NetHack
Description official description
NetHack is a roguelike role-playing game with both traditional ASCII graphics and a graphical tileset. The objective is to find the Amulet of Yendor and sacrifice it to your deity.
In the beginning, you choose one of the classes - there are some traditional ones, like Priest or Knight, but also unusual ones like Tourist or Caveman. Then, you find yourself on the 1st level of the dungeon, along with your pet that will accompany you and help you in combat. On each level, you have to find an exit to the lower level; on the way, you'll find countless monsters to fight, as well as items to collect. Sometimes, you come upon a shop, where you can buy or sell items.
Items you find can be blessed (more effective than normal), but sometimes are cursed (less effective, or outright harmful). Eating the corpses of fallen enemies is an important part of the game since many creatures give you special abilities or immunities when eaten.
While the above description might seem brief, NetHack is, in fact, a very complex and merciless game - there are lots of ways to die.
Since NetHack is a roguelike, everything is represented as a top-down view of the current dungeon level, where the walls, the floor, and all items, characters, and monsters are ASCII characters. More recent versions of the game also include an official set of graphical tiles which can be turned on at the player's option.
Groups +
- Fantasy creatures: Dragons
- Fantasy creatures: Dwarves
- Fantasy creatures: Elves
- Fantasy creatures: Gnomes
- Fantasy creatures: Goblins
- Fantasy creatures: Halflings / Hobbits
- Fantasy creatures: Minotaurs
- Fantasy creatures: Orcs
- Fantasy creatures: Trolls
- Fantasy creatures: Unicorns
- Gameplay feature: Burden / Encumbrance
- Gameplay feature: Controllable pet companions
- Gameplay feature: Having children
- Gameplay feature: Hunger / Thirst
- Gameplay feature: Permadeath / permanent death
- Games with officially released source code
- Games with randomly generated environments
- Genre: Dungeon crawler
- NetHack revisions
Screenshots
Promos
Credits (DOS version)
128 People (126 developers, 2 thanks) · View all
| A Guide to the Mazes of Menace (Guidebook for NetHack 3.3) by | |
| Guide extensively edited and expanded for 3.0 by | |
| Large portions of the Guide shamelessly cribbed from "A Guide to the Dungeons of Doom" by | |
| Small portions of the Guide adapted from "Further Exploration of the Dungeons of Doom" by | |
| Original Hack written by | |
| Assistance on original Hack from | |
| Hack re-write (v1.0.1 - 1.0.3) by | |
| Early Hack port revisions merged in NetHack 1.4 by | |
| NetHack 3.0c rewrite coordinated by | |
| NetHack 3.0c rewrite team | |
| NetHack 3.0c rewrite team joined by | |
| NetHack 3.1 revision lead | |
| [ full credits ] | |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 89% (based on 2 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 110 ratings with 9 reviews)
The greatest game of all time.
The Good
Everything. The interactivity is outstanding for a roguelike RPG game. You can pick from 13 different types of characters, and 5 different races. That's a pretty wide range of gameplay right there.
The Bad
I wrote this review for the Windows version and not the DOS version because the DOS version has no graphics. This was a bit of a bother for me, so I tried the Windows version and was even more amazed at the game because it had some graphics this time.
The Bottom Line
Simple. The absolute greatest game of all time. I've played a LOT of other games, beat them, passed them all, etc. And then... I went back to playing NetHack - the game I could never beat. Best PC game of all time - 10/10.
Windows · by Mr. Crap (3) · 2004
The Last Game You'll Ever Play
The Good
It is comprehensive: it has great scads of races, of items, of dungeons (quest levels, a Sokoban game, the Gnomish Mines &c.); even the kitchen sink. It never gets old: just when one thought one knew it all, some new thing leaps out. After NetHack, every other game pales and is boring.
The Bad
It is hard, probably the hardest game I've ever played. It'll keep drawing you in and killing you off. Just as NetHack has more items, monsters and types of levels than other games, so too it has more ways to die: being killed outright; starving; choking to death; eating too much food; poisoning; petrification; being crushed by boulders; falling down stairs; donning an amulet of strangulation; and so on and so forth. It is a tough game.
The Bottom Line
Well worth playing. It's available for nearly every platform, and there's even a GUI (Falcon's Eye, I believe) available. It requires thought and consideration--there's no such thing as an unfair death (or any other negative occurrence) in NetHack: it's always winnable, and always possible to think one's way out.
Linux · by Robert Uhl (2) · 2003
ultima enchanced, (besides the grapics)
The Good
this game has it all !!! from items, to npc's, monsters, mazes, and you even get to have you own pet !!!!
The Bad
1. It's hard as hell, i mean, almost everything and anything can and will kill you
2. gameplay isn't very good. most of the cool commands are hidden within the docs of the game
3. text graphics is so yesterday.....
4. the turn-based mechanism of the game allows the computer to "cheat"
5. it has too many options
The Bottom Line
it's an RPG, one of the best, and it's free !!!!
something like ultima, but with more options, better gameplay, and less graphics!
Windows · by Henry Aloni (46) · 2003
Discussion
| Subject | By | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Why does this exist? | Tracy Poff (2095) | Jun 21, 2014 |
| NetHack or HackLite? | Игги Друге (46649) | Apr 30, 2014 |
Trivia
1001 Video Games
NetHack appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Development
This project is also the descendant of an older game called Hack. Hack was one of the first "dungeon" type games to use a graphical display instead of text based room descriptions - though it still used ASCII characters to portray your environment.
Easter eggs
Some scroll names in NetHack mean something when read backwards (e.g. "ELBIB YLOH", "DUAM XNAHT"), but "KIRJE" just means "letter" in Finnish.
Gameplay features
- Players are able to receive Email within the game.
- NetHack is one of the few computer games where you can actually produce offspring. By polymorphing into a female snake, dragon, or other appropriate monster, you can lay eggs. Just be sure to have fire resistance once your baby dragon starts breathing fire.
References
The owner of the candle shop in the Gnomish Mines town, Izchak, is named after one of the former DevTeam members, Dr. Izchak Miller, who passed away before the release of Nethack 3.2. Information also contributed by Late
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Related Sites +
-
"Dudley's Dungeon" webcomic
Frequently-updated Nethack-themed webcomic in fixed-width textmode -- just like Nethack! -
"Which NetHack monster are you?" quiz
Equates your psyche to personality traits of 15 common NH enemies. -
Annotated NetHack File
History of the NetHack releases -
The RLTiles
Graphical Tilesets for NetHack
Identifiers +
Contribute
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Droog.
Windows Mobile, OS/2 added by Trypticon. GP2X, GP2X Wiz added by 666gonzo666. PC-98 added by Infernos. GP32, Acorn 32-bit added by Kabushi. iPhone, Macintosh, Browser, Android, Amiga added by Pseudo_Intellectual. Atari ST added by Игги Друге.
Additional contributors: Adam Baratz, Jeanne, Alaka, Pseudo_Intellectual, General Error, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.
Game added February 2, 2000. Last modified October 17, 2024.