A good while back I was – I admit – searching for a game for my computer. As I was on Linux, the game had to be 1) Linux-compatible, 2) Free, and 3) Not lag. A quick public question in IRC came up with the answer: ADOM – Ancient Dungeons of Mystery.

It’s a command-line run game – a roguelike. For those unaffiliated with this genre a picture speaks a thousand words:

Ok – it already looks ancient. As you might’ve guessed, it’s all text based, and you move about just like you would in any modern day RPG. The story revolves around you as a young explorer trying to discover the source of some evil thing called chaos that is destroying your world. You complete quests and learn through experimentation how to survive in this magical and mysterious world.

Being text-based, it allows me to play it when SSH’ed in remotely. This is a very ideal scenario for people who don’t do gaming seriously like me. It also helps that you can pretty much stop playing anytime and resume later exactly where you were without fear of the consequences.

What makes it fun is the flexibility and complexity of the game. There are a lot of things you can do – there are even several ways of winning. For example, I can attack a monster by throwing my hat at it – it probably won’t be very effective, but you get the idea. Or I could kill some rats and eat their corpses – or if there was a cat nearby I could feed it some rat corpses and it might become my pet. There are spells, races, classes, potions, herbs, weapons, shields, clothing, amulets, gods, quests, pets, shops, skills, talents, curses, special effects – you get the idea: it’s detailed. You can do a lot of stuff – and stuff you do affects stuff that happens to you. Heck, locations are randomly generated every single time you play the game. If that’s not awesome replayability, I don’t know what is. ADOM’s Wikipedia entry says a lot more about it than I can mention in this post.

Don’t be fooled by the hideous graphics – or lack of graphics. It’s a challenging and interesting gaming experience. I still haven’t won it – not even come close. True I’ve only played it 20 times or so (savefiles are limited to one per character, and once dead, that’s it. No saves), but yes, it’s challenging. You actually have to reason once in a while.

Just because it’s a console-based game doesn’t mean it doesn’t play nice with Windows or Macs. If you’re looking for an interesting gaming experience to try out next weekend I would recommend ADOM. Just a note: it takes time to learn, and it’s hard – don’t be discouraged if you keep on dying.

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