Thank you Assemble Entertainment for sending us a review code!

My first foray into roguelikes happened in my high school years. Ancient Domains Of Mystery (ADOM) had clearly established itself as a pillar of the genre by that time. It was the first roguelike to boast an overworld that players could run around in, rather than being set entirely within a single dungeon. One of the key locations of Ancardia was a small cave in the Drakalor Chain - the Caverns of Chaos (COC). A popular community challenge was to head straight for this cave at game start and delve as deep as possible without ever leaving. The spirit behind this venture forms the basis of the 2021 release of Ultimate ADOM:COC.

Dispensing with ADOM’s main questline, COC instead has players join a faction at the start of the game. Each faction has their own reasons for sending an emissary to the Caverns, such as investigation, treasure, extermination, or fame. Your choice also rewards a corresponding set of skill points. After that, choose a gender, race, and class, and you’re good to go. As you play, you’ll gain influence with your chosen faction, and eventually you’ll unlock some minor bonuses for playing that faction. Gameplay is the stock standard dungeon crawling you’d expect from a roguelike. Enter the dungeon, wander around, fight monsters for experience and loot, and descend to the next level. As you gain experience and level up, you’ll gain skill points to spend in one of the 23 skill trees spread across four major categories. Skill points are tied to categories, and all classes get a differing number of skill points for different categories. Between faction and race choices, it is possible for any class to go deep in an off-class tree or two.

There is a fair amount of freedom in character builds, and I was able to create gishes (magic-using fighters) in various flavours. Halfway down however, every character can expect to have all their key skills. After that, it’s a smorgasboard of defensive boosts, since monsters don’t scale up nearly as fast as the player, and everything starts to play the same. Boss monsters are still a threat, but they simply work off large numbers. ADOM Classic had ways to kill even the most powerful characters in ways that weren’t just bigger numbers on monsters. I met none of these classic foils in my 30 hours of play, save for a few Karmic Lizards.

Long-time players will also notice that character creation has far less options than they are used to. ADOM’s 12 races and 22-odd classes have been pared down to 8 races and a mere 8 combat-focused classes. This pattern repeats itself throughout the game. Systems that gave ADOM Classic a touch of the Survival genre are not here. Items no longer need to be identified, non-combat spells have been removed, and there is no pantheon of capricious deities to placate. Players won’t be able to experience the D&D-esque play of magically locking a door to keep a monster out, but they can still play a dumb-as-rocks Troll Wizard if they feel like it.

The devblog reveals the reason: accessibility to modern audiences in the short term, and post-release development to eventually surpass ADOM Classic in the long-term. Ultimate ADOM is definitely accessible in its current state, having been distilled down to its purest essence of roguelike dungeon crawling. It’s as accessible as ChunSoft’s Mystery Dungeon games, but it’s also clearly incomplete. The system messaging is extremely detailed, but it’s so verbose as to be almost useless for regular use. I didn’t need 150 lines of text to explain the events of a single turn, every time combat happens.

And then there’s the bugs and poor controls. A quarter of skills just don’t work as described. When skills try to interact with each other, that number rapidly climbs to about half not working as expected. Adding spells to the hotbar doesn’t work properly. Wall spells have clunky targeting. Memory leaks keep piling up and eventually slow the game to a crawl. The game freezes when quitting to desktop. Mouse controls keep losing track until you open a menu to reset it. To be fair though, the game is possible to play with only a mouse, and the controls feels like they have been designed with an eye to mobile platforms. It wouldn’t surprise me if that is indeed on the cards.

The aesthetics are nothing special. Having graphics at all is certainly a huge step up from ASCII text for most people, but it’s all very generic. The game does include an ASCII text display mode if you want to go oldschool, but the rendering method is dissonant; it feels more suspect than a tower of kids in a trenchcoat insisting they’re old enough to buy tickets to an adult movie. Sound effects and music are equally generic but functional. In context, this isn’t much of a criticism. Some of the best roguelikes are still floating around with ASCII text displays so they can focus on developing their mechanics.

As the heir apparent to one of the oldest and most detailed roguelikes, ADOM:COC does have more moral concerns than you might be used to in an RPG. You’ll do plenty of killing, all the way up to humans and other playable races. Depending on your choice of faction, this may even be flavoured as straight-up cold blooded murder. Blood pools out whenever enemies are injured, and body parts can be amputated… or grafted on to turn the player into a Frankenstein monstrosity.

Unequipping armor will also strip the paper doll avatar down. However, the underwear looks more like jungle tribal wear than it does a bikini or kilt. This on its own isn’t a concern for sexual morality. More relevant here though is the game’s options for gender. The Tentacled gender plays into the cosmic horror aspects of the setting, and shouldn’t be considered concerning in context. Besides that however are Neuter, Both, and Non-Binary, three contradictions of Biblical teaching on sexuality – namely that “God created them male and female” (Genesis 5:2) and the various lengths shown to ensure that men are men and women are women. If you are one of those fortunate Christians who has yet to encounter transgenderism ideology, know that it insists that we may only discern our true gender by connecting with and trusting our “deceitful hearts” (Jeremiah 17:9) over the one who knew us before He formed us in the womb. (Jeremiah 1:5) On a related note, while it wouldn’t be normal to mention a publisher in a review, it should also be noted here that the CEO of publisher Assemble Entertainment recently tweeted an open letter asking people not accepting of homosexuals to refrain from purchasing any of their games. While we are indeed called to love all peoples, that does not mean accepting their sinful lifestyles, and this attitude does not change just because the sin is sexual rather than violent in nature.

Besides the fantasy magic, there is a lot of messing around with necromancy and death magic. One skill tree in particular is all about becoming a lich. Occult themes are also present, albeit with a cosmic horror flavour. Players are able to consume enemy corpses; not just animal corpses, but humans too. One of the messages to be found on the random wall plaques reveals that slavery is a background presence in this world, although the context implies that only evil monsters engage in the trade.

Ultimate ADOM:COC competently reinvigorates the classic roguelike with modern design values. In its current state, the game is quite raw and unfinished. Given developer Tom Biskup’s track record, it’s fairly safe to expect a lot of continued development for years. If you’re an old hand at roguelikes, this game is essentially a stripped down and barebones experience. If you’re new to the genre, this is as good an entry point into the purer titles as any.