Roguelike is a term to describe a peculiar type of game – a text-based dungeon crawler. Like Blizzard’s Diablo series, roguelikes consist of randomly generated dungeons, monsters, and phat loot. Unlike Diablo, roguelikes are freaking difficult. More on that after the jump…

When you die in Diablo, you do not have to start completely over from the very beginning. When you die in a roguelike, the game is over and you must start from scratch. This makes roguelikes very difficult and when you do experience victory in a roguelike it is very rewarding. I could go on for a while about why anybody that likes dungeon crawling must experience a roguelike but instead I will recommend two roguelikes that I consider to be better than the rest:

• NetHack
• Linley’s Dungeon Crawler

Here is what to expect a RogueLike to look like:

Two good sources for discovering additional roguelikes:

• Wikipedia’s RogueLike List
  
• Home of the Underdog’s RogueLikes List

It’s also worth pointing out that these games can be played on the Nintendo DS and PSP if you have a homebrew setup.