Brogue. Best game evah.
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Do you even ASCII-art permadeath, bro?
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So… Was this inspired by any particular design goals that set it apart from Nethack or vanilla Rogue? From the name I would have expected something like a superficial parody.
While I haven’t played it yet – I’m waiting for a version that a bit more “idiot” friendly (more my speed) – I’m surprised Dwarf Fortress didn’t make the list.
Any time I see a “best” list like this, I don’t go into it in the hopes that my personal favorites will make the cut. Instead I scan it to see if I’ve missed anything interesting.
Of the 50, I’ve played 45 to one degree or another. Of the 5 I haven’t played, it was because they weren’t appealing to me. Unfortunately I’ve heard of them all, so I’ll have to keep an eye on the comments and see if anything new shows up here.
A couple that I would include on my personal list are Beyond Good & Evil, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. I was looking forward to the BG&E sequel that was being talked about a few years back. I would guess Eternal Darkness died with Silicon Knights.
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If you like Darksouls try Salt and Sanctuary
I also really enjoyed Sundered
Easier fair: Both Steam World Dig games
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Brogue is pretty much the only game I play. Works surprisingly well on the iPad. It does have a feature that allows you to pplay a specific dungeon seed, which mitigates the permadeath aspect somewhat and makes it possible to share promising dungeons with other masochists:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brogueforum/comments/47tgfk/new_new_list_of_difficult_easy_or_neato_seeds/
I don’t know the backstory. I played Moria on a VAX system in the late 80’s; went looking for an iOS compatible clone and found Brogue.
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I think it’s a case of “you always remember your first time”. What I experienced playing Morrowind was not “wow, this is a really well-executed, detailed open-world RPG” it was “Holy shit I didn’t know games could be like this, how is this even possible”.
I’m not sure anyone even can experience that revelation now, since vast open worlds are a given in all kinds of games these days. Morrowind was amazing, now it’s pretty meh. You had to be there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I’m not sure I understand your point. We are currently in the 21st century and the year is commonly spoken as “two thousand and nineteen” or “twenty nineteen”. How we speak the year has little to do with what century it is in. Saying the year as “twentieth nineteenth” won’t change that it’s still a part of the “twenty-first century”.
But none of that had anything to do with my original point. Centuries are groups of 100 years. The common numbered centuries start with rolling the Gregorian Calendar back to year 1 and going to year 100 for the first century, years 101-200 for the second century, etc. up to 1901 to 2000 for the 20th century.
If we want the year 2000 to be a part of the 21st century then the 20th century would need to run from the year 1900-1999, and on back to the second century running from 100-199, but what about the first century? There is no year zero, the year 1CE is preceded by year 1 BCE, so would the first century be from 1BCE-1CE-99CE? Or do we throw up our hands and say there are only 99 years in one of the centuries?
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Great I’m gonna be humming the damn music for the rest of the day
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I used to like listening to Keza McDonald when she frequently guested on the now dormant Daft Souls podcast. It’s really cool that she’s now with The Guardian and they have some decent games journalism. They also do a lot of sf/f reviews, unlike most of the mainstream media, so go Guardian!
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Great list but I’m surprised that Horizon: Zero Dawn is missing. It’s just one of the most amazing games ever created!
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Was there a methodology used?
(Fits Angry Borsalino Panama…)
Whatever it was, I disagree with it!
No mention of kerbal space program?
I wouldn’t hold my breath… Just give it a go.
I felt much the same way but found that it’s not actually that hard to get into. It’s one of those games where there’s always going to be someone creating massive cathedrals of lava powered megadeath or creating Turing-complete computers out of watergates or whatever but you can just fire it up and get your very own Khazad-dûm going as a mere mortal. Or play Adventure-mode.
This is a BBS post. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of malachite. This post is adorned with spikes of platinum. On the post are images of dwarves writhing with food poisoning inlaid in ebony.
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I’m sick of this century already.
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It does if it indicates we are on a number line instead of counting from some particular date (like the Japanese era system). And you have to face it - that’s the current common understanding. It’s why everyone says “the year Nineteen Seventy Nine”, and it’s why everyone celebrated the turn of the willennium on Jan 1 2000 after they partied like it was 1999. I’m a date descriptivist.
So current years are on a number line, years way back are in the archaic model brought about by dynastic thinking 1500 years ago, and there is a fuzzy connection between the two. Maybe someday we will be smart and put all dates on the number line. I say Julius Caesar was born in -99.
With the big ones (on the indie game scale) already named:
Do you like pinball as well? If yes:
Also, if you are interested in weird geometry:
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It’s in The Guardian, so it must be true.
I’ve been holding out for this:
It’s not that I can’t get into a game with ascii characters, in fact I loved them for a long time. It’s just my eyesight is turning to crap as I get older and I don’t want to find my adventure ended when I mistake a hostile comma for a friendly period or whatever the real game equivalents would be.
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That reminds me a lot of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat:
Probably most well known for being controlled with a set of bongo’s. Great game.
I will keep my eyes open for Yoku.
Edited to add: I put Yoku’s Island Express to my nintypricer.com wishlist.
Also reminds me, in style, of Snake Pass:
Which is basically just one long tutorial for how to become a snake 
Snake Pass would be high on my list of the 50 best games.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pack
There are all sorts of graphic sets available.
Maybe one of those would do the job?
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