Que people lining up to vote against I game they've never even heard of and taken no time to learn about, let alone play. Lame.
For the last couple of months I have been giving away copious amounts of my life to an entertaining little masterpiece known as Dungeon Crawl - Stone Soup. This game has now pleased me enough that I feel the strange compulsion to spread the love a little bit. Also, I want to push this game in the upcoming tournament and think my odds are better if a few other people on the forum have actually played it.
I don't care too much if people vote for it, I'm just interested in seeing that it gets played. It's a free download - give it a shot. If you like RPGs then you are unlikely to regret it.
DCSS is a game about searching a dungeon for a magical McGuffin named The Orb of Zot. You choose a species and a background, get starter gear, and delve into the furthest depths of the unmapped, unexplored, randomly generated, extremely dangerous dungeon complex.
Still here? Good. Stone Soup is the absolute best example of a near death genre of RPG known as a Roguelike. Roguelikes are characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. In days of old they all used to be produced in ASCII (letters and numbers instead of a graphical interface) but Stone Soup has outgrown that tradition. Roguelike games are also well known for being hard as fuck, and that's one tradition that Stone Soup does not shy away from.
Be warned, Dungeon Crawl - Stone Soup is a game so old school that it wears a mortarboard and regularly beats children. There are no checkpoints, there is no saving, there are no second chances. If you die in the dungeon then it's game over (though ghosts of your previous characters will show up to try and sabotage any future attempts to descend into the dungeon) create a new character.
To give an indication of the difficulty, I myself have never managed to progress more than 20% of the way through the dungeon. It's that hard. That being said, the game is almost never unfair. If, or rather: when you die; it will be entirely your own fault.
It's a recurring cliche in gaming for video games to claim that no two games will ever be the same. With DCSS this claim is actually true. With 23 playable races, all of whom handle completely differently, 28 classes, 17 deities and an almost infinite selection of equipment and dungeon layouts, Crawl has more replayability than any other game I have encountered. There is almost no limit to the number of ways one can try to tackle the dungeon. You could play a stealthy Spriggan relying on putting enemies to sleep then cutting their throats. You could play a berserk Troll capable of cutting down waves on enemies in an instant. You could rely on the unique mutations of the Deamonspawn, the ability to fly of the Kenku, or the all powerful breath of the Draconian. It's really hard to put into words just how varied a Crawl experience can be. You are constantly forced to use every ability, every potion, every single trick at your disposal just to survive. It's a game of truly epic proportions.
Crawl in an indy game for PC under constant development, with new versions containing new content coming out on a regular basis. It is also completely free to download. Given that I've spent more time on Crawl than I have on the vast majority of my PS3 titles I call that pretty good value for money. Advertising is technically frowned upon here so I won't post a link, but anybody capable of actually playing the game is easily capable of locating it.
If your an RPG fan and fancy a taste of a truly old school experience then I heartedly recommend giving Stone Soup a try. It wont be to everyone's taste, but I dare say there's a few folks out there who'd appreciate a touch more of a challenge than your typical Final Fantasy title offers.
At the end of the day, Stone Soup is the absolute king of its genre. Donkey Kong isn't.
