Few games have been as influential within the gaming scene as Rogue. First releasing as freeware in 1980, Rogue became an instant sensation that was soon included with operating systems and saw a commercial release not long after. Many imitators cropped up looking to capitalize on its popularity and even now—4 decades later—"roguelike" games remain massively popular.
You'd think that decades of iteration would make the original seem outdated. Primitive, even. Yet in spite of all the games it has inspired, Rogue's appeal holds strong to this very day.
Its premise is simple. You are an adventurer—a rogue—trapped within the bowels of a vast dungeon. There is no way to leave and nowhere to retreat. Your only recourse is to venture ever-deeper into the dungeon, seeking the legendary Amulet of Yendor. That ultimate prize which foolishly led your character into this deathtrap to begin with.
While all too familiar today, Rogue's gameplay was mind-blowing at the time. Its dungeon and all the content within it were randomly generated for each play session, but always in such a way that they remain playable. The shape of rooms and how they connect, but also what monsters roam within and what loot they might protect.
No matter how often I play, it's a trick that never gets old. I keep being surprised by new discoveries and challenges, which feel structured enough to be engaging in spite of their random nature. It's not like some roguelikes where levels become incoherent mishmashes of random tiles or are just a bunch of copy & pasted rooms. Sometimes you just fall into a pit filled with slime monsters while casually exploring. Or a floor ends up consisting mostly of maze-like hallways with secrets hidden all over.
The randomness extends to most items you find. In the sense that each potion, ring, weapon, and armor is a complete mystery to you. You don't know what anything does until you try and it'll all be different again on your next run. The potion that made you move faster in one run might be deadly poison in the next. That cool sword you found could be a big upgrade or it could be so cursed that it ruins your entire run. You can spoil what something is by using a scroll of identification on it. Guess what though: scrolls are random as well. Have fun trying to find the one you need.
It's in this randomness that Rogue reveals itself to be a brilliant game for accidental comedy. In one run I found a wand that allowed me to cast polymorph at enemies, turning them into something else. I used that on a bunch of tricky enemies to circumvent having to fight them normally. A great tactic, until I accidentally turned a common centaur into a terrifying dragon. Or in another run, where I found a Ring of Teleportation. I figured I could use that to warp around the dungeon, which... yes. It kinda does that, but it's completely random when and where you are teleported. Any step I took could suddenly send me to the other side of the level, so to speak. That's pretty bad, but on top of that the ring was also cursed. Meaning I couldn't take it off anymore.
This fun is amplified by the level of freedom you have in solving problems. Sure, the basic gameplay just has navigate the maze and fight enemies by bumping into them until one of you wins. It's simple, but fast-paced and plenty satisfying. You can also get creative with it though. That paralysis potion you found might be a bad idea to drink yourself, but you can use it as a projectile on enemies. A teleportation trap you fell for earlier could become an improvised escape route or you could hoard useless items to counter thieves.
Thinking like that gets even more important as the enemies and traps become more devious on later floors. Some enemies will absolutely ruin you in a straight-up fight, so you have to come up with nifty strategies to sabotage them. For example, one enemy I struggled with in my earliest runs permanently damages your armor with every hit it lands. No matter how good your gear, these bastards will turn it into cardboard before long. Guess what though? It can't hurt you at all if you're naked, so just strip the moment one of these pricks shows up and suddenly they're trivial to deal with.
That mix of fast-paced gameplay, randomization, and creative problem-solving kept me coming to Rogue over and over again. When I was stuck in long meetings at work, I was playing Rogue. Hours after I should have gone to bed, I was playing Rogue. This review is late, because I was playing Rogue. For all its complexity, it's terrifyingly easy to fire up the game and slip back into the adventure. Even when you really ought to be doing something else instead.
With that said, there are two roadblocks that may make it difficult for a modern audience to get into Rogue. The most obvious being its visuals. The entirety of Rogue is constructed out of ASCII art, which is not very nice to look at and often unclear. Monsters are indicated with letters, but it's never immediately what any of them are. You don't know that L stands for leprechaun until you tried attacking one and get screwed over by it. You eventually learn, but even then it's a limitation you're working around rather than a quality.
Secondly, the controls are not very intuitive. Moving around and attacking is alright and the most important. Everything else though requires obscure inputs that you usually need to double-check in the menus. Doubly so because these inputs are case-sensitive. An attempt is made to somehow makes these logical, but that just doesn't work. Like eating food is mapped to e—for eat—but drinking potions is on q because that's short for quaffing.
Even after wrapping your head around the actual buttons, some of the game's logic remains dodgy. To use a bow, for example, you must first equip it to your hand. You'd think this would mean you now fire arrows as an attack, but no. To fire an arrow you must then hit T—for Throw—and then select an arrow. You then need to repeat that for each and every arrow you want to fire. It's needlessly silly at times.
Those are limitations indicative of the game's age, of course. If you can put those aside, then only a few minor annoyances remain. It's little vexxing, for example that search randomly doesn't work. You need this to reveal hidden passages and traps, but whether it succeeds is a matter of chance. It also doesn't give any feedback that you're actually doing something, which adds to the confusion. The game is also a little too keen of making rooms dark. Entire floors regularly consist of nothing but dark rooms, which are a pain to navigate through unless you lucked your way into a solution for them.
The version as it exists on Steam also has some rare issues with maintaining saves and starting new games. In extremely rare scenarios, it may even run into an overflow error and discard your entire run.
Whether you're curious about the history of the Roguelike genre or just looking for a good RPG within it, this is a classic well worth revisiting. Rogue is a game as complex as it is engrossing. A game that I struggled to put away to such an extent that I was as likely to starve in a real-life as my adventurer was in the game.
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