Humble's monthly bundle, now called Humble Choice, has arrived for July and it's a doozy. You can pick up one of our 2020 games of the year, Paradise Killer, plus 11 more games for £8.46 / $12. That's with Humble's current sign-up bonus, which gives you 40% off and three additional games this month.
]]>Prepare for a roguelike return to those Ancient Domains Of Mystery, because a sequel is finally almost here - over 26 years after the original. The developers today announced Ultimate ADOM - Caverns Of Chaos will enter early access on February 18th and no, while the name does suggest a revamp or expansion, it is a full sequel to the dungeon crawler. Come have a look in the new trailer below.
]]>Ancient Domains of Mystery - ADOM, to its friends - has been kicking around for a good long while. A complex and traditional roguelike in the vein of Nethack, where everything seems to interact with everything else on some level, and death seems inevitable without extensive trial and error.
The past few years have been treating this old workhorse well. While traditionally freeware, it returned to full development thanks to sales of a Deluxe edition of the game via Steam, and a crowdfunding drive, giving paying players access to new builds early. Now a major new update for the game has just rolled out for everyone, bringing all players free and paid alike up to the same point.
]]>Adam loves ADOM. There must be something about very old roguelikes that overpowers our deputy editor. The allure of a random dungeon. The temptation to drink every potion at once. But he also once told us that the final boss of ADOM (short for Ancient Domains of Mystery) is his gaming nemesis. Well, now he has a reason to fight that giant ‘@’ sign once again. ADOM is being remastered as Ultimate ADOM. Not to be confused with our own Ultimate Adam, which is just Adam after a 7-minute power nap.
]]>Who's your worst nemesis? This week the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is talking about our most reviled enemies, against whom we hold deep, lasting grudges. Matt harbours a lasting bitterness for Silencer, the magic-cancelling war jerk of Dota 2. Adam is fuelled by a dark hatred for the final boss of Ancient Domains of Mystery, a giant '@' symbol called Andor Drakon. And I still maintain a grievance against an entire electricity company in Final Fantasy VII. They killed my friends.
And speaking of nemeses, we've had plenty of time to play Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the icon-hoovering game of anti-establishment orcs, which has us divided. The Evil Within 2 also gets some attention, as Adam runs from spectres and fails to stealth-kill hideous monsters, and I am publicly shamed in Tekken 7 by a robot who takes off her head and throws it at me.
]]>For most of us, traditional roguelikes are intrinsically inaccessible. They’re notoriously difficult, their design is complicated and often opaque, they can have more hotkeys than there are keys on the keyboard, and their ASCII-based visuals mean that it’s often unclear what’s happening on the screen. It’s these exact qualities, however, that ironically make roguelikes accessible and even appealing to blind or low-sight players.
]]>Vanilla Bagel [Steam page] is a proper roguelike. None of that roguelite or roguelikelike stuff here - you've got a big old inventory to manage, dungeons to explore, impossible odds stacked against you, and a whole lot of things to learn. It appeared on Steam a couple of weeks ago and that was the first I'd heard of it. Last night I decided to take it for a spin and have decided that it has enough in common with one of my faves, ADOM, that it's earned a spot on my weekend playlist.
]]>Ancient Domains Of Mystery (ADOM) [official site] is one of the first things I install on any computer I own or borrow. That's been the case since I first discovered the game around twenty years ago. Created by Thomas Biskup, ADOM is one of the great traditional roguelikes, a combination of randomised dungeon crawling and a hand-crafted overworld. There are scripted sidequests as well as a Big Plot to follow, and there are oodles of character combinations.
It's now available on Steam for the first time, in enhanced form. I roguelove it.
]]>Free games are great and roguelikes are the best of all games, so a torrent containing more than 700 of the blighters is a lovely thing to discover on a Thursday morning. The collection is the work of 'foamed', a Reddit moderator and roguelike curator, and it's more than a big pile o' fun. As well as containing some of the greatest games ever made, this is an important archive - there are variants and minor games included that are no longer available elsewhere, and as long as there are seeders, any future disappearances will be protected until our computers turn to dust.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM) might be my favourite traditional roguelike. To some extent, the ranking depends on my mood, but ADOM has a remarkably well-tuned sense of progression to go along with the usual cluster of quaffable quandaries and randomised dungeoneering. Its sprawling depths are as perilous and perplexing as the pits of Moria and Hack, but the overworld is a fixed entity, with settlements and themed dungeons placed across it. I've played it for as many hours as any other game in existence and still find new challenges to overcome whenever I visit.
]]>"Hmm? What's that?" Valve spins around its chair, suddenly noticing the noise. "E3 just happened and we didn't release any trailers for far away, in-development games? Right. Yeah, I guess you're right about that." Valve reaches over and pulls a rusting level by its desk. *k-k-k-thunk* Seventy-five new games have been greenlit, making their way through the community voting process to now have the right to release and sell their games through the service. This batch includes ADOM, Northern Shadow, The Hit, and a ton more obscure games.
]]>The purity of the term 'roguelike' has been debased and diluted. When I tell you that a game is a 'roguelike' you might expect to see platforming, first-person procedural dungeons or, I don't know, a kart racing game with a cast of death-staring cartoon characters. It's time to start a 'Reclaim Roguelike' campaign and Ancient Domains Of Mystery's revival is a superb catalyst. The game never really went away but a development hiatus (2013-12) almost as long as Duke Nukem Forever's actual development cycle (1926-2011) kept it out of the newsrooms for a good while. A successful crowdfunding campaign allowed creator and curator Thomas Biskup to return to development and the game is now riding high on Steam Greenlight and looking better than ever.
]]>ADOM is one of my favourite games, mostly because when people talk about how brilliant it is I sometimes think they're talking about me. Then they say something like, "ADOM's insistence on killing me with savage beasts is quite distressing", and I've never killed anyone so it's at that point I realise they're talking about another more more murderous Adam, or Ancient Domains of Mystery. The latter is a glorious roguelike that I've been playing since I was fifteen. Development ceased in 2002, as creator Thomas Biskup presumably couldn't devote his entire life to the game but, if he can Indiegoget enough money, he'll return to development with a small team to help improve the game. Obligatory video below.
]]>It’s been a fantastic year for Roguelikes, with continued development of the stalwarts and plenty of releases that have toyed with the formula, sometimes reshaping it until it’s almost unrecognisable. I’ve even managed to have great roiling arguments with people about whether certain games should be called Roguelikes or not. That led to Roguelikelikes, which I am simple enough of mind to be pleased about. I also love that people care so much about these permutations of a thirty one year old game that they are willing to bicker about them with strangers. The dungeons and wildernesses are more populated than ever. So, scrolls and potions at the ready? Down into the depths we go.
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