New-ish release: ADOM

ADOM is not new. In fact, ADOM has been around for literally decades. According to creator Thomas Biskup, ADOM (short for “Ancient Domains of Mystery”) is one of the Big Five roguelikes in existence, notable in large part for being the first roguelike to add to include “vibrant towns, NPC dialog, and quests” to the traditional, straightforward dungeon crawling that was the focus of its predecessors.

The narrative premise:

Deep in the mountainous ranges of the Drakalor Chain, Chaos has broken through into Ancardia and it’s up to you to decide the fate of the entire realm. You control a single character with a wildy varying set of skills, talents, spells and other abilities. Customized equipment makes each race/class combination a very different experience. Explore a mostly randomized underworld, fight monsters, loot treasures and uncover the many secrets lurking in the world of Ancardia.

So what’s “new-ish” about this? Well, y’see, ADOM had a successful Indiegogo campaign back in 2012 that allowed Biskup to expand it with lots of neat new features, including graphical tilesets and 3D support. You can see the fancy new graphical presentation in ADOM’s new trailer:

So that’s that–this game is old as dirt, but the new version is, y’know, new. What’s more, after a whopping 20 years of active development, Biskup has just successfully concluded his campaign to get the game onto Steam, where it will presumably be available in short order. In the meantime, you can download the latest version of the game for free from this page. It comes in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux flavors.

Also, one last thing: even though I am manifestly terrible at roguelikes, I will be trying this one out in the near future! (And probably dying. And recording it. Sigh.)