Man, I hate NetHack. It is one of my favorite games of all time, what other games boast such simplicity and yet allow for such complex reactions and immersive gameplay? But why does it have to toy with my emotions? I have never made it past around dungeon level 10, despite playing it on and off for the past few years. I had such a good character, but died to a meager Giant Bat as I was preoccupied reading a spellbook.
I just.... I just need to calm down for an hour or so before I can go back to it.

Reading the opening post i thought you said HackNet. Still both are bound to be good :)

Real good rogue-likes... Gotta love them :)

Others to consider: <span class="bold">ADOM</span>, ToME, Dungeons of Dredmore.

Hmmm... Actually Dragon Fin Soup is suppose to be pretty good.

Use Vulture

Awesome meme. So many people won't get it... I mean here they will. But just... Awesome.

Man that game... One of my first characters died with a bolt welded to his hand. The damn thing was cursed, and I thought dipping it into a fountain might help. It didn't, it just made it a rusty bolt welded to my hand |:-(

I kind of quit the game in disgust after my incredibly powerful ranger met his end courtesy of a polymorph trap and a bout of teleportitis (I think I ate a leprechaun or something). I was fellling giants and golems on something like lvl 12 like they were nothing, and then next thing I knew I was a small rodent a few feet away from a deadly air elemental. If that wasn't bad enough, being a rodent meant that none of my protective gear fit anymore and just kind of fell of me. So my powerful af ranger died the death of a naked rodent trapped inside a whirlwind, literally...
Last thing I remember doing was trying to read, in a small squeaky voice presumably, some of scrolls that laid strewn about my heap of clothes and armour hoping for a miracle.

Awesome death! Stories like that are the best. Now I need to play nethack again. I never beat it, although I played it when I had no internet access and poor English reading skill, now it might be different story.

I occasionally like to load up the game in wizard mode and play around with things.

One interesting thing about nethack is the death messages: When you die, you get a message that tells how you died. Here's the thing: *Every source of damage can kill you if it reduces your HP to 0.* This means that, if something can damage you, you can get a death message from it. This leads to some rather funny deaths, like being killed by Newton't third law.

One other interesting death message you can get: "Quit while on Charon's boat." Can you figure out how to get that message? (Hint: In the situation where quitting would give you that message, you would eventually die as soon as a certain effect wears off.)

By the way, on wizard mode, you can wish for anything, and the usual restrictions do not apply. This has one side effect: It becomes annoying to wish for the fake Amulet of Yendor, as simply wishing for the amulet will actually give you the real amulet.

Edit: Minor change at the end to clarify what I mean.

One of the most embarrassing things to have written on your gravestone is "Killed by a kitten". It happens surprisingly often - those little cats are fast. One of the least embarrassing ways to go would probably be "Choked on a dragon".

Allow me a suggestion:

Brogue

It is not very well known but I personally find that it finds the perfect balance between "hard-doable"
-It sticks with the ASCII graphics, but adds colour!
-Permadeth is there ofc. Save file gets deleted upon death but if that is a problem you can always backup it up and load. (Most people think this deafeats the purpose of the roguelike genre though.)
-Finite food resources and starvation mechanic stresses the player to keep moving deeper. No grinding.
-Playstyles determined on equipment availability and your enchantment decisions. No classes.
There are a lot of "quality of life" options, like auto explore, mouseover, basic explanation of mechanics, and %s for kill-get killed upon enemy encounter.

It's not overly complicated, if you are into classic roguelikes maybe you'll find it oversimplified. But for me and maybe some people new to the genre it can be just right. Don't get me wrong, if you show it to a random gaming person you still get a "wth is this?" response.

Also it is Free And Open Source!!!

Give it a try, it doesn't take much of a time investment either :)
https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brogue_(video_game]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brogue_(video_game[/url])

Annoying game hehe, every now and then I play it for a bit and never get to level twenty before dying. Good thing about it are the super low requirements -- it will work on my 12+ years old laptop just fine. I think it would be just perfect for the mobile. <Goes looking for Android version>

No one has mentioned Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup yet? fo' shame, fo' shame.

It's kind of a less-random version of Nethack, with a tad less "let's hold on to everything just in case a mind-eater attacks me while blind, confused and with a cockatrice corpse nearby" and more of a traditional dungeon crawler instead, and also has a pretty good official Android port with graphics and everything, though it does have to be side-loaded since the version in the store is unofficial and older, IIRC.

I never got past the Medusa level.

ADOM, though, I have beaten once, ordinary ending.

Playing ADOM i know exactly what it means... The ASCII art and the @ is almost iconic :P



And not in a Ubisoft-Iconic way Hmm... Adom with Elementalist/Sorcerer with the lizard who can spit acid. Fun times. (But you need LOTS of food if you are going to spit acid) Or a fire ant, pitfall, poison, goblin with rusty knife... seen them before. Now I wish I had screenshots for all the hilarious ways I died.

I got to level 20 once... tried to go to a higher level area and... well... that didn't go well.

Actually got to about 20th with ToME too.

What really annoys me is the 'you die and there's no way you could have avoided it' events. More than once I've flipped off my computer and cursed at it.

There's a reason that permadeath and Syoban Action-style unfairness are generally not seen together. (Well, there is I Wanna Be the Guy's Impossible mode, but that game doesn't have random generation and there are non-permadeath modes so you can learn the game, and I am not sure if Impossible mode was intended to be cleared.)

Syoban Action does have a random generation mode ("Mystery Dungeon mode" according to the Japanese readme); press 0 at the title screen, and excpet to unfairly die a lot, and for levels to frequently be unwinnable (although they are regenerated when you die).

I note that classic Wizardry has the combination of permadeath and the occasional unavoidable death (ambushed by ninjas, or by spellcasters in the Apple 2 version).