One of the most famous names in roguelikes and one of the longest continually-developed games of all time, NetHack is a legendary title in many ways; not least of which is its unflinching difficulty level. But does this minimally-presented adventure still hold merit today, or is there little reason to visit it now with the surge in other well-known, fiendishly-tough dungeon crawls?
Arguably the most enduring RPG of all time, NetHack debuted in 1987 and is still under active development today, continuing to get bugfixes and new features with each patch that comes out. A fork of an early game simply titled "Hack" that was a clone of genre-definer Rogue, Nethack features similar, yet much deeper gameplay. You make your way through a 50-floor dungeon seeking an artifact in the name of your god, hoping to escape the dungeon with it and achieve transcendence. But of course while you can make anything sound easy, getting the task done is a pretty monumental achievement; so much so that people who have played hundreds or thousands of rounds of NetHack can count their victories in single digits. Even being able to call upon divine intervention from your god only gets you so far; it's something best saved for when you're in a very dire spot, as calling them too frequently or frivolously will anger them and possibly bring down their wrath upon you.
Yes, NetHack is legendary for its extreme difficulty. In addition to cursed and unidentified items to deal with, you also have to manage your character's hunger; get hungry and you start fainting, which puts you in extreme danger; go too long without any sustenance and you die. You start with a few rations and can occasionally find more, but for the most part you're reliant on eating slain enemies. Only specific ones, though - eating critters like rats or bats will poison you, while undead can cause food poisoning, which is almost always fatal. Partaking of cannibalism or eating cats or dogs will likewise aggravate all monsters in the game, making you an easier target. The flipside is that some critters will also grant you resistances or temporary benefits like invisibility, but the only way to know is to experiment (and die a lot) or look up a spoiler list online. Meat also spoils fairly quickly unless you store it in tins, so it's not something you can easily hoard in large quantities either.
That's just one aspect of the game's difficulty, too. There's plenty of traps waiting to snare you, dump you to lower levels or poison you and no shortage of monsters with nasty tricks to inflict on you, like being poisoned or paralyzed or cockatrices turning you to stone or werebeasts infecting you with lycanthropy, causing you to uncontrollably morph into one of them; all of which will severely hamper you or bring your run to a quick end if you're unprepared for them. Similarly, going around equipping items willy-nilly is a very quick way to screw yourself. Find a nice weapon or piece of gear that seems too good to be true for the stage you're at? Yeah, get that guy identified before you even think of putting it on. Oh, and be sure to carry backups, because metal equipment rusts and falls apart when exposed to acid, water and other hazards.
Something else Rogue didn't really have was character classes - you just started up the game and went for it. This is definitely not the case in NetHack - you get to pick your gender, your alignment, and, based on those, one of thirteen different classes. Some fit into the usual Dungeons and Dragons inspired archetypes like the Knight, Priest, Monk, Rogue, Wizard and Barbarian, while others are a bit more silly. Cavemen, for example, are not penalized for cannibalism or eating tripe rations, but have relatively weak weapon and armor options. Archaeologists are very clearly modeled on Indiana Jones, starting with a bullwhip, leather jacket and fedora and a few convenient items. Tourists can be considered the "joke" class of the game, as they generally have a lot of money to start but very lackluster equipment and low stats, plus shopkeepers charge them more and give them less money when they sell items. Each class has very distinct capabilities and strategies to employ as the game progresses, so learning their quirks, advantages and disadvantages is key to success; or at least, not dying so quickly.
Each class is optionally accompanied by a starting pet ally; some (like the paladin's steed) can be ridden, while others have useful traits like detecting traps or helping you find cursed items. They also fight alongside you and require food to stay alive, and can even change into new forms if they live long enough to gain experience. Monsters of all sorts in the dungeon can also be tamed, charmed and controlled, which goes a surprisingly long way in keeping you alive - after all, enemies attacking them aren't attacking you.
Another thing you can turn to your advantage are shops, where you can of course sell various items, identify things and buy others to give yourself an edge. It may also be the first roguelike with the badass shopkeeper trope - if you anger the shopkeeper by attempting to steal things, damage his goods or outright attack him, he'll go hostile, wielding his arsenal of items with lethal force (including wands that cast Death and other nasty things), or summon an enormous horde of Keystone Kops to attack you.
I've only covered some of the basic elements of NetHack's gameplay in this review, but it serves to highlight my point: there are hundreds of variables and endless possible permutations thereof, and figuring out how to deal with them is mostly down to trial-and-error and learning to utilize subtle clues, with one slip-up putting you at serious risk of death. But that's also the game's strongest trait. Nethack's dense and addictive design, solid sense of humor and endless replayability gave it strong appeal in 1987, and its ongoing development ensures it will continue to do so for years to come. It may not have top-notch voice acting, movie-like cutscenes, achievements, epic music, amazing sound design or even graphics (unless you install and enable tilesets), but it's got tons of depth and timeless design, and that's enough to make it an immortal classic.
Publisher: The NetHack DevTeam
Released: 1987+
Platforms: PC, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows CE, OS/2, Unix, BeOS, VMS, Haiku
Recommended version: They're all based on the same source code so they all play pretty much identically at their core. I'm personally most fond of the MS-DOS build since I can run it in DOSBox on virtually anything.