Starmaker: You absolutely can spoil a roguelike. The foundational element of every roguelike is gaining persistent knowledge between playthroughs, learning from one's mistakes and trying to do better next time. Hell, it can ruin a player's experience when they start out knowing the theory and find the rate of progress at learning the implementation too slow.

E.g. I started playing Don't Starve now. I didn't make a fire and died the first night. On my second attempt, I dug up some graves and was simultaneously dying of hunger, poison (I nommed some clearly poisonous berries for the lulz), and being attacked by a monster. I probably survive even longer next time. But if I'd had a recipe for success, the primary success criteria at first would be luck and making sense of interface/controls. And bad luck and unfamiliar controls are highly unsatisfactory reasons to lose a session.

Starmaker: ಠ_ಠ
It's "palate". Don't teach the kids bad English.

Sanjuro: .
As for free games, have you played Battle for Wesnoth? Do you know some good free games we forgot to mention?

Speaking of spoilers, I'm probably not the first to ask and I know you aren't the one responsible for technical aspect of the forum, but do you happen to know if [spoiler]/[hide text] tags are going to be implemented here? I mean, a gaming forum can hardly avoid spoilers altogether, especially while discussing game lore.