[scratchmonkey]

In terms of roguelikes that you should actually play, the list is pretty much:

- Brogue
- Shiren the Wanderer (either version, really)
- Crawl (Stonesoup version)

And I say this as somebody who has been on rec.games.roguelike.* for over two decades. And I've beaten Angband, which is the forgotten "canonical" roguelike, overshadowed by Nethack, which mauve has already adequately covered (although I believe Apol has a shine for the game and would possibly have a defense for it) -- in any case, Angband is really transcended as an experience by the above list and there was a great blog post going around a while back that detailed somebody's fictional life of playing Angband that summarized it pretty well. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore -- the gist of it that was that there's an Angband Borg, a program written to play Angband in the mid-90s and the Borg is arguably a better player than most actual players because what really gets you success in Angband is incredible amounts of patience. You need to grind, run away from anything dangerous and then achieve a certain amount of things that are only available from random drops before advancing the game. Most human players die simply because they actually take risks, which will eventually go against you.

[scratchmonkey]

I have not! It looks pretty interesting, although I find the aesthetic to be atrocious.

[scratchmonkey]

That's it! A bit different that I remembered; pretty great though.