What is a roguelike game?

A roguelike is a single-player turn-based role-playing game where the player controls a single character (whose race and profession can usually be chosen from a list). This character explores a world with either one or more dungeon complexes with almost all levels in each complex randomly generated. The ungeons are full of randomly-placed monsters and items with which the player character can interact in several ways. Roguelikes usually have ASCII graphics (text characters instead of images) or very simple 2D graphics.

Why bother with roguelikes when you have plenty of quality commercial RPGs?

The absence of quality graphics in roguelikes is made up for in roguelikes by advanced and tactical game-play, a much bigger variety of monsters, availability for FREE over the internet, small file sizes, modest system requirements, and often cross- platform compatibility. Because of their nature, roguelikes have a much high replayability than commercial games as each time you start again you can play for a completely different character using completely different strategies and all the maps will be entirely different! Sometimes even the quests are randomly generated!

Don't be put off by the absence of graphics either, the gameplay is worth it, and you can look at it like reading a book compared to watching a movie - higher immersion in the game.

Which roguelike should I begin with?

If you haven't played any roguelikes before, you should pick a roguelike which is easy to learn but not one which is too simple so that you are not bored to death. In the future, I plan to make WoT both full of complex features and easy to learn but that's far off, so if you want to actually play a roguelike (not test one) you should pick something else. I suggest Moria for beginners quite simple and yet fun to play, but don't forget to read the manual before playing, and then move on to something more complicated. However, my first (and still my favourite) roguelike was ADOM, and I had no problem after a few initial difficulties. See my links page for more information on various roguelikes.