Rouge

Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman originally developed around 1980. In Rogue, players control a character as they explore a dungeon as they seek the Amulet of Yendor. Along the way, they can collect treasures that can help them offensively or defensively, such as weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and other magical items that help against monsters. The game is turn-based and implements permadeath, to make each action by the player meaningful. The dungeon levels, monster encounters, and treasures are procedural generated on each play-through, so that no game is the same as a previous one.

Rouge is a very simple game and while playing it I had a mixed reaction to it. At a base level of the game I quite enjoyed it. It is a Rogue-like, the term rogue-like came from this game, which is a sub genre I enjoy. The turn-based combat is fun and adds a form of strategic game-play. Having the levels be randomly generated also help add replay ability, especially since permadeath is used, so the player doesn’t have to go through the same levels over and over again.

One of the problems I have with the game is that there are to many inputs that you must work with. Not only that but some of the buttons they choose for some of the actions don’t make much sense. Also, when I accidentally press the wrong input it can sometimes be a hassle to get out of it. This problem stems more from how video games nowadays have few inputs, so I am used to having fewer inputs, which makes this a problem more with how I play games than the game itself.

You can see that Rouge also takes some influences from Dungeon and Dragons. The turn-based combat is like D&D’s initiative where you take turns in combat. Also the setting is very D&D with the player exploring a cave looking for treasure and fighting monster. Even the inventory system draws influences to D&D with rations, different armor and weapons, and magic scrolls.

Overall the game is well made for the time, and it is rather easy to see how it inspired future games in the genre. Even though I think that the control scheme is a bit outdated it is still a fun game.