Indie game studio FrozenCrate announces a remastered version of the original NetHack: one of the oldest and most intricate dungeon roguelikes. The revamped classic, dubbed NetHack: Legacy, will launch through Steam on August 10th for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
NetHack: Legacy pulls the 30+ year old game up to modern standards while still retaining the essence of what makes the game so fun and addictive. You can still do just about anything in the dungeon, from training your dog to steal items, to using your helmet as a weapon; they just clean up a lot of the baggage from antiquity and add new features to enhance the classic D&D roguelike experience.
“We tried to remove many of the technical barriers surrounding NetHack, so you can get straight into the game without messing with terminal settings, config files, or in extreme cases, compiling the code yourself,” states Kevin Nygaard, lead developer at FrozenCrate. “You just start the game and it runs. We added things that sound silly since they are so commonplace now; things like title screens, window resizing, persistent options, cross-platform saves, mouse support, arrow keys… yes, arrow keys.” The game also adds features like in-game recording, so you can re-watch games you’ve played and figure out where you went wrong or what you could have done differently.
Though with all these improvements, NetHack: Legacy focuses closely on bringing the original dungeon crawling experience to players. “Before tilesets, the only way you could play NetHack was through the ASCII interface. Instead of having little pictures of items and monsters, you had characters, like a ‘d’ for your pet dog,” Nygaard explains. “This was revolutionary in the age of text-based adventure games like Zork. But, it straddled the boundary, still leveraging text descriptions and your imagination for what a creature looks like, which makes the dungeon environment a bit more shrouded in mystery. We believe that was one of the core experiences that made NetHack great, so we kept the ASCII look and feel.” To further complete the retro inspiration, the character-based graphics have special effects to mimic an old CRT terminal from the days past, including glow effects and warped screen distortion.
NetHack: Legacy launches through Steam worldwide on August 10th, 2018 for $5.99.
Official Website: https://nethacklegacy.com
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/837200/NetHack_Legacy/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FrozenCrate
