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”?
That’s improved now, though, with the steam release. Before the Steam release I exclusively played DF with Ascii graphics. Honestly, I thought it was pretty.
It does have a certain charm. I never really played that much tbh, my favorite part was reading the sagas of fortresses on the forums. Those were always so unpredictable and hilarious.
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.
Yeah. A lot of the UI seems to be intentionally bad. It’s actually a pretty hard game. A good example is reloading. You do this by holding right click, moving the mouse down then up and letting go of right click. I think the visual parts of the experience speak for themselves from the screenshots but my point is that even a lot of other stuff in the game is just wack.
There’s another one with a similar kinda vibe (the vibe being “shitpost but it’s a video game”) called Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengence of the Slayer. I haven’t played it but it looks great. Er… Gameplay wise anyway lol.
I have had some people refuse to even try Baba Is You, because it looks ugly.
I had The Hex a few years even installed, so I have tried it, but only after getting familiar with the style of Daniel Mullins’ games with Inscryption I pushed far enough to get interested. Still very clunky, but worth it.
I love both the style and soundtrack of that game. Maybe it’s a little too “lowfi” for some people. That’s the only way I can imagine someone not liking it.
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
Tales of Maj’eyal. A free to play open source roguelike that I hate. This game is amazing. Fuck this game. Also definitely recommend. But fuck this game. After numerous 10-12 hour long runs, I have yet to win.
I loved this at first but then the complexity of the various mechanics seemed to take a sharp rocket ship upwards through the roof. I got kind of lost and then tried to read the wiki guide and it was like a book, so that was that. I really wanted to like it though! Maybe I should give it another go.
West of Loathing and its sequel Shadows of Loathing have a bland grayscale artstyle on the outside but they’re absolutely hilarious RPGs that have a lot of heart to them.
Man I played their browser game way back when, the humor was pretty funny, but I haven’t been able to make time to consider trying their console games.
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