black_sluggard | (Wtf) On Roguelikes and Their Evils (a.k.a. "Fun")

So, when I was working on Ja'Behat, some narration about Khajiit sensory acuity got me all bogged down in researching feline senses. While trying to search for a graphic representation of a lion's field of vision (as I figured savannah living felines would probably be the best model for Khajiit), I stumbled across an image totally not related to what I was searching for (you go, Google).

This image caught my eye for several reasons... One, it featured a photograph of a man with a bow that I could have sworn I saw before. It reminded me of some of the stock images I'd seen on deviantArt, and I was curious to find out if I was right.

Secondly, this image was superimposed upon what looked, at first glance, like a screenshot from the game Dwarf Fortress...a game that I have, historically, off and on lost a good chunk of my life playing.

Upon investigation, I learned that this was not Dwarf Fortress but a game called UnReal World—not a difficult mistake to make, because the two are very similar. Both are roleplaying games of a style called "roguelike"—so called, very obviously, because of their resemblance to a very early game called Rogue (circa 1980).

(As a random aside, it seems like everyone I talk to is playing these games lately: Dwarf Fortress released a new version, and a few players on SOI have picked that up, one friend is playing Dungeons of Dredmor and watching streams of Don't Starve, and my bff Z tried to force me to play Rimworld *cough*DFripoff*cough*).

If you've never played a roguelike before, these are its basic characteristics:

The game environment is generated randomly, meaning that between one playthrough and the next everything you encounter is completely different.

Most have simplified, minimal, or often zero graphics—several of the more well-known roguelikes such as Dwarf Fortress and ADoM and NetHack are based entirely on ASCII text interface (your character is often an @ or something similar, and the rest of the world similarly represented by letters and symbols). UnReal World features tile-based sprites, interspersed with atmospheric photographs.

They tend to be somewhat resource-intensive...your characters need to eat and drink, and often need to sleep otherwise they risk death and the degradation of their ability to fight, which, with the addition of...

Creatures of some kind (often randomly spawned monsters of some kind) leads to...

Death—or "fun" as it's is known to players of roguelikes. And in most roguelikes, death is a very permanent state. Traditionally these games offer only a single save per character, overwritten periodically, and deleted upon their untimely (and often gruesome) demise.

The game in question, UnReal World, is somewhat different from other roguelikes I'd played. Rather than being focused on dungeon crawling (like ADoM and NetHack, or Dwarf Fortress when you're in adventure mode), or on building up a fortress/space colony/etc (like Dwarf Fortress, and Rimworld), gameplay features both solo combat/exploration and simulation/construction.

Set in a low-magic fantasy setting based on Iron Age Finland, UnReal world pits players against realistic threats to every day survival. Hostile wildlife and foreign invaders are only the most obvious opponents—the player is just as likely to lose their character to dehydration, starvation, disease, or the elements. The key focus is on finding a way to sustain the character's existence, and the game includes very in depth simulations of active hunting, trapping, fishing, cooking, preserving, hide-working, timbering, carpentry, and agriculture—all more or less accurate to the period and place. And developing one's knowledge and effective use of proper manners and rituals for appeasing the spirits can mean the difference between a friendly forest home and eking out one's living in an unwelcoming wilderness.

This is a very addictive game. This is a terribly addictive game. Over the past four days I have spent hours and hours playing this game. Hours of my time, dedicated to my little woodsman Asti and his tiny homestead on the lake. Hours spent fishing for pike and bream so that he wouldn't starve. Hours felling trees, and splitting boards and gather stones to make his little cabin with its little fireplace and cellar to keep him warm and allow him to smoke and keep meat. Hours spent clearing and burning fields so that he can plant broadbeans and barley for harvest in the fall. Hours spent hunting for beavers and reindeer, and tanning hides, and trading with the local village for tools. And (with a mod) digging for bog iron in a nearby mire so that he can finally have the tools to build himself a workshop as well.

And it's all going to end in heartache. Because it's a roguelike, and there is no way to win at roguelikes. There's no real "end"...you just play until you lose and play again. In a way, they're the RPG equivalent of slot machines... Success is often based on blind luck rather than any degree of skill with the game, and yet each time one game ends you feel the potential for the next:

"Maybe this time I'll really make it happen..."

There's that tried old saying that the journey is as important as the destination (or more so), and no games really encompass that philosophy quite like a roguelike. The little random events can make for a pretty exciting story, and when eventual defeat is a given it makes the little victories (like harvesting that first crop after a season of waiting) incredibly meaningful.

TL;DR - A random Google had the unexpected result of me losing the greater part of an extending weekend (and, naturally, my hopes of any writing productivity whatsoever) to a simulation of rustic survival set in Iron Age Finland. :/