Play Ancient Domains of Mystery Online

ADOM is one of those classic roguelikes that somehow still hooks me even with its ASCII graphics (though there’s a tileset option now if you can’t handle the old-school @ symbols and lowercase letters as monsters). You start by picking from a bunch of weirdly specific races and classes—like a mist elf necromancer or a dwarven elementalist—and then get tossed into this massive, unforgiving world where everything wants to kill you.

The overworld map actually feels like a place, not just a menu screen. You’ll stumble into villages, dark forests, and dungeons that stay the same once you’ve explored them (except for the Infinite Dungeon, which is exactly what it sounds like). The chaos gates spreading corruption are a nice touch—you can literally watch the land rot as the game goes on, which adds this weird pressure to hurry up even though you know rushing means certain death.

It’s brutal, but in that satisfying way where every dumb mistake teaches you something. Like, don’t eat random corpses unless you want to turn into a werewolf mid-fight. Or maybe you do? That’s the fun of it. The dev came back to it after nearly a decade, so there’s still new stuff popping up if you’re into the deep lore. Just be ready to die. A lot.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".