A spell that lets you revert time back to a previous point, a spell that move enemies forward in the timeline, a spell that lets you split the timeline in 3 to try different approaches to a problem and then pick which one to stick with, and more.

It even recreated the experience of having a capricious, pimply, power-mad Dungeon Master as best as it could with a punishing difficulty level and insane, randomly generated levels.

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In Rogue, you play a lone symbol navigating a dungeon comprised of periods and equal signs, fighting a menagerie of monsters represented by the full spectrum of capital and lower-cased typography.

Despite all this, though, Rogue is a game that is played to this day.

Roguelikes routinely put players in situations that would be downright impossible in other games.

In what other genre of game can you choose to play a flying wizard octopus wielding eight rings of power, commanding an army of undead warriors, who worships a snail god as old as the universe itself, which in turn gives you the power to turn back time The best roguelikes not only let you play any kind of character you can possibly imagine, they let you use a variety of tactics to achieve your ends that other types of games simply cant match and the truth of the matter is that when gameplay is satisfying and infinitely variable, beating a game ceases to be the reward mechanism.

This goes back all the way to the roots of Rogue, and its actually strength of the genre: because theres no graphical overhead to creating an object in a roguelike short of picking an ASCII character to represent it, developers can implement new monsters, items or radically new gameplay ideas extremely easily.

In a traditional roguelike, when you hit an enemy with your sword, you just bump into him with it.

In Dredmor, you can see your character pop the top off a vial and glug it down.

Its also a fantastically funny game, a roguelike with a goofy sense of humor.

You wont find many other roguelikes with skills like Communism or Emomancy.

And its also the plot of DoomRL, which isnt just one of the best roguelikes out there, but which has also been called the greatest Doom spin-off ever.

While DoomRL has all the hallmarks of roguelikes, like randomly generated levels, permadeath, turn-based combat and an RPG-like leveling system,the gameplay is pure Doom: the same Doom enemies and weapons, the same Doom setting, even the same music and sprites.

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If you know how to play Doom, you know how to play this except its strategic instead of frenetic, and the levels are different every time.

Theres no bones about it: while roguelikes have become more accessible thanks to new trends like attractive graphics, helpful tutorials and UI features like auto-explore, theyve also tended to get more complicated through the addition of multiple race and class combinations, gods to worship, different stats and skills to keep track of, with a mess of inscrutable gameplay logic seemingly proscribed at random by a thousand unseen generations of sadomasochistic beardos slathered all over the top of the hot ASCII mess.

Even if you, oh ye product of the Xbox generation, can see past the simplistic graphics of your average roguelike, you might find yourself slaughtered during your first game because you didnt know, for example, that that dungeon sink you were prompted to kick had a 20 chance of a brain-consuming water nymph snaked up inside the drain, and the only way to escape it once woken is to use your dagger to write Elbereth on the floor.

Although everything in Brogue is represented with alphanumeric characters, the quality of implementation is stunning; during a game, you will explore the depths of shadowy subterranean lakes, come upon fruit-filled dales glittering with sunshine, dangle above vast gorges upon rickety rope bridges, and see entire rooms incinerate into flame.

In Brogue, you dont have to worry about classes, or learning spells, or training skills skills, or keeping your piety level up, or what the command is to tell your minions to attack, Your character just explores the dungeon.

You dont even earn XP for killing monsters: its possible, but not likely, to beat the game by taking a stealth approach.

Its the equivalent of going through Moria over and over again when theres all of Middle Earth hanging invisibly above you.

Either way, in ToME, you dont just explore dungeons you solve quests and find adventure in a massive overworld in which one haunted dungeon or orc-ridden wood is just a single level in an entire globe of adventure.

The game features an MMO-like leveling system, Diablo-like special powers and abilities, a rich and detailed game world, multiple free-flowing quests, a cool achievement system and unlockable classes.

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