I love Nethack, and have returned to it time and time again since the 80's. However, much as I love it, for about 6 years now I've been drawn away to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup[1], which has in some ways evolved past Nethack.<p>One of the main draws to DCSS for me has been its autoexplore feature, which makes exploring the dungeon much less of a chore than it was in Nethack. It also has much better use of color in text mode (the only mode I play both games in). Then it has an enormous variety of gods, powers, races, classes, and spells.<p>Unfortunately, it does have some downsides compared to Nethack. The interactions with gods, shops, and pets tends to be richer and more complex in Nethack. The things you can do to and with items is as well. The trend in DCSS has been to kind of dumb it down over the years, taking away friction points that made it more complex and thus (arguably) less fun for a certain kind of player. My own taste is for more complexity and more options, so I'm not a huge fan of going in that direction, but I still stick with DCSS because it's great despite that.<p>You can play and watch other people play the game by ssh'ing in to crawl.akrasiac.org, with a username and password of "joshua" (a reference to the classic 80's hacking movie Wargames).<p>Another game, in some ways very different but in other ways very much in the spirit of both of these games that I've really enjoyed has been Path of Exile.[2] It's not minimalist like Nethack or DCSS, but it definitely has a lot of roguelike elements and is pretty complicated for a mainstream, modern game of this sort, and is a worthy successor of both of these games, in my eyes. It's free to play too, so if you have the slightest interest, give it a go.<p>[1] - <a href="https://crawl.develz.org/" rel="nofollow">https://crawl.develz.org/</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://www.pathofexile.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pathofexile.com/</a>