The curiously named Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a freeware roguelike game, a type of RPG where the difficulty is sky high, and the loss of your character means starting a new game. A bit masochistic, but the fun comes from the randomly generated dungeon you find yourself plummeting into. Your goal is to descend the dungeon, grab the Orb of Zot and get the hell out of there. To put into perspective on how difficult this game is, I’ve never beaten it. I’ve also been playing it for seven months. Your character, selected from one of the 24 races and 28 backgrounds, is free to advance themselves however they want, and while some combinations are stronger than others (cough Minotaur Fighter cough), there’s always something to entertain, like playing a wizard hat-wearing octopus that goes berserk.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2012.
There’s even a Linux version