It is a classic of the roguelike and dungeonwandering genres. It is free. It can be played in ASCII or tiled modes. Lots of classes and approaches. Playthroughs tend to be quick for new players and can be longer as one builds up experience. There are a lot of learning moments to the game, but the basics can be learned in minutes. It can be learned blindly, but there are very helpful wikis and resources to help you learn as well.
I think I first saw this being played when I was in middle school by some older kids and I was fascinated that a game could just be text in a command prompt moving around. Then when I started playing my mind was blown again by just how much stuff there was in it. More than any other game, this is the one that made me want to make games, and given the trends in video games over the last decade and change, I’m not the only one. Even more than Rogue, this is the Velvet Underground and Nico of video games. I like Qud and DCSS and a couple other roguelikes more now, but it will always hold a special place in my heart. Really looking forward to this.
I first got into Nethack through a friend in college. He was a bookish sort - Classics major, once proposed spending an entire 3+ hour drive reading me Raymond Carver stories. He said he had fun with a free game called Nethack. So that night, I downloaded it and booted it up.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of the ASCII interface. Then I saw another file named NetHackW. The representative tiles felt more legible to me, so I’ve played that way ever since.
I’ll share more as I get into the game again this month.
What makes Nethack Nethack is an extreme kitchen sink philosophy to the Rogue formula. Does a monster have an effect when it touches you? You can probably wield it as a weapon, as long as you’re wearing gloves of course, but be prepared to fall down the stairs and drop it and fall face first into it and die. Any minor interaction in this game that makes you wonder “Wait can I…” yes. Yes you can do that thing. “The dev team thinks of everything.” If they haven’t thought of some niche interaction, someone in the last 40 years has, and it’s been put in by now because this game has been in consistent development all that time. In fact it is the oldest game in active development to my knowledge across all genres. If you’re going in blind you are in for a hell of a time, but you are basically never going to stumble upon the optimal ways to play. Which presents you with two options:
Play it as a wacky death simulator (not downlplaying this, it’s really fun to play this way you’ll never die the same way twice.)
Spoil yourself and play “for real”.
If you go the latter route, I recommend watching some speedruns. The speedrun scene for this game has exploded in the past few years, and the routes are clean enough that it has seen some live marathon play. These will give you a sense of the optimal strategies, and are a good intro for what to look up on the wiki later. The wiki is your friend, its probably the most detailed guide for any game on the internet, which makes it daunting itself. Watching play throughs can help with that.
I’ll try to do one run a day. Today, I died in about 15 minutes.
First Death
Human Valkyrie.
I had a bee chasing me, so I fell down a hole my pet had already fallen into. I was having a rough go of trying to get back to stairs up. Then I ran into the soldier ant that delivered the killing poison.
Oh geez, I haven’t played Nethack in a long long time. I no longer have a 10-key numpad on my keyboard, I wonder how awful it would feel to play now.
I ultimately ended up with ADOM as my favourite of the classic roguelikes, but Nethack will always hold a special place in my memory. (Way) back in my university days, the research group I was a part of were all heavy nethack players. We had a shared leaderboard on one of our servers and competition was friendly but fierce. One day, one of the PhD students was called in to our supervisor’s office with a very serious-sounding “…can I see you in here for a moment please?” followed by a “can you come around here and look at this?” paired with a gesture towards his screen. The student was thinking “oh crap how badly have I messed something up? what’s he going to show me?” only to be then met with “…you see, I’m stuck behind this boulder and I’m not sure what to do on my next turn”.
Today, I am an orc barbarian with a lovable kitten.
Today’s death: A dwarf was on the other side of a boulder I was pushing, and he zapped a bunch of magic missiles at me. I was trying to make sense of the boulder trap beforehand that hurt me a lot, but I think a nearby hobbit got most of the damage? My kitten ate the hobbit’s corpse.
Gemstonez collected: None today. I think I got a jet stone yesterday? Something like that.
A lot. I’ve played it on and off for decades, after discovering it via a second hand repost of something from slashdot. (3.4.0’s release I think)
The game was already old then, and the pitch at the time was something along the lines of “This game has been developed for 20 years! IT’S SO COMPLEX THAT THEY CAN’T EVEN MAKE GRAPHICS FOR IT!”
I’m not particularly good, and I’ve never finished the game. But I love it all the same. It’s currently #9 on my half-maintained list of all games I’ve ever played ranked in order of quality. Between Mario World and Omori.
I have two tips that I don’t think others will mention:
For returning players: Use a larger font size than your terminal’s default. Making this change ~5 years ago improved my enjoying of the game immeasurably
For new players: There is no thirst mechanic, there’s no need to drink at all (other than potions for their effects). It took me years to learn this, despite how obvious it is in hindsight. and I suspect there may be some experienced players who still don’t know this.
I don’t play with tilesets. Nethackw I feel is even less intuitive than ASCII. Particularly these days.
Compared to games defined under modern usage of the term “roguelike”?
The comparison is irrelevant, none of them are remotely similar.
With the notable exception of Noita. Which I think is as close as you can come to a succesful interpretation of the impossible mid-2000s dream of a “realtime Nethack”. It’s a shame that game was released into an environment where that achievement was lost on 90% of the players.
Compared to modern actual roguelikes?
I think Caves of Qud has overtaken it as the best roguelike ever.
Compared to the others, Nethack has aged relatively poorly. It’s still better than almost all of them. But the gap has been closed by modern roguelikes making significant improvements in usability, design and innovative gameplay, without sacrificing any of the genre’s fundamental appeal.
Have a decent run going on atm. I’m level 11 on DL 15, have a lot of what I need already to head to the Castle so I can get enough xp to start the Quest. It’s like riding a byzantine Rube Goldberg machine of a bicycle, you never forget too much
Yesterday was a quick death as a tourist. I tried to read a book without identifying it. It’s not a really risky move, but exceptionally bad luck made it fatal.
Today I’m at Mines’ End as a Valkyrie and going pretty strong. (An amulet of lifesaving is providing a bit of added security, and I have managed not to piss off my god yet.)
It is interesting how much of my experience playing is accreted habits. I don’t think one has to have these habits to get something out of the game, and mine may not be optimal or even good. They include basics like
n - 20 - s : searching for 20 turns in a single spot to find a hidden door (when I’m pretty sure one is there, like at the end of a hallway)
throwing all my weapons to hit a floating eye, including my primary one if I’m feeling risky (floating eyes can paralyze if you attack them in melee)
eat gnomes whenever I can
kick a gray stone to test what it is
dropping everything unknown (D - X) on an altar to see whether it’s blessed or cursed
#pray when I’m under 10 HP to recover to max, if I think I can safely pray
Drop all gold and then #siton a throne until it poofs
All good tips. I’m pretty pray averse for health because I always want to be able to pray to avoid the worse stuff, but sometimes you have to. I’d try to run away first if possible though
