Hello!

I am back with roguelikes!

I have been a roguelike game called Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. It is a fork of an old, unmaintained dungeon crawling game (which is the reason for its name, duh).

The goal of the game is to dive into the Dungeon and retrieve the Orb of Zot. To do that, you have to locate at least three runes, which will unlock the final area where the Orb awaits.

Highlights:

* A lot of character building is going on. You decide which skills you want the character to be good at, and they are trained automatically. You get to change your training targets every now and then because circumstances change throughout the game.
* The Dungeon has lots of branches and sub-areas. You can decide which areas to explore and which enemies to fight. If your character build does not work in a certain area, you just try somewhere else and return when you feel strong enough. Or just abbandon that place forever - you are not required to explore 100% of the game to beat it, since there are more runes than necessary to unlock the final showdown.
* The religion system is wel worked on. You can join a church in-game. Your god will grant you powers as you further his agenda, and you will get screwed up
by your god if you fail him or betray him.

Downlights:

* Permadeath. In original rogue it does not matter much, because games last half an hour. Here it sucks because you can lose a character you have been working on for hours. Admitedly, there are not many sources of cheap deaths in this game so it is less of a problem.
* For what I can see, the devs of the game are not very flexible. They want you to play a certain way and actively penalize behaviours that fall out of expected play. They are very upfront about how they want the game to be like in the documentation, however.

I am having a blast. You can try it out by finding an online server. Both web and ssh access is suported by many.

Infor about online play: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto

Cheers!

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