GnollHack

Can’t save my current file because of a message that comes up any time I try to save that says “trickery” and tels me “game over”

Pros: fun, excellent controls for a touchscreen, saves properly Cons: Addictive! An excellent variation on the venerable NetHack family, though compared to its predecessors it's significantly easier on Standard. I may have to put this away until I can succeed at the OG. It's also addictive, tempting me to stay up late on worknights and ignore my other projects! If I could, I'd rate this 4.5 stars, as the game did generate a level with no > and wouldn't let me leave by < or ^, but surprisingly I was able to recover a version pretty close to the corrupted level.

Nethack is one of my fav games of all time and this is a really great revision of this game.

First off: yup, neat nethack variant. Good graphics, some fun additional content. The sound is neat too. Don’t play it. Because here is what will happen. You will start a game in classic mode. And you’ll play for a while and then put down the phone, or switch out to the web browser, or whatever, and GnollHack doesn’t save when you do that. So when your phone needs a little more memory for the browser, it will kill GnollHack, and the next time you try to load that game it will say that it crashed and try to do an emergency restore. This will work. The first time. Even the fifth time. And then, when you’ve just found a really good weapon and a belt of fire giant strength and are ready to take on Ludos, it won’t work, and bang, your game is gone forever. So you’ll start a game in the “keep my last save around” mode, even though it isn’t eligible for achievements. And you will try to remember to save your game every time you switch apps on your phone. Or lock your phone. And mostly you’ll succeed, so you will only lose a few hours of play during your next run. And then you’ll have a character who is very nearly ready to go get the amulet, all spiffed up and everything. And that night the app will auto-update and the next day you’ll start it and it will say “sorry all your saved games are incompatible with this version here I will helpfully delete them for you.” This is a fun game that is well-suited to desktop play. It could be a great game on mobile too, but the dev responsible for this version of it refuses to put in the extra work necessary to make this a mobile game. As it is, it’s a rage-fest.

Great nethack variant for the iOS. Controls take some getting used to but do a great job once you do. All the classes and races you want and Gnolls! What more could you ask for?

This game is a fantastic iOS implementation of Nethack. It has easily the most playable, least clunky interface of any NH variant I’ve played, and I’ve played a lot of them. The graphics and animations look really good, and voice acting bits are a very nice touch. The gameplay includes all of the best core features from Nethack, and many of the rest of the features as well. I’m running it on a 6th generation iPad, and it does crash occasionally due to the older hardware, but I’m sure if I tweak the settings I can fix that. Even when it does crash, the recovery is very good with very little lost data. This is absolutely worth playing for any fan of traditional Roguelikes. 5 stars and an Amulet of Yendor.