As with all games I talk about on Freeware Friday, some history must be given. A long time ago, an RPG in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons was made available on Unix systems. This was the incredible Rogue, a classic of the genre and the forefather of most computer role-playing games. Follow a few years later, and you'll see the release of hack, another great RPG much like Rogue. Shortly after Hack was released, a group of internet developers pulled together to work on it, and Nethack was born. And the rest of Nethack's history is a series of increasingly better developments to the game as the years go on.

The very first thing you notice as you start up Nethack is the robust character creation. There's a very wide variety of character classes, from Tourist to Samurai. You can choose the name of your character, their gender, their race, and their alignment. If you even go into the text settings, you can even change the name of your pets that you get (most classes recieve a cat or dog, but one, the knight, gets a pony) or set it to always choose a particular set of characteristics to start each game with, circumventing the normal character creation process.

After choosing your class, race, gender, and alignment, you are tossed into the first level of the dungeon with slightly randomized equipment. The very first thing you will notice is that things appear fairly empty. Most of the game is exploration, not fighting. Finding secret doors, treasure chests, stairs, and the such is one of the most important parts of the game. The game is not about constant fighting, but rather managing fighting and exploration effectively so that you don't die, exhausted and hungry, to a rather nasty monster.

Fighting is accomplished extremely easily. Melee combat is done simply by moving into a monster you want to attack. Ranged combat can be done in several ways: casting spells, firing ranged weapons, and throwing other weapons. You can only do ranged combat in a straight line, so you have to line it up effectively. Combat takes into account the traditional elements, such as weapon, attributes, and AC. That's about all there is to it.

The game incorporates a lot of elements that most RPG games nowadays don't have. For example, you must eat to stay alive, so finding rations and consuming the bodies of defeated enemies is a very integral part of gameplay. Another element is praying to and pleasing your god. You can do this by performing charitable actions and sacrificing the corpses of monsters on altars of your alignment.

A major element of the game is identifying objects and monsters and figuring out what they do. You can either do this on your own, or by looking up spoilers (read: information necessary to live) on the internet. Things such as identifying whether items are cursed are vital to your survival in the game, and information on which wands do what and which monsters impart which status effects on you are awfully important as well. Knowledge is everything, and if you are ignorant, you will die.

Death in Nethack is permanent. When you die to anything, be it a trap, monster, or even a backfire from one of your own actions, the game scores you based on your inventory, stats, and location. This may seem frustrating at first, and if you look at the game as a single game to get through, you will rapidly lose interest. But Nethack is about more than that. It's about trial-and-error, in the best tradition of old arcade games. You will die, restart, and try a new strategy. It's just the way the game plays. So if that sort of thing bothers you, don't play Nethack. You'll get incredibly frustrated. If you can handle the meta-strategy though, it'll be great.

I've neglected your actual goal in this entire write-up. The fact of the matter is that the game really forces you to establish your own meta-goals. Stuff such as reaching a certain level of the dungeon, obtaining certain equipment, performing the one quest, or even completing the main goal of the game. The goal to end all goals, the actual goal of the game, is to go to the bottom of the dungeon, retrieve an amulet from an insane wizard, and
take it through the elemental planes to the altar of your god to ascend to demigod status. And be prepared to die on the way to completing this almighty taks. A lot. But it's a learning process.

For those interested in competitive sort of play, there's really only one way for you to do it. There's a fair bit of Nethack servers that you can connect to through telnet, and by playing on them, you can record your high scores into the overall leaderboards. Most of these run vanilla Nethack, as it's the simple and most balanced version. I personally recommend nethack.alt.org for your online needs. The pro to doing it this way is that you can play pretty much anywhere. The downside is that you can't use graphical interfaces. ASCII only!

There's not much else to say about Nethack. Its randomized, dungeon crawling gameplay will likely evoke memories of classics such as Diablo, and with good reason. As one of the most played and most influential computer RPGs of all time, bits of it show up in just about every RPG made for the PC. If you haven't played it, you are missing out on a vital part of gaming history. You can download the PC, Mac, and Linux versions of the game right here on Big Download!

For another look at freeware games, take a peek at Joystiq's Free Game Club weekly feature!