Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
A week ago a friend linked me to Underhound - a website on which you can play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup right in your browser. It's a roguelike - a role-playing game where your mission is to descend into the depths of a dungeon, fighting and evading monsters, find the Orb of Zot, and escape alive. Of course, this is much easier said than done - various dangers await in the way.
The game is not easy. You have to gain experience to level up your skills, understand the strengths and weaknesses of the monsters you face, and be prepared to flee with a scroll of teleportation if the situation becomes dire.
You die, a lot, guaranteed. When you die, you start from the beginning, with a completely new character. Every game is different - the levels are procedurally generated from a random seed. Some aspects of the game are set though: there will always be 15 dungeon levels, some selection of known branch types like Swamps or Shoals, special areas like Depths and Abyss, and so on. Your mission is always the same - find runes in order to progress to different areas of the dungeon, constantly improve your character, and finally escape with the Orb.
One fun aspect of the game is the morgue files: when you die (or are skilled and lucky enough to escape alive), your character's information is saved into a text file. These files can be viewed later in the public servers - see e.g. this failed run. You can read through the files of others, or share yours with more experienced players to ask for tips. The current active game also has a morgue file that keeps updating on every save: see e.g. my current run.
Because the game is turn-based, you can always pause to think. You can save the game at any point and resume other activities you were procrastinating from. Speaking of which, I need to get back to reading about QUIC...
Have fun in the dungeons, and remember to bring some potions!
Edit: the "current run" mentioned in this post ended up being my most successful run so far! Still died though. Morgue file
