[PC] [MAC] Ancient Domains of Mystery

[icycalm]

Has anyone here played this? I would appreciate some quick impressions. I have this review sitting in the review sub-forum, and I am thinking of publishing it (after editing it, naturally):

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=3110

I will also unban that guy because he didn't really do anything bad or rude -- he was just stupidly shy, I guess.

So if you know anything about this game speak up.

[bullethell]

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/pc/ancientdomainsofmystery/

Very difficult game, indeed. I just downloaded it and tried it and in my first play I survived for 0 years, 5 days, 8 hours, 27 minutes and 5 seconds (81 turns). I will definitely spend time playing it. Without a doubt it is a very interesting game.

[Skid Headcrash]

I hope I'm not being too redundant here, as the review is already up, but I've sunk several dozen hours into this game on and off over the last few years, and feel like I have something to share. It is very hard and unforgiving. Also, perhaps more random than some of the more focused roguelikes. It attempts to graft an over-arching narrative and adventure-game style puzzles onto the basic rogue-like structure, which is ambitious but the puzzles can really only be figured out through walkthroughs or knowledge gained over the course of hundreds of deaths.

That said, the ability to travel from dungeon to dungeon across an overworld, discover hidden villages high in the mountains, and learn secrets from ancient druids is, at least, nice window-dressing, and the skill system is surprisingly deep and useful. I'm not certain about class balance, or about the Talents that were added in one of the last patches to go live. (ADOM development has been stalled for a while; the author is involved in the early stages of a massively ambitious game called JADE, which has Dwarf Fortress styled world generation and narrative generation as intended features--I would expect it sometime between three to five years from now and never.)

Crawl, or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup to give the full title, is a better game in my opinion: not much less challenging, but fewer random deaths and arbitrary puzzles, and no focus whatsoever given to narrative. Instead, there's a deeper leveling system, better spell, enemy and item variety, and fewer broken combos. When I die in ADOM, it's usually because of random bad luck (undetectable rune traps have a good chance of killing many low-level characters) or just haven't memorized enough tedious facts from FAQs yet. When I die in Crawl, I almost always immediately see a way that my situation could have been avoided if I managed the resources (scrolls, potions, wands, spell, abilities, allies etc.) that I had available to me better.

I am not a first-rate expert in either game: I've never beaten either. I could talk a bit more about Crawl, but I think I'll make a thread for it later, with a link to the online server and instructions for downloading the necessary software to play online, and have your high scores and ghosts saved to confound other players. I hope it's not out of line to have posted this information in this thread--ADOM was my favorite roguelike before Crawl, and I feel like the comparison sheds light on both games.