help me

It's a roguelike.
Not the hardest.
Not the easiest.

I have almost a hundred hours and I have 1% of the achievements. That's something.

I don't play rogue-likes.

That was my starting point with ToME(4), aka Tales of Maj'Eyal. I'm not really a fan of the genre, though I am a fan of tactical RPGs. It was only after some interesting comments on another game forum (Grim Dawn, great game, look it up) that I decided to give ToME a try.

Unlike some other rogue-likes, ToME gives you the option to play softcore. There are varying difficulty levels in addition to different degrees of 'rogue-like-ness' (multiple lives; from 1 to infinite). The classes vary from basic and simple (Bulwark, Rogue, Archmage, etc) to surprisingly unique (Mindslayer, Oozemancer, Solipsist, etc). The unlock system can be a pain, but it does encourage you to progress through the game, explore and play various archetypes.

The lore is great; the world has been excellently crafted (imo). While it doesn't read like a AAA novel, the depth of the backstory is pretty astonishing considering it's been done primarily by one man (props Darkgod).

When it comes to the gameplay, everything is surprisingly newbie-friendly (for a rogue-like). The UI is simple and easy, the controls are variable (keyboard and/or mouse, re-bindable) and the overly-complex item usage often found in the genre has been notably streamlined.

The graphics are solid. Now, take that with a grain of salt; this is a 2d game of tiles and sprites. If you're anticipating something like Dragon Age, you're going to be disappointed. I know that I was unpleasantly surprised. That being said, it has definitely grown on me and it certainly gives enough information on what's happening.

All that being said, this IS a roguelike. You WILL walk around a corner/open a door/open a chest and get exploded. Careful, cautious play is highly encouraged.

Overall, if you find yourself wanting to try out a roguelike but finding they are a little too 'hardcore' for you, give ToME a try. It's the only roguelike that I have found myself returning to, time after time.

That game can be described in one word: amazing.
I mean, beside being such a complex game created and maintained by one dev, it has dozen of features and things that make it even better:
- Humor. Dialogues, story, everything is filled with dark, hidden, or obvious humor. Even the achievements have sometimes the best names I've ever seen ("I cleared the room of death and all I got was this lousy achievement!")
- Death. You can probably die a thousand times differently.
- Death (again). You can choose to have an amount of lives to spend, or you can go in full Roguelike-Permadeath-Nightmare/Madness difficulty, but in that game, you will die a lot, that's for sure.
- Network. No multiplayer, but just a global chat, that also let you know when another payer achieves something, or DIES. So you know you're not alone.
- MOD THAT GAME TO DEATH
- You have so many classes and races to play as and to combine in the vanilla, you probably won't even know what to play anymore after you modded the game to death. There is probably a character-mod for every single creature in the game. There is even a mod that allows you to play as a TREE.
- B*tch, I'm a Mega Turtle Storm Knight
- The story is a big part of the game. TomE isn't a simple randomly-generated-try-or-die-exploring-maze Roguelike. It has continents, locations, races, people, events of the past, yeah, a story.
- B*tch, I'm a Star Elf Paradox Mage
- There are so many items, you don't know if it's possible to have something balanced in that. And a lot of the items have a story, and special abilities. Also, you're not limited, in terms of what you wanna wear. Wanna be a human mage that shoots fire with his sword ? Go ahead.
- B*tch, I'm a Dwarf Arcane Gladiator

I just love it.

Traditional roguelike meets modern gaming sensibilities. Perma-death, randomized dungeons and plenty of fully-realized, unique classes to play. At the same time, it does away with painful inventory management, randomized scrolls and potions and the other painfully vestigal bits from the classics.

It's ok.

This game is my favourite game it has more than enough achievements to satite my ravenous autism.

Excellent game, if stat screens make your pants feel funny, I reccomend this game, it is truly one of the best modern roguelikes, with many interesting mechanics, very different classes, varied races, an interesting world and lore. I love it.

Tons of content, and it's even free. I must have played like 200 hours before acquiring it on steam, because DarkGod deserves the money, and a game like this for this low price is almost a steal,

The game starts out being relatively simple to play, with few races and classes avaliable, and few complicated mechanics, but as you progress in your runs and do different stuff, you unlock interesting new races and classes.

Hell, you can time travel. TIME. TRAVEL.

One of the best parts is that, in order to unlock classes and races, you have to do some pretty interesting things. For example, unlocking mages requires that you find the existence of mages, and some important finds affect later playthroughs, like finding the anti-magic people of Zigur or a certain chest that once you find all your characters start with.

This game is so awesome, that it helped me stay sane during a week of post-surgery lying face-down on a hospital bed.

I reccomend this. Seriously, if you like roguelikes and don't mind text, give this a try for free at te4's page, and I strongly reccomend buying it, it barely gives you features, mostly cosmetic ones, but something of this scale deserves a purchase, and for this price, it is well worth it.

I love it.

Good roguelike, technically an evolution of the old Tales of Middle Earth Angband variant but you won't notice unless you've played the old ToME. It's quite forgiving for the genre. It's not nearly as spoiler-heavy as Nethack or ADOM, and while it doesn't have the same "transparency" as Dungeon Crawl, it tends to be a little easier. There is a multiple-life "adventure" mode which can be turned off. There are essentially no consumables in the game; the roles typically filled by these are instead unlimited-use abilities subject to cooldowns after use.

One interesting feature is that if you log in to play, there is an in-game chatroom. The online population rarely reaches above 200, so the chatroom isn't actually too cluttered. I have frequently seen developers online answering questions/taking bug reports.

This game is available for free on the developer's website, but there is one class and a few other minor features that are only available in the paid version.

Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME4) is a fantastic take on the modern rogue-like. The developer made smart design choices like getting rid of unnessary potions and hunger mechanics . This really helps to streamline the rogue-like genre. Tack on it's intricate class and character progression systems and you've got a unique and fun game that keeps you coming back for more.

A pretty good rogue. It's not about graphics but the gameplay obviously. What really works for me personally about the game is that it is effectively one long endurance battle(I've been a long distance runner for many years and it's a similar mentality). It's randomized, progression is inevitable(both in your character, and forced upon you), you can choose a number of ways to fight between the various classes, etc. but again you must always be alert in order to succeed. Or you lose everything.

I enjoy not feeling completely alone in this game.... because it has a chat. Sure, it's most obvious use is for help questions, but it's much more like dark souls in that you see people dying, world events occurring, and what forms is a sense of unity in the community despite everyone being alone on their own journey.

The game is free from the website, but why not buy it for the cheap price anyway?
Fun to play when you need something casual, too.

One of the best roguelikes ever created. Ot successfully blends replayability, unlocks, lore, and a fully featured and challenging campaign together to make a satisfying and murderous whole. If you enjoy roguelikes, you absolutely cannot go wrong with this game.

Tales of Maj'Eyal (TOME) is a viciously addictive roguelike adventure which contains a number of key features that both improve the gaming experience overall and crucially distances itself from other run-of-the-mill roguelikes. It is 2D and turn based, preferring gameplay and depth over graphical wizardry.

One important distinction between TOME and other roguelikes is the lack of emphasis on procedural generation. TOME actually has a plot, one that spans continents and the void between worlds, a story of darkness, magic and of course world domination. Throughout each playthrough, the story is the same, albeit with some slight alterations/additions depending on the actions you take and the starting class you select. There is a world map, and the major story locations do not change. Although the layout of each dungeon is procedurally generated, this is not empasised as a selling point of the game - it is merely a tool used to highlight the other qualities this game possesses. And boy are there a lot of qualities.

First and foremost - the character classes. Good luck finding a more comprehensive, deep and exciting set of classes in any other roguelike, or any other GAME for that matter. TOME has over 15 of these, ranging from the stalwart Bulwark to the insidious Shadowblade to the righteous Sun Paladin, TOME has you covered for any kind of playstyle you wish to try. Each class then has a vast array of talent branches to follow, and the branches you choose to develop will essentially create a subset of the class you have chosen. The customisation possibilities are massive, resulting in a lot of replayability and tactical flexibility.

Combat is a highly tactical turn based affair, with a strong emphasis on positioning, cooldowns, and your innate knowledge of your own abilities versus your opponent's. Once within your view, every enemy you encounter can be right-clicked on to view their statistics, abilities (passive and active) and resistances. There are no consumables in TOME. The use of each of your skills and items works on a cooldown system, and managing these cooldowns effectively will make the difference between you slaying a boss or becoming a small stain on a tower floor.

And believe me, the latter will happen far more often than the former if you're not prepared, because TOME is HARD. Hard as in one-hit-kill hard. Hard as in the game gives you 3 options - Rogulike (1 life), Adventure (gain lives as you level up) and Exploration (infinite lives) - and taking the Roguelike option early on will result in tears. Hard as in some of the more powerful enemies in the game are comprised of two separate random character classes, and God help you if you face one with two even remotely synergistic classes under its belt.

And to be honest, if there's one thing that drives me nuts about TOME, it is the difficulty. No doubt this makes me a console casual, but I'm serious. The difficulty of TOME is not embedded within the general gameplay, such as a game like Dark Souls, but rather in its frightening inconsistency of enemy threat. The existence of enemies with randomly combined abilities, together with the fact that there are over 10 different damage types (Fire Cold Darkness Light Mind Temporal Blight Nature bleh) means that at some point (normally after you've spent 10 minutes breezing through a horde of useless trash mobs) you will suddenly bump into a Godlike terror that sends you screaming into the abyss of death with a single, sloppy blink, simply due to having the perfect storm of resistances, abilities and relative level that results in a big tick in the Rekt column. Despite my affection for this wonderful, deep and mechanically interesting game, it is also by far the game I have rage-quitted the most.

TL:DR Version....

Good - Excellent character classes, tactical combat and involving storyline.

Bad - Insane difficulty spikes

Overall - if you enjoy a good tough roguelike, you should already have this game!

Rougelikes have become increasing gameified lately, TOME however, is the real deal. It takes a hardcore rougelike and wraps it in an easy to access package. The depth of gameplay contained within this game is amazing! If you find yourself enjoying the flood of new "rougelike" games that are crowding the steam storefront, then do yourself a favor and try this game.

A very traditional hard-as-balls roguelike. What sets this apart from other genrecompetitors like DCSS or nethack is the very accessible interface and overall decent presentation with a very good default tileset (that can be swapped out, if you feel like it).

Make no mistake, I have barely scratched the surface of what this game holds. But there is an insame amount of stuff in this, half a dozen races, several "sub"races, classes with subclasses and almost all of them come with a unique opening. Very impressive stuff. And everytime I die, even if its in the early stages due to some unfair RNG, I still keep rerolling thanks to the massive amounts of content, every run is different and you will always find another titbit of lore or a new quest.

Its hard to not miss the references to other fantasy worlds. This used to be set in the Tolkien universe, but for the sake of it being a commercial product, all of the connections had to be removed. Still it holds an interesting world with unique characters and well-written lore.

If you're into roguelikes, ToME is almost a mustplay. It takes a lot of time to get used to its "rogueiness" and I recommend changing some of the horrible default keybindings, but once you get out of that beginnerslump, you don't want to stop playing.

With over 1350, this certainly is the game with the most achievements I've ever played.

A fantastic, highly approachable Roguelike that cuts the most tedious parts of the genre while keeping all the depth and replayability.

The game about fight with infinite number of play styles and huge amount of skills
No stupid puzzles or sensless dialogs, no pathos
very small percent of obviously useless skills

I have been searching for an old school brutal RPG for so long that I had almost given up, until now. Everthing about this game speaks of patience, time and careful development. The developer/s have clearly played a vast array of games themselves and have created a game that will speak to the sophisticated RPG'er who isn't solely drawn to graphical thrills. The depth of character development and it's importance to your longevity in the game world is something I cannot stress you enough to take your time with.

This turn based RPG is unforgiving and it's game types and difficulties are designed to help you learn to survive. There is no "Loading a save game" when you're about to be 2 hit by a unique boss twice your lvl who has just seen you, warped behind you cackling with glee at it's next meal. Brutal, ingenious and rewarding, this game will challenge you to develop strategies just get out alive more often than being concerned about killing your foe.

You only have so many lives Adventurer.

98 / 100

As everyone else is saying, this is probably one of the most elaborate games of its kind out there. And with the astonishingly reasonable price, I'd say you should surely pick it up. If this is your type of game, of course. I could easily see an individual putting several hundreds, or possibly even more hours into this game.

I have actually had to make myself stop playing this game as every time I start a new character, I get sucked in once again. Best 7$ I have spent in a long time.