michael toy and glenn wichman’s rogue, in the eighties, was an early attempt at a graphical adventure game for the computer. as such, they can be forgiven for not imagining the most efficient way to use a keyboard of a hundred-or-so buttons. but, dudes, making the same mistake a hundred authors before you made isn’t “tradition,” it’s ignorance. the “roguelike” games that trace their ancestry to rogue, in the thirty years since the original, have by and large come no closer to understanding that a game doesn’t need to use every key on the keyboard just because it’s there. get this: in nethack, you use the “r” key to read a magic scroll, the “q” key (for “quaff”) to drink a potion, the “a” key (for “apply”) to light a lamp, and the “z” key (for “zap”) to fire a magic wand. and even taking into account hidden choices – “applying” a wand does something very different than “zapping” it, for example – that’s still a tremendous amount of dead weight.
even one of the leanest rogue-inspired games out there, crawl, has two seperate keys for equipping items: lowercase w for “wielding” weapons and uppercase W for “Wearing” armor. (and if you want to wear a magic ring, that’s “p” for “put on!”) part of the reason newcomers find these games so impossible to get a handle on is the time they have to spend figuring out which of your eighty commands is the right one to drink a bottle of water. the other is that your game has been accumulating shit with very little curating for over twenty years and it won’t occur to most new players that eating an egg might be instant death because there could be a fetal cockatrice inside it.
brogue, i think, addresses both problems pretty elegantly. drinking a potion, reading a scroll, firing a magic wand – that’s all the “a” for “apply” key. equipping anything – a sword, a suit of armor, a ring – that’s “e.” (and i still think these two keys could probably be one key – applying a ring could put it on, for example, and applying a worn ring could take it off.) but the game’s not just concise in terms of its verb set: the cast of characters, and conditions, is also elegant. every creature in the game – the floating gas sac who releases poison when killed, the psychedelic toad that causes hallucination on contact, the ogre that misses most of the time, but hits hard when it connects – justifies its existence, and they work together well.
i’m also pleased with how much stuff isn’t cribbed from other roguelike games. that’s “tradition,” too. brogue has clouds of poison gas, spreading and slowly dispersing, fires that catch and spread across fields of cave flora, glistening underwater pools, rope bridges over chasms, glowing lakes of lava. a lot of it is mostly for flavor, but i like how much flavor there is, how strong a sense of place the game has. most roguelike games are trapped in the same sixteen-color palette as dos rogue – tradition? brogue has a magnificent sense of color, cool blue-greens and muted colors with sparse hot highlights. when a magical flying sword is conjured, you know something unnatural has been summoned to the cavern because of the bright, weird light it throws on everything around it. this kind of game is almost never made with an eye for color, and what it adds is almost staggering. it makes me wonder why visual beauty is so often an afterthought in these games, or never a thought at all.
