I enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup played in the terminal with ASCII graphics. I wonder whether there are other hidden gems out there which don’t get attention because they are “ugly”?
Card Quest (Android) has similar dated graphics, but I got kinda into it lately. It’s a card-based roguelike, with a fixed deck that only changes with inventory/skill changes.
Thanks for the recommendation! Spent this evening playing it, and it’s everything I was hoping Slay the Spire would be. Slay the Spire is still great, of course, but deckbuilding has always been my least favorite part of card games.
You’re welcome, glad that someone enjoyed my suggestion!
Yeah with Slay the Spire there is often some slight feeling of “I lost because I didn’t get any good cards”, but in this game I more often feel like I died because I messed up my resource management and priorities haha (still haven’t beat it once yet…)
I'll have to give it a go. I bought it to support them. I put in many many hours of DF like 10 years ago. I was sending the guys money too... I wish I could find the drawings they sent me.
I've just been playing a lot of DCSS lately because it is so easy to just spin up my browser and be killing kobolds and fire giants.
Agreed. I have more hours in DCSS than any other game. I started playing when it was Linley’s Dungeon Crawl.
I don’t think it’s totally fair to call it ugly either. It’s a masterpiece of efficiency. The ASCII looks messy to some people, but after a while you just see right through it; purple Y = catlobe gtfo etc. Plus the upside is that it’s extremely clear at a glance what is going on because you don’t have complicated sprites everywhere. And the handmade vaults that get rolled into the procgen are often really nice looking and give the world a lot of character.
I’ve also been playing since Linley’s! Got my first win way back when Sif channeling was a discrete action and it cost food. I was a mummy so fuck food and I cast summon dragon (also discrete) to fill up the whole screen. Good times.
In my opinion, it's okay. It's pixel art that does its job of depicting things the player can recognize. It just looks bad. The colours in particular are... not pleasant.
I didn’t expect to find a Stone Soup entry so early in the list. It’s perfect for me because I can just spawn a new window inside my tmux session, type soup, hit enter, and etch-a-sketch my brain for a few minutes.
I dunno compared to other games of a similar or younger vintage like UT2004, that I had a ton of fun with at the time but looking back they have aged like milk in terms of aesthetics and core gameplay… I think the quake games actually have aged very well.
From the games I can recall, Anuto TD (Another Ugly Tower Defense).
I cannot say whether or not it would get attention because of the graphic quality, but I know there are plenty of people who wouldn’t play it since it is not 8k super ultra 3D high def masterwork quality graphics and would gladly shit on it because it doesn’t have the most realistic graphics out there.
I would say Kenshi with assests that show it was done by one person and a rough UI, also maybe pathologic 2, although for that game I wouldn’t say it’s the graphics that put people off it’s mostly the gameplay, but the geaphics are weird and really grey/depressive
Imbroglio (apps.apple.com/us/app/imbroglio/id969264934) is one of my favorite minimal purchase iOS games. I haven’t played it in awhile, but it’s a unique dungeon puzzle game where you place attacks as floor tiles on the board ahead of playing. There’s some consistent rules with ramping challenge, which made it super replayable for me. I loved trying different floor designs, finding strategies, and there’s a small progression system that’s fun. Hasn’t been updated in a few years, but it was a great design despite the rough appearance.
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