Roguelike

HyperRogue

There can't be many Linux users who don't know the classic Rogue or NetHack games. Both broke the ground for the concept of exploration as the central gaming component, where the dungeon you explore is entirely procedurally generated and different every time you play, just like the encounters you have and the locations of the objects littered throughout the levels to help you on your quest. But these games are both from a different era. If you've been around Linux long enough, you'll know they were two of the only games you could play on a 1990s early pre-X Window GNU/Linux installation. Their procedurally generated nature hid the requirement for memory and storage that hand-made levels would require, as well as the human effort required in designing those levels. But somehow, the principles behind these games have survived the decades since their creation, passing through 3D acceleration, game consoles, and multicore CPUs. This means that if you're a newcomer to Linux, you're still likely to have heard of "Roguelike" even if you can't pin your first experience on a dirty amber screen in a 1990s computer lab.

The reason why this game style has far outlived the limitations that necessitated its design is the generations of balancing that now govern the algorithms that generate the levels and the difficulty. The levels may be procedural, but the algorithms that generate them now benefit from the influence of tens of thousands of player hours and many hundreds of developers. New games latch on to this addictive mechanic, adding their own elements to the tried and tested formula as they attempt to bring these games into the 21st century. HyperRogue is one of these games. There are several significant ways it differentiates itself whilst still remaining true to the original idea – one of which is that, although it's open source, it's also available as a commercial game on Steam, which is a great way of supporting the game if you enjoy it.

The first thing you're going to notice is its visual style. It describes itself as "non-Euclidean" Roguelike, and this means it doesn't feature normal geometry. Instead, exploration takes place on a hyperbolic plane – a grid of hexagons and heptagons that move in and out of view as they scale in from the display's circumference. On first glance, it looks like you're moving across the surface of a sphere, but the non-Euclidean scaling means it's more like looking through a concave lens, where you can see more detail along the edge. There are no parallel lines in this universe. While this does make navigation more challenging, its brain-defying difference makes you feel lost on another planet, which is exactly how a game like this should make you feel. The terrain will also change as you explore further from the starting point, with more than 60 different lands to explore. The general quest is to find 10 treasures from each land. Uniquely, you only have a single hit point, but so do your opponents, and combat is usually a single click as you fight off converging baddies. This makes combat only a peripheral challenge as you try to find enough treasure to open the next land, but it also makes the game fast and addictive to play.

Project Website

http://roguetemple.com/z/hyper/

The non-Euclidean geometry in HyperRogue means that there are no straight lines.

Each land has different characteristics, such as moving walls, as do all of the monsters, which you need to master to progress.