John Bilbo
Gold Member
What is NetHack?
NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine. Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly. Each game presents a different landscape - the random number generator provides an essentially unlimited number of variations of the dungeon and its denizens to be discovered by the player in one of a number of characters: you can pick your race, your role, and your gender.But that's a very dry description.
The game is available to download for free. It is playable on Windows, MSDOS and Amiga.
The following list is assembled by Grok so it may contain errors:
Key Features
- Turn-based, grid-based gameplay (usually represented in ASCII/tiles).
- Permadeath — die and you start completely over. No savescumming (well, you can try, but it's against the spirit).
- Insanely deep systemic interactions: Almost everything in the game interacts with everything else in logical (and often hilarious) ways. Dip a weapon in holy water? Poison? Acid? Eat corpses for powers (or die from food poisoning)? Use a pet dog to fetch items from shops? Polymorph into different monsters? Wish for artifacts? The game is famous for its "encyclopedic" object and monster interactions.
- Humor and pop culture: References to D&D, mythology, Star Trek, Discworld, Monty Python, and tons of in-jokes.
- Extremely high difficulty and complexity — it rewards experimentation, knowledge, and clever problem-solving over brute force.
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