I basically started my career writing about and for games with this Salon.com story on the birth Nethack, the legendary "rogue-like" RPG created in the 90s, and after twenty-plus years of gaming, I'm still looking for worthy successors to that open source, collaboratively created classic. Pixel Dungeon is so far the best rogue-like I've ever played on mobile (available for both iOS and Android), and I've tried quite a lot. While not as quirky and eccentric as 100 Rogues, another favorite, Pixel Dungeon is perfectly designed for the mobile experience, with a user (and thumb)-friendly UI, and appealing, easy to understand graphics. It's perhaps a bit too difficult, and you are likely to die dozens of times before even getting past the first gooey boss monster, but the gameplay experience is so smooth, seamless, and speedy, it's still a pleasure to zip through numerous levels in a few minutes time before meeting your almost certain doom. Even more key, Pixel Rogue comes with the kind of infinite, constant, emergent possibilities that made Nethack so great:
With every object, tool, weapon and creature imbued with a wealth of attributes, every situation has endless potential. The aforementioned cockatrice, for example, could turn you into stone, but that is only the beginning. If you kill one, then pick it up with gloves, you can wield its body like a flail, instantly turning monsters to stone when you bash them with it. (Usenet wags dubbed this maneuver "wielding the rubber chicken.") If you have a wand of Polymorph and also wear a Ring of Polymorph Control, you can actually turn yourself into a cockatrice, and explore the dungeon in that deadly form. You can even lay cockatrice eggs, too -- usable as hand grenades of instant paralysis.
In Nethack, at any point, anything seems possible. Jean-Christophe Collet, a DevTeam member who discovered the game while working for a Parisian Unix company, says he was enthralled by "the sheer complexity of the situations you could get into, and the way that there was no 'right way' to get out of them." Surrounded by Orcs, for example, you could incinerate most of them with your Wand of Lightning, but the blast would likely ricochet off the opposite wall and crisp you, too. You could wear your Ring of Conflict, which would magically compel the Orcs to start attacking each other instead -- but then again, wearing it would probably also compel your pet Large Dog to attack you. You'd often get the eerie sense the game was anticipating you and all these uniquely intricate conundrums that no one could have possibly foreseen. Or could they? When I review computer games now, I always begin with the question, Is this game as complex and engrossing as Nethack? And even now, more than 10 years from the day I discovered it, it rarely is.
... and fifteen years after writing that, I'm finding Pixel Rogue to have about as many delightful, complex, aggravating, engrossing possibilities.
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