Barony

I'm not going to lie to you -- I was a little bit surprised with how much I enjoy Barony. There's certainly no shortage of games out there that attempt to put the most minor of spins on "classic roguelikes" but stop just short of making a playable game. So of course I was a little caught off-guard by Barony's accessibility and how it manages to keep things interesting, even while learning the game.

A big part of this is almost certainly the fact the Barony changes very little about the formula of "classic" roguelikes -- in fact, some of the text strings for particular death conditions or unidentified scrolls are pulled directly from NetHack. This shouldn't exactly come as a surprise as Barony admits freely on its Steam store page that it's inspired by NetHack, Ultima Underworld, and others. This also makes it pretty clear that its main goal isn't to reinvent the wheel with tropes and concepts present in the game, but to reimagine what a classic or "true" roguelike might look like in a 3D, first-person, real-time format. For the most part, this works. You don't have the same range of approaches available to you that you would in turn-based roguelikes, partially because this would be ridiculous in real-time and partially because it took NetHack 30 years to get to its present level of detail.