Tales of Maj'Eyal is released, despite being out for 109 years

I'm no paleontologist, but I'm fairly certain Tales of Maj'Eyal has been in development since the late roguozoic era, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth one tile at a time, and everyone ate lasers. Roguelikes seem more resistant to leave beta and declare themselves 'released' than any other genre I can think of, perhaps because they expect a sudden shanking upon emerging, blinking, into the overworld - not an unreasonable assumption, considering how many deaths they've been responsible for. And so it is that ToME leaves the beta dungeon and enters a, ahem, better one, leaving 1 million character deaths and 109 years of playtime in its wake . Man, someone shank it already.

ToME is one of the more major roguelikes available, with a fancy (optional) graphical front-end that my computer has never gotten along with for some reason. The game's open-source, and its T-Engine 4 is particularly mod-friendly, even if the user documentation is a bit sparse. It's one of the bigger, more complex roguelikes out there - you could probably get 109 years of play out of it all by yourself.

In truth, the game's 'release' status probably doesn't mean all that much - ToME will doubtless continue receiving regular updates - but it's a pleasure to see its ~14-year beta phase finally come to a close. Developer DarkGod isn't asking for any money for the game, but he is accepting donations to keep the project alive. You'll even get a few extra goodies by way of thanks.

[Thanks, Indie Statik! ]

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.