with aggro and level generation and player power. The entire design is doomed top to bottom, just scrap the whole thing and start over.

It also has definitively the worst progression of any large roguelike. Dreadful utilitarian-obsessed itemization, skills are just arbitrary numerical breakpoints, raise one barely meaningful stat every few levels, freeform classes converge on doing the same things and playing the same way because there's ultimately like 2 things to do in the whole game.

Nethack is definitely not a kitchen sink game because a huge amount of attention to detail has gone into how all the parts interact with each other (it's what the game's most famous for). ToME4 definitely is a kitchen sink game because it's a collection of whatever the developer felt like doing thoughtlessly tossed together. Having said that, ToME4 does have some great character archetypes, good progression, and better combat than at least DCSS. And I don't even like ToME4 - I think the sum of its parts is a severe failure, but it still destroys DCSS on literally every single front. I personally have plenty of experience with Angband (probably 1000+ hours across all its variants) and I don't think it would be crazy to say that even Angband has better combat than DCSS given their relative positions in each game's strategical hierarchy.

[Vanguard]

You've incidentally reminded me that there are (quasi-)humans who actually like DCSS out there. Dear lord, I can't imagine another game that does absolutely everything quite as wrong. Bizarre that it still has any influence at all, but, well... a complete lack of standards is frankly pretty common among RPGers of any stripe.

It's SO tedious and somehow it's one of the most popular roguelikes. I really do not get it.

I can't really enjoy TOME4 either because of its MMO cooldown based combat, but it does offer a lot of interesting character types to play as. I'm a fan of the dev's old Angband variant, TOME2. Angband is kind of tedious too but I'll take it over Crawl any day. TOME2 has a lot of fun and crazy character building choices like you'd expect from DarkGod.