Since I was a teenager I’ve had the vague fantasy of a puzzle game where each key on your keyboard is mapped to a different, unexplained function and the primary thrust of the game is figuring out what each key does and how each function interacts with the world of the game. So it’s probably not a surprise that traditional roguelikes are a genre that very much are for me. I’ve been obsessed with Nethack particularly lately, and I want to talk a bit about why.
Real quick background: Nethack is one of the major early offshoots of the original Rogue, the other being Angband. Games inspired by Angband tend to go more into the dungeon crawler aspect of the genre, focusing on labyrinthine dungeons and crunchy combat and survival strategy. Meanwhile, Nethack, while still maintaining the linear dungeon crawl structure (games like ToME and ADOM that would popularize the idea of open world roguelikes were still a while off), focuses more in on interactions. There’s still plenty of combat, but while Angband has the feel of a classic tabletop dungeon dive, Nethack is more about learning how to use the elements of the world and the resources it presents to your advantage. Learning when to run from a fight is important, but so is learning that falling into a pit with a ball and chain attached to your ankle will result in it falling on your head, or that breaking down the door of a closed shop will result in the shopkeeper killing you, or simply how to safely try on unidentified necklaces without risking it being a necklace of strangulation.
This is why Nethack has a bit of a reputation as being a wacky and absurdly deadly game even by traditional roguelike standards. The game is extremely willing to surprise you, and that surprise is often death, or at least being disadvantaged somehow. In other games you can usually think of the primary deadly aspect being combat and other things as peripheral to and preparing for that, but combat in Nethack is as peripheral as any of the many other environmental and mechanical interactions.
Now this is all fun and dandy and we all love RPGs about freely smacking elements together to see what they do. For Nethack though, there’s a meta-level at which all this functions that is vitally important to what makes it engaging to me. Put simply, Nethack takes the general inaccessible nature of roguelike UX to an absurd extreme. The game is a mess of esoteric keyboard commands, Vim-style text entry, and unexplained core mechanics, not to mention an extremely dense options menu (and config file), which has many things that could make the game more accessible, including an entire alternate interface, off by default. And yes there is, of course, a detailed manual (and wiki) you can dive into, but realistically unless you’re capable of reading a giant manual and memorizing like 30 keyboard commands in one go, you’ll be learning even the basics of how to interact with the game piece-by-piece over a long period of time. I literally did not know there was a spellcasting system or a way to increase skills until I was around 12 runs in. Combine this with ASCII graphics where you need to spend time learning what the symbols on the screen even represent and you’ve got a deeply obfuscated RPG.
Which, you know, feels kinda counter to a lot of game design wisdom and you may well have read that last paragraph and gone ‘wow! no thanks!’ which is entirely fair. But for me? Well, refer back to the first paragraph of this blog.
In this way, Nethack is a game about phonotactics and grammar, more than any other game I’ve played. Starting at 0, with perhaps some general roguelike knowledge, you are given a collection of phonemes in the form of basic game actions. You learn the valid and invalid and optimal ways of mixing these to form ‘words’, a multitude of combinations of basic actions which you then, through a slow process of trial and error, learn to combine into grammatically valid chains of actions and long-term strategies.
It’s a lot. Nethack is the kind of game you play for years before winning, that you play for years and are still discovering new ‘words’ and ‘sentences’, new methods of interactions, new quirks, new mechanics. It defies all reasonable wisdom about game design - accessibility, coherence, you name it. I think it’s maybe the best game?
Nethack is lenticular and fractal, a shifting and deep thing that spirals out more the more you delve into it. For someone like me, to whom video games are essentially about the collection and management of information, it’s nearly perfect. I look forward to, seventy-five runs from now, suddenly discovering a new keybind or menu option that allows me to survive just that little bit longer, construct just a slightly more complex combination of actions. And maybe one day I’ll even win a game and shout about it in excitement to my vaguely befuddled friends.
(For more thoughts on the phonotactics of games, do check out Lyric Scrabbleby my wife Hy Libre, which I read for the first time while thinking about this blog and which informed some of my thoughts regarding it, particularly the framing of learning a game in linguistic terms.)