Hello roguelike Lemmy community. Was hoping somebody could convince me that TOME is possibly up my alley. I’ve tried playing it a bunch of times, but never really enjoy it, although it has raving reviews on steam. I feel like games like Caves of Qud and Brogue have spoiled me with amazing dungeons/caves to explore and TOME just feels…bland. I understand that it’s a lot more combat focused, but even that feels like samey. Granted I haven’t played too far into the game and probably need to get to later levels to really feel the strategy requirement. I guess I’m wondering… What merits does the game have OTHER than the combat? Do the dungeons feel unique at all or is it just random gen rooms with enemies littered everywhere?
Alternatively, if TOME just isn’t my thing, are there any roguelikes that scratch the same sort of itch as CoQ and Brogue, and maybe Cogmind?
The big draws for ToME (for me) are: character classes, challenge, and music.
The game really has some cool classes, more complex than I’ve seen in any other Roguelike (and I’ve played a lot).
For example, the solipsist is a psionic character who grows more and more powerful mentally but more and more frail physically. They gain the power to warp the shape of reality with your mind, projecting waves of force and even creating swirling maelstroms of distortion.
They also gain the ability to sear the minds of their enemies, to project your own mind outside their body and travel through walls, to put all of their enemies to sleep and make their nightmares come alive to attack them, and even invade their dreams to destroy them in the dreamscape.
Another class, the paradox mage, is the master of time and space, with control over gravity and matter. They can create gravity wells, materialize barriers of solid matter and then blast them apart, create spikes of locally intense gravitation that rip through enemies. Create wormholes and warp mines to teleport themselves and enemies around, or dimensionally anchor enemies so that they snap back to where they were if they try to teleport (or are forced to teleport) away.
They can create temporal clones to fight alongside themselves, or travel into an alternate timeline to destroy an enemy, erasing them from the current timeline and continuing as if your target never existed in the first place. They can even stop time or take themselves out of the flow of time altogether. As well they can place a spell on contingency, having it cast automatically when their health drops below a certain threshold.
Perhaps their most dramatic talent is the ability to peer into the future and play out three different timelines, and then choose which of the possible futures becomes your reality.
And that’s just two of the many classes. There’s tons more and they all play completely differently from one another!
Ahhh thank you for the detailed reply. That does intrigue me and sounds pretty fun. I should give one of those classes a shot. Previously I’ve just been choosing classes like bulwark and archer…hah. Is there any merit to the dungeons in this game aside from the enemies? Like any environmental hazards / random traps or goofy things that can happen?
Yeah there are actually some really interesting dungeon gimmicks that come up toward the mid game. I don’t want to spoil anything for you though!