Rogue

Rogue is a pretty special one, it's the game all those other ones are like. It certainly wasn't the first game to employ the now-iconic formula of procedurally generated dungeons with random items and monsters strewn about, above-average mechanical complexity, and permadeath, but it was the most iconic, as evidenced by the fact that it's the game the iconic RPG subgenre would go on to be named after due to its outsized influence on later attempts. This is another one I've played before; I picked up the steam version for something like 3 bucks a while back as part of an old-school RPG study project. This version consists of a standalone DOSbox package which'll run easily and smoothly with one click.

I was surprised at the time by the breeziness of this game, and that hasn't really changed. While it is relatively mechanically complex compared to its contemporaries in the PC RPG space, it's still pretty simple by modern standards. You can move in 8 directions, pick up and equip, drink, or otherwise use various armor, weapons, scrolls, potions, and wands or staves, and also throw anything you happen to have in your inventory in any direction. You can also collect and eat food, and if you're making sure to explore you'll usually have some whenever you need it. (Interestingly, you can't technically starve to death in this game; if you get too hungry, you acquire a "weak" status effect which will make you randomly pass out from hunger, and it's the vulnerability of having this happen around enemies that will ultimately end your run.) That's mostly it, outside of some niche utility functions like a "wait" button that lets you skip a turn (or hold it down to rest until healed, but watch out for wandering monsters) and a "search" function which you'll sometimes need to use to find hidden doors in order to progress. All the magical items like scrolls, potions, and wands will have their actual utility hidden until you've tried them out (or used a scroll of identify if you have it) so you get the really exciting "swallow this and hope it doesn't kill me" dynamic you'd later see in stuff like The Binding of Isaac's pills. The same even applies to armor, which won't show you its functional AC until you either identify it or put it on, and the latter is particularly dangerous as it may be cursed, stopping you from taking it off and forcing you to stick with a potentially bad option. This can be particularly galling if you then go on to fight an Aquator and get your unremovable cursed armor further degraded.

Speaking of the Aquator, several of this game's 26 enemies (one for each letter in the roman alphabet) have pretty brutal special abilities. As previously mentioned, the Aquator can degrade your armor, permanently lowering its AC. Rattlesnakes can permanently lower your strength with their venom, and Ice Monsters can hit you with a freeze ray which temporarily immobilizes you. Slimes can split into multiples of themselves and mob you, and as far as I can tell this doesn't seem to even weaken them like it does in a lot of games. All of this on top of the fact that all these enemies can also just hit you to whittle down your health, and some, like the Trolls, are particularly strong and dangerous on this front. Combat mostly comes down to standing toe to toe with an enemy and hammering on each other, outside of some limited ranged options, and you're both beholden to the almighty random number generator to determine your success in combat, just like the dungeon itself and the tools and hazards within it will depend on the providence of the procedural generation.

All of this melds together into an almost slot-machine-esque experience; There's actually fairly little you can do to meaningfully increase your chances in a lot of cases (especially since enemies move as fast as you do, so it's difficult to meaningfully escape combat without some way of immobilizing them, which you may very well never receive) and what is available in the way of optimal strategies is so simple you can generally do it on autopilot. There's even a "fast movement" key which will allow you to automatically move in one direction until you hit a wall or come across something you may want to interact with. Combine this with the permadeath, and you have a nominal RPG which feels more like an arcade game in terms of its overall play dynamics, and actually slots in very well alongside classic time wasters that would arrive on the PC gaming scene years later, like Solitaire and Minesweeper. I get the impression the designers were aware of this too, the game sets F10 as a dedicated "Supervisor Mode" key which will pull up a fake DOS prompt to make it look like you're working, not playing a game. It's certainly not a deeply engaging set of complex mechanics, but it does hit a particular balance of breezy interactivity that makes it perfect for stimming while you listen to a podcast or something, or just killing small chunks of time that won't allow you to squeeze in a proper session of something more in-depth. The game is just really charming and likable, and easy to come back to whenever the mood strikes. It's easy to see why this would go on to influence an entire expansive subgenre.