The Hardest Roguelike


If it doesn't fit anywhere else, it belongs here. Also, come here if you just need to get hammered.

Mines Malingerer

Posts: 31

Joined: Monday, 4th April 2011, 08:09

Post Saturday, 7th May 2011, 18:06

The Hardest Roguelike

What is the hardest roguelike?

I have played Nethack, Adom, Lamda Rogue, Rogue Survivor, Lost Labyrinth, Castlevania Rogue, Elona, Transcendence, Desktop dungeons, Doom RL, Stone Soup. Not finished all of them.

I would have to say Stone Soup is for me.
User avatar

Halls Hopper

Posts: 58

Joined: Friday, 17th December 2010, 23:29

Location: Castle Shadowgate

Post Saturday, 7th May 2011, 18:33

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

If we are counting the Nightmare difficulty of DoomRL, then there's no contest. Even the latest release on average difficulty is a bit rough for me.

I've never managed to beat DC:SS though.
IT'S A SAD THING THAT YOUR ADVENTURES HAVE ENDED HERE!!
User avatar

Dungeon Master

Posts: 4031

Joined: Thursday, 16th December 2010, 20:37

Location: France

Post Saturday, 7th May 2011, 19:05

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

Rogue?
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

Halls Hopper

Posts: 63

Joined: Thursday, 28th April 2011, 08:19

Post Saturday, 7th May 2011, 19:48

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

I've tried Elona Shooter and I quit in frustration only a few days in. My learning curve was way too shallow and I felt that with my hand-eye-coordination as it is, I would never be able to beat it.

Mines Malingerer

Posts: 47

Joined: Tuesday, 3rd May 2011, 19:38

Post Saturday, 7th May 2011, 19:52

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

I agree with Rogue.
Say Stone Soup punishes your mistakes with a Whip of RNG +10 (yes, i don't know why the whip though), Rogue just punishes everything (with say, a Hammer of Fated Dragon_in_your_face_after_going_downstairs +666). It even punishes your will to play by random stuff impossible to predict like "death awaits behind this door you're opening". Only my opinion though, I'm so bad at roguelikes.
But it seems to me that Rogue is very unfair at times. The good point is, you get that "d100" feeling.

There's also a Touhou roguelike that is VERY hard (or so I've heard, I don't speak japanese so I can't tell and it hasn't been translated).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-Iq_J6o8xc Here's a review if you want to check, with some gameplay footage.
User avatar

Vaults Vanquisher

Posts: 482

Joined: Thursday, 16th December 2010, 21:08

Location: Savannah, Ga.

Post Saturday, 7th May 2011, 20:07

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

Rogue. I've never sniffed the amulet and I played for years.
  Code:
Jory screams, "No, no!" before exploding into a cloud of blood!
User avatar

Halls Hopper

Posts: 56

Joined: Monday, 2nd May 2011, 04:21

Post Sunday, 8th May 2011, 02:02

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

I don't know. Definitely it's not DCSS though.

Ququman wrote:There's also a Touhou roguelike that is VERY hard


There are a few of them, including one boring Angband modification.
http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Fangames#RPG
I don't know about their difficulty though. It seems they are not real roguelikes mostly but some kind of jrpg (which difficulty is grind).

Mines Malingerer

Posts: 47

Joined: Tuesday, 3rd May 2011, 19:38

Post Sunday, 8th May 2011, 10:53

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

moekitten wrote:There are a few of them, including one boring Angband modification.
http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Fangames#RPG
I don't know about their difficulty though. It seems they are not real roguelikes mostly but some kind of jrpg (which difficulty is grind).


Yeah they don't look like total roguelikes. But some of the RPGs are really fun btw, also Touhoumon.

Talking about hard roguelikes, I've heard Nethack was among the easier ones. Makes me cry. I never go bast sokoban or gnomish mines :( maybe I haven't tried hard enough.
User avatar

Swamp Slogger

Posts: 149

Joined: Friday, 17th December 2010, 15:39

Location: Thuringia

Post Sunday, 8th May 2011, 16:49

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

Not shure about which is the hardest roguelike in the true sense.
Hardest 'traditional' CRPG should be Wizardry IV - Return of Werdna.
It actual had some roguelike elements. All the monsters where player 'ghosts', and when you died you where 'back on field one' etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry_4
User avatar

Dungeon Master

Posts: 4031

Joined: Thursday, 16th December 2010, 20:37

Location: France

Post Sunday, 8th May 2011, 20:23

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

Mychaelh wrote:Not shure about which is the hardest roguelike in the true sense.
Hardest 'traditional' CRPG should be Wizardry IV - Return of Werdna.
It actual had some roguelike elements. All the monsters where player 'ghosts', and when you died you where 'back on field one' etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry_4

True, wizardry IV is insanely hard. It's all about spoilers though. With a walkthrough and maps, it's doable (but pointless and boring too).
So the question of hardest really needs some criteria. With spoilers, nethack is easy, without it is extremely hard. And very hard is often synonymous with very bad design like lots of grinding or luck needed.
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

Mines Malingerer

Posts: 31

Joined: Monday, 4th April 2011, 08:09

Post Sunday, 8th May 2011, 23:18

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

True, wizardry IV is insanely hard. It's all about spoilers though. With a walkthrough and maps, it's doable (but pointless and boring too).
So the question of hardest really needs some criteria. With spoilers, nethack is easy, without it is extremely hard. And very hard is often synonymous with very bad design like lots of grinding or luck needed.


Note the extinction of adventure games. I believe this happened because they do not require any skill, just knowledge. Once you know the solution they are easy to complete. Often times the solution can be very convoluted in adventure games. They don't follow common sense. You just click around trial and error until you get it. And there is usually only one solution to each problem.

Therefore my criteria is how hard the game is WITH spoilers. I believe people like to be given a set of rules and find common sense solutions within those rules. That's why DCSS is so great. It is still difficult without convoluted solutions.

Nethack for example has a lot of convoluted solutions. And yet you can only shoot the bow in a few directions. This makes what you can and can't do in the game seem pretty arbitrary. Especially with the internet, it doesn't seem worth it to alot of people to work out arbitrary solutions by themselves. I think people prefer the rules of a game to be transparent.

Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1196

Joined: Friday, 17th December 2010, 13:59

Location: Maryland, USA

Post Monday, 9th May 2011, 14:02

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

I'd also have to go with Rogue itself.

Its complexity is lower, but that also means that you have fewer tactical options.

Because you can only go down until you find the Amulet (and then you can only go up), it's not like you can turn around and go do something else if you can't handle the level you're on.

In most ports of Rogue, monsters don't have death drops (or there are very few), so if the RNG doesn't generate an item on the floor for you, you don't get items. It's entirely possible to be down on dlvl 12 and not have found any weapon or armor better than your starting kit. And if that's the case you are probably dead soon.

Rogue has a meaningful (and brutal) food clock. Nothing changes the run rate (in either direction) and there's no guarantee of finding more food.

Let's put it this way: I got my first Nethack win after about a year. I only won at ADOM once, and that took about 2 1/2 years. DCSS took me about a year for the first win, though if you count Linley's original version in there, increase that to 10 years before my first win (although I took about 8 years off in there). Rogue took me over 20 years to win, admittedly with some very long playing breaks in there.
You fall off the wall. You have a feeling of ineptitude.

Tomb Titivator

Posts: 879

Joined: Tuesday, 26th April 2011, 17:10

Post Monday, 9th May 2011, 19:35

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

Well, I've really played only original Crawl, DCSS, Nethack and ADOM (and Doom RL) extensively and tried a few others (Omega, Dwarf Fortress, Rogue). I never won in Nethack although I still have a monk somewhere in my some of my computers hardrive who could probably take it. Endgame in Nethack is just really boring so I haven't felt the urge the complete the game :D .

The basic way of winning in ADOM is not that difficult. However, the ultra endings are much more difficult and without spoilers they can be incredibly difficult to achieve (there is 5 ways of winning in ADOM). If we are talking about achievements, like clearing a ziggurat in DCSS, then ADOM may very well be one of the hardest. I only know two players who have ever achieved the Platinum Girdle which is like the ultimate wearable item in ADOM and can only be achieved in the game through incredibly careful playing, skill and luck.
User avatar

Swamp Slogger

Posts: 149

Joined: Friday, 17th December 2010, 15:39

Location: Thuringia

Post Monday, 9th May 2011, 21:30

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

Mankeli wrote:[...] ADOM is not that difficult. However, the ultra endings are much more difficult...[...]


That got me thinking. Wizardry IV had 'ultra endings' too.(never achived by me)
Which game had this first?
Has DCSS 'ultra' endings, apart from 'multiple rune wins'?
User avatar

Vestibule Violator

Posts: 1459

Joined: Sunday, 19th December 2010, 05:45

Location: New England

Post Tuesday, 10th May 2011, 00:19

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

^Crawl Ultra ending: ascend as an all rune-er, with the orb, with as many demonic runes as possible without becoming overloaded. Dump everything else in your inventory to make room. But before the ascension, make sure you run around in Pan clearing Zigs until you max the variable used to count cleared zigs. Be sure to take a full tour of the pantheon- get every god your race can worship up to ******. And don't stop till you've generated all the fixedarts!

Eh. Or not. Most of that isn't making the game any harder, it's just testing your resistance to grinding.

@Ququman: Goodness, but the player in that review is a whiner, isn't he? Aside from the language barrier forcing him to use-ID everything like a CK of Xom, it didn't seem any more merciless than any other roguelike I've played. Heck, he only died once in ten minutes. And he got to carry over part of his inventory!

If we mean hardest as the game that works the hardest into wearing down your will to play the game at all, I'd nominate the mystery dungeon series. Gods, but that was a mind numbing, boring grind fest for no reward.

Elona gets a nomination, simply because it applies mmo logic to a roguelike. Expect massive amounts of grinding and doing the same thing over and over, wasting tons of time to get anywhere. Again though, this is a kind of artificial difficulty though.

For my personal pick though, I'd like to nominate the ancient dungeon from Lufia II. They built a roguelike inside a traditional rpg- meaning the system gives you very few options to survive. The dungeon is 99 floors deep, there's no way to save- not even the temporary, self-erasing saves roguelike players are used to- item generation is completely random and not dependent on depth, there's no rest button, consumables are rare, you can't retreat up stairs, you start with no equipment, and your survival is heavily dependent on the RNG- you can't skill or spoil yourself out of danger often.

Still, the main challenge is you're playing a roguelike in an environment not primarily designed for it. Not sure if that should count.

If I'm comparing just crawl and nethack, I'd say crawl's harder- but more fair. It's a strange trade off.
User avatar

Swamp Slogger

Posts: 138

Joined: Friday, 14th January 2011, 11:54

Post Tuesday, 10th May 2011, 00:43

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

mageykun wrote:If I'm comparing just crawl and nethack, I'd say crawl's harder- but more fair. It's a strange trade off.


I was an OK Nethacker, despite never Ascending. The big issue there is that it's pretty much impossible to win without a whole raft of spoilers, and even if you don't have rage issues you'll end up throwing your keyboard across the room. I might not be in 100% sync with the Crawl philosophy, but as something an aneurysm preventing response to Nethack I absolutely love Crawl.

Mines Malingerer

Posts: 47

Joined: Tuesday, 3rd May 2011, 19:38

Post Tuesday, 10th May 2011, 11:03

Re: The Hardest Roguelike

mageykun wrote:@Ququman: Goodness, but the player in that review is a whiner, isn't he? Aside from the language barrier forcing him to use-ID everything like a CK of Xom, it didn't seem any more merciless than any other roguelike I've played. Heck, he only died once in ten minutes. And he got to carry over part of his inventory!


Hm yeah he whines way too much considering that he can save part of his inventory and well he didn't show us so many horrible deaths. I love the concept of Xom-ID btw XD I don't know if the guy plays other roguelikes but if he doesn't it can be very painful to him as it's japanese :mrgreen: Well it's just a short review and I can't read any of what's written but I've heard here and there that it was a quite difficult roguelike. I should look into it some more to get opinions from players :geek:
Or try it myself, like a man, for the glory of blind roguelike play. sounds epic enough :twisted:

Return to Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 32 guests

cron
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group.
Designed by ST Software for PTF.