Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free, open source, roguelike game. You're tasked with retrieving the "mystifyingly fabulous" Orb of Zot from a seemingly never-ending dungeon. Both ASCII and tile based(with graphics) versions are provided.

Character creation includes twenty three races, twenty eight backgrounds (classes) and a pantheon of eighteen gods to worship. With such a high number of combinations, along with randomized dungeon levels, it's almost impossible for two game sessions to be the same. Note that backgrounds only affect your starting skills; from there on you can develop what you like, or set skills to level automatically according to the amount of use.

The game is entertaining, addictive and fun as hell. I've been playing for a week or so, having tried a dozen different characters and I've barely seen a fourth of the dungeon. Mob variation is masterfully done. The first couple of levels only contain weak rats, goblins, kobolds and the like; as you descend you'll start meeting orcs, ogres and minor demons. Then it's giants, hydras and dragons. And they all want to smash you.

Enemies pull no punches. They will swarm you and beat you to death in a few turns if you're not careful. You will die (a lot). Don't let it discourage you. Once you've settled in your playstyle you'll breeze through the first half dozen levels. Then you'll die again, probably due to overconfidence

Download from the first link - and do play the tutorials, they'll teach you everything you need to know. I'll answer any questions, if I'm able, and you can check the game's wiki for specific stuff, though, care for spoilers.

 

I played Nethack about 10 years ago, but eventually gave the whole thing up as being too obtuse. How does Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup differ from Nethack.

 

Played this occasionally. Its decent enough I guess, with some interesting features. Ultimately though, it is just a nethack clone in the sense that you kill monsters to gain skill and levels, you go down stairs to get to a new level, and kill more monsters there to become stronger, and so on. If you are tired of roguelikes, I doubt this will end up changing your mind, but if you don't mind playing a roguelike, then this is fun enough.

The wiki at:
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=CrawlWiki
Has quick lists of things like gods to worship and skills,classes,races and such, that should give a quick idea about the game.

EDIT: I will say that this has option of graphical tiles view with partial mouse control. Its probably easier to get into than Nethack.

 

I have to disagree emphatically. It is a drastically different experience from nethack. Net Hack is a hackers game. You are SUPPOSED to try and break the game/system. You are SUPPOSED to check source code to look ahead and find hidden tricks to "cheat". You are supposed to HACK the game, and game it up, to learn the necessary spoilers to win.

Nethack, as a game, goes out of it's way to not only kill you, but be an asshole about it.

The design philosophy of DCSS is to minimize the tedium that was prevalent in the genre at the time, and really focus on the game (ie fun) part of the game. That all said, it is still a roguelike, and that means:

Permadeath. There is one exception, the Felid race has multiple (but limited) lives, as cats are wont to do.


Fiendishly difficult gameplay. As the OP said, monsters don't pull punches. However, it's not blatently unfair, unlike some other examples in the genre. Nethack and IVAN in particular have some/many instances where the game is clearly trolling you. That doesn't really happen in DCSS. You can run into monsters you are not expected to be able to defeat from time to time, but there are many ways of handling such creatures, either to bypass them entirely, or leave them for later when you CAN defeat them. The main struggle here is learning what the real threats are and how to deal with them. However, the wiki is well maintained, so you can always spoil it for yourself if you wish, or there are in-game tools (such as looking at/examining a monster) that can help you determine the correct course of action. That said, in most cases it is fairly obvious; don't cast fire at a fire elemental; poisonous creatures can poison you; and the like.

Keyboard usage. As datakim said, there is mouse support, and it is well done, however, it really is best avoided imo. The keyboard becomes much much faster, and a smoother UI experience, once you get the hang of the key commands. And there aren't really a lot you need to know to really get started. With nethack, even after years I had to play with the manual open to the key commands area because of the sheer number. DCSS doesn't go to such extremes. Nearly every command is mnemonic in nature (as with most roguelikes): You (z)ap a spell, e(v)oke a wand, (q)uaff a potion, (w)ield a weapon or (W)ear an item, (T)ake off an item, (P)ut jewelry on, (r)ead a book/scroll, and so on. Furthermore, I feel it's best to get used to it early, as to the best of my knowledge all the advanced features require keyboard usage, such as aut(o) explore (which isn't as bad as it sounds), and a search function (ie you can search "arrow" and find every arrow dropped so far in the game, or "rPois" (resist poison) and find every item with resist poison that you've discovered so far. Auto travel to return to your stash (or a different dungeon branch). Stuff like that.

ASCII Graphics. However, in DCSS' case, it does come with one of the best tilesets ever created in the genre, and playing tiles often gives a superior experience unlike most other games. I personally prefer the tiles version, as although I am a fan of ASCII graphics I never liked the way Linley's Dungeon Crawl used them/looked. When I first started playing DCSS they hadn't changed much at all graphically from the Linley's days, so I ended up using the early tiles options more or less as soon as they became available. That is just personal preference though. Dated 2D tiles though they are, they are well done.

As for more differences from nethack, here's some that immediately come to mind:

You can't sell items to shops, so you not longer have to haul ridiculous amounts of gear (ie pick up everything) to sell, just to be able to buy things.

You can't steal from shops, so you longer run down your food clock in the early game trying to get your stupid dog to steal that wand of omfgdiemonster just to survive a nasty out of depth monster blocking the stairs.

Much more elaborate character system. It's a heavily skill based system with your class determining some starting bonuses, and ultimately only limiting you by your race. That is to say, your race determines your aptitudes with each skill making them easier or harder to learn/master. Actually, over all I feel the whole RPG statistic aspect of DCSS is more detailed than nethack. (Though to be fair, nethack is an OLD game loosely based off OLD AD&D concepts)

Tiles version is vastly superior to nethacks. Though there is no isometric front end for DCSS, unlike nethack. Tangentially to this, you can play the tiles version in your browser on their webtiles server, though I don't recall if you have to make an account for that or not.

Each level is much much larger than in nethack, and I'm pretty sure there are also more dungeon branches (I don't recall how many there were in nethack). Related to this, the movement system in DCSS is much more robust, as well.

Luck has a much smaller impact in DCSS. In nethack, more often than not it was bad luck that killed me in addition to bad play. In DCSS it is almost never bad luck that kills you, but rather bad play. Luck just has a smaller role in DCSS overall, and there are much more (or at least much more obvious/accessible) tools available for minimizing the effects of luck. For example, if you want to guarantee you will get certain (or lots of) spell books, worship the appropriate god, and you shall.

In general, I feel that DCSS's RPG elements are just more detailed more fleshed out. The UI benefits from many improvements made in the genre since back in the day (and nethack hasn't been updated in years and years). The tedium aspects prevalent throughout the genre (farming, victory dancing, scumming, etc...) have really been dialed down if not outright removed from the game.

tl;dr;

NetHack is an old AD&D dungeon crawler with a meta-game requirement, with very little in common with the skill/race-based Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, except that they belong to the same genre.

(edit: As an aside, I do actually like nethack, though it doesn't sound like it in this post. I do, admittedly, like DCSS much better, however.)

 

I remember playing this game a while back. Tried playing as Orc Priest, after surviving the first few levels I got to meet orcs. My Orc Priest gained followers. Orcs ganged up on anything that threatened my character, following him around the dungeon Until I ran into things that could beat even them. And me.
A fun game, occasionally.

 

Well, kalespr pretty much nailed it. The only thing I'll add, is that, ultimately, I feel the strongest game theme, is tactical challenge; at each battle, you have a limited amount of resources (spells, race abilities, potions, scrolls, hit points) and you have to manage them carefully if you want to prevail (or, again, not die ).