catfeeder

Heretic!!!!!!!!!!!

(I hate dragon claw btw)

The current version is 0.33.1, the game's title should display it

It's pretty complex, especially if you never played another traditional roguelike before. There's a tutorial which... I'm not fully fond of but it's good enough. You can see all the controls by pressing '?' at any time, and you can do everything with a mouse only (helpful at first!).

A video might help but keep in mind the game is fairly fast-moving (big updates roughly every half a year) so guides might be a bit outdated.

Have fun!!

It really is pretty!

Someone even made a "chart" of all the sprites changes during the game's lifetime: https://reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/1kjlvdq/dcss_pok%C3%A9mon_evolution_chart/

While I understand the reason people dislike attacks of opportunity, playing a roguelike without it feels so wrong to me. Melee brutes just can't do a thing to you when you moving away from them, it's so... weird!

I play a lot of crawl, and have pretty regularly since v0.16 or so. There’s been a lot of changes (there used to be food! Spells made you hungry!)

I want to try older versions someday but the lack of QoL features from modern versions is scary. I still remember my Vine Stalker who was sent to Abyss by a elf necromancer with a chaos dagger that I overlooked in logs. I'm SO glad that distortion brands are now marked on screen.

If you get Shatter online it can delete a lot of stuff outright. You just need another solution for flying stuff and jellies.

I never dived too deep into Earth magic but had a powerful ice mage with Permafrost Eruption, destroying entire screen worth of enemies. Then a unique caught me on the Spider's entrance and I realized too slowly that I need to escape. YASD

I don’t usually do the extended anymore.

I'm curious about extended but I also prefer my runs to be pretty short... I'll probably manage to get a few big runs to explore Pan and Hells and whatnot but can't see myself sticking to it. Short and sweet is great!

I learned that eating green slimes will melt your skin off and is uncurable.

Damn Nethack is something else lol. At some point I tried to play it (not Pathos, the OG) and died to a floating eye that paralyzed me for a few dozen turns or something. Didn't touch it ever since :D

there were some balancing issues deeper in the game that put me off it.

I'm not the biggest fan of PD personally but I find Shattered Pixel Dungeon (the most popular fork, very active) pretty fun. It was actually the first traditional roguelike I've ever beaten (not counting 7DRLs)!

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and I adore it. Sadly it’s just open world with no direction, which doesn’t work for me. I need a clearly stated game goal to work towards. But it’s a cool game no doubt.

I tried that one too, and had the same experience! I like its character creator, the complexity, even the inventory system. But... I don't know, the moment I find a safe base I lose any motivation to play. I'm not a survival girl after all.

Because, if it's free, you can just try it out, no? Some people (including me) are broke and need to carefully manage their expenses. It often means I wait for months before getting a new game, however much I desire it. A free game though? I can check it out at any moment, as long as I have a time for myself.

It would be nice to live in a naive world where I can just get whatever I want, whenever I want to.

I am sorry, but… how may not you even heard about Dungeon Crawl hearing about the genre almost everywhere…

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Of course I know about Dungeon Crawl and its genre...

Pathos Nethack Codec (basically Nethack rewrite for mobile support with some gameplay changes) was my second roguelike, after Pixel Dungeon. I was too stupid to search for guides so I played the game without ever knowing that eating certain corpses is always safe. I just kept dying of starvation.

My favorite start was a wizard, I loved figuring out how to use starting rings and scrolls to my advantage.

I figured offense is the best defense. I could’ve blinked away no problem. Hell, I could’ve launched a much better offense at practically no cost by using Serpent’s Lash, but nope, just ended up tapping the keys I always tap and hoping for RNGesus to save me.

I feel this. Splatted a lot of characters because I didn't decided to just keep hitting/walking away when the situation requires a much more involved solution. At least I die with lots of consumables in my pocket :)

I ran most of the game with a ring of evasion on, and my stats show that I dodged almost 3000 points of damage, so I'd say getting some EV is optimal even for dwarves and gargoyles with their low dodging apt.

With that said, in crawl clever play can mitigate many "sub-optimal" decisions and builds which I really love! I'm 100% sure I made several mistakes for this build too. Another roguelike like TOME is much less friendly to sub-optimal builds (at least in my experience).

The main reason I tend to not use gods' abilities is just that there's so much you can do in dcss that I sometimes just forget about what I can do. I'm way too fast in my decision making lol