Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup

If you like rougelikes like NetHack, you should love Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Decently hard, but what I like about it instead of NetHack is that doesn&#x27;t require the level of rote memorization that NetHack requires. (Or Wiki hand-holding.) The game does a good job of killing you, and making you feel that, &quot;yep… I did not play my hand right there.&quot; whereas NetHack will kill you for looking at it funny. (Usually in DCSS, I find that I should have retreated much sooner than I did.) The game will generally warn you outright if you try to do something considerably dangerous. (Aside from, notably, running headlong into combat when you shouldn&#x27;t. But, for example, it will warn you if you try to eat a mutagenic corpse, or wield something that will royally peeve your deity.)<p>The artwork is beautiful, and I&#x27;m especially fond of the dungeon generator: it&#x27;s a mix of random layouts and human design, and the result feels a lot more natural and interesting. On some levels, large parts of the level will be random, but a human designed piece might get integrated into it (randomly).<p>You can play online, too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawl.develz.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawl.develz.org&#x2F;</a> (and I prefer this myself, as you can also spectate other players, and chat w&#x2F; them. Occasionally, I learn a thing or two.)<p>The point of the game is to get the Orb of Zot and get out, much like NetHack. Somewhat unlike NetHack, you need 3 runes to get the orb, but there are 15 in the game, making all of them considerably optional, and it&#x27;s <i>much</i> more difficult to get all. The game has a few challenges beyond that, as well.<p>(I&#x27;ve only escaped w&#x2F; the Orb once, as a Gargoyle Fighter.)

Unlike many other games, DCSS has an explicitly articulated design manifesto explaining the ethos of what is fun and why. It&#x27;s _amazing_ and you should read it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;crawl&#x2F;crawl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;crawl-ref&#x2F;docs&#x2F;crawl_manual.rst#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;crawl&#x2F;crawl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;crawl-ref&#x2F;docs&#x2F;cr...</a><p>I&#x27;ve pulled a few highlights:<p>&gt; Speaking about games in general, wherever there&#x27;s a no-brainer, that means the development team put a lot of effort into providing a &quot;choice&quot; that&#x27;s really not an interesting choice at all. And that&#x27;s a horrible lost opportunity for fun.<p>&gt; Another basic design principle is avoidance of grinding (also known as scumming). These are activities that have low risk, take a lot of time, and bring some reward. This is bad for a game&#x27;s design because it encourages players to bore themselves.<p>&gt; The interface is radically designed to make gameplay easy - this sounds trivial, but we mean it. All tedious, but necessary, chores should be automated. Examples are long-distance travel, exploration and taking notes.<p>&gt; the joy of discovering something spoily is nice, once. (And disappears before it can start if you feel you need to read spoilers - a legitimate feeling.) The joy of dealing with ever-changing, unexpected and challenging strategic and tactical situations that arise out of transparent rules, on the other hand, is nice again and again.

Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making &quot;stone soup&quot;, which tastes wonderful, although it still needs a little bit of garnish to improve the flavor, which they are missing. The villager does not mind parting with a few carrots to help them out, so that gets added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not reached its full potential yet. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning to help them out. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by all. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty and nutritious meal which they share with the donors.

I&#x27;ve been playing Nethack and other roguelikes for well over 20 years. Nethack has to be the one game out of all the games that I&#x27;ve played that I played the longest. As you can probably tell, I love Nethack.<p>DCSS is the game that has made me more or less abandon Nethack to play it instead. It improves on Nethack in so many ways: from the super useful auto-explore, to the beautiful and innovative use of colors, lots and lots of really bizzare and unique gods, beautiful and interesting thematic levels, a Lua scripting interface, and much, much more. I&#x27;m seriously impressed with how much the DCSS developers have achieved, and how quickly they&#x27;ve achieved it.<p>It&#x27;s also telling that Nethack has traditionally had a glacial development cycle, while DCSS development is super active. There are tons of new features, races, levels, and gods in nearly every release, and new releases come out all the time.<p>That said, there are still other things that Nethack does best. The crazy number of things that you can do with items and bodies in Nethack seems deeper than DCSS, as are some of the relationships with one&#x27;s god in Nethack, and the use of pets (such as training them to steal from shops). Someone told me that a DCSS deverloper motto is &quot;when it doubt, don&#x27;t do it like Nethack&quot;, which is a pity, because they could learn from Nethack and take some of the things it does best and improve on them, instead of stubbornly refusing to be like Nethack. That said, none of this is going to stop me from playing DCSS, which is now by far my favorite rougelike of all.<p>I strongly recommend anyone who has even the remotest interest in rogulikes give DCSS a try, if you&#x27;ve somehow missed the boat and haven&#x27;t already.<p>Also, playing in ASCII is the one true way to play. ;) You can ssh or telnet in to a server to play, if you want to play online (or watch others play).[1] Or you can download and compile the game itself to play locally on your own machine.[2]<p>Finally, if you ever need help, check out ##crawl on freenode.[3]<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawl.develz.org&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;howto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawl.develz.org&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;howto</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawl.develz.org&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawl.develz.org&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;</a><p>[3] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenode.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenode.net&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve never played DCSS, but after a few nethack ascensions I&#x27;ve found its &quot;chores&quot; (getting the wand, etc) interfere with actually enjoying the parts of the genre I like most: resource management in an unknown world. I suspect DCSS will be a similar experience.<p>For those that feel similarly, I heartily recommend giving brogue[0] a try. It&#x27;s beautiful, balances many strategies without giving dominance to any (dwarven valkyrie, anyone?) and drops the &quot;schlepping&quot; associated with nethack and related titles.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;site&#x2F;broguegame&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;site&#x2F;broguegame&#x2F;</a>

Works on android beautifully. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.crawlmb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.crawlmb</a>

<p><pre><code> $ brew cask install Caskroom&#x2F;cask&#x2F;dungeon-crawl-stone-soup-console </code></pre> If you were wondering!

DCSS is the only roguelike that I&#x27;ve been able to sink lots of hours into.

As someone who came second in a DCSS tournament back in the day, let me tell U that this game rocks if U enjoy tactical gameplay. It can brutally punish U until U learn sufficient caution and U tune your situational awareness and resource management.<p>Have fun!