Tales of Maj'Eyal is a roguelike RPG, featuring tactical turn-based combat and advanced character building. Play as one of many unique races and classes in the lore-filled world of Eyal, exploring random dungeons, facing challenging battles, and developing characters with your own tailored mix of abilities and powers.
Reviews View More
Lowkey maybe my favorite roguelike. Certainly my favorite 'classical' roguelike.
I think ToME is my most played game of all time. It's an excellent roguelike with a huge variety of character options. The game is certainly overlong, and random spikes of difficulty can be frustrating, though both issues are mitigated by the default mode allowing for multiple lives. I don't play it much these days since it can really chew through time, but I'm sure I'll be back when the upcoming DLC finally releases. Well, if it does.
Hard to get into, insanely fun if you manage to, first game I've played where the sfx for casting lightning bolt literally just sounds like a shotgun.
The standard difficulty is a tiny bit on the easy side compared to other roguelikes, and the skills being cooldown makes this pretty good for a newbie. Dungeons are a bit dull in gameplay though, even if cool in concept.
Tales of Maj'Eyal plays like a standard roguelike with the addition of an impressive number of build options and a vaguely open world for you to explore. Some of it works, and some of it doesn't, but it is a very interesting entry in the genre that has been better every time I have tried it.
Besides the regular roguelike stuff, there are quite a few quality of life advancements here -- ToME eschews some of the things that I would call antiquated like randomized potions and scrolls, for instance. Other systems are obviated after a couple of plays with items that automatically identify everything for you, automatically destroy items for money, and let you warp out of dungeons easily. This stuff is welcome, but it feels like those systems should have just been removed outright.
ToME does have some UX problems that get in the way, however, with tons of menu and stat gore that make things generally difficult to easily understand and make equipment and abilities hard to compare. It is unfortunate since other modern roguelikes like Brogue and Cogmind have done a ton to move the genre forward in ways that ToME misses.
I like the build options, even though things can be a bit obtuse and the number of things to choose from is a bit overwhelming. Your character is just a set of skill trees defined by your race and class choices which works well as an interesting, modular way to build characters in a game like this. I did find myself tending down the same paths for any given class, but there are enough possible characters you could build that it doesn't really matter at all.
I really liked unlocking new classes and seeing what they have to offer. There is a lot of creativity on display here from straightforward melee classes of various flavors to ranged attackers, magic users, summoners, and mages who use possession. No other roguelike I have played has quite this variety in character options that can fundamentally change gameplay to this degree. The flipside of this is that many of the classes can play pretty poorly. The aforementioned summoner and possessor seem cool, but I found the actual mechanics to be clunky and dissatisfying.
ToME is an open world, but is heavily gated by level ranges you are sort of intended to find by trial and error, I guess. You can wander the (static, predefined) overworld and find your way into (predefined) dungeons that are procedurally generated at a specific difficulty level. Going into a dungeon that is too tough for you will almost always just result in near instant death. Because of this, despite the world being ostensibly open, things end up very linear. It is unfortunate, since you can see a lot of potential in a game like this with a generated open world layout or simply more options for where to go at any given time.
This is ultimately what has made me shelve the game both times, since even though the builds feel unique, what I am doing in the world feels repetitive and boring.
This is a cool roguelike to mess around with and worth trying out if you are a fan of the genre. I bounce pretty hard off the world/level design aspects, but find myself wanting to return just to explore the classes and unlocks and I haven't really even tried the expansions.
Tales of Maj'Eyal has only gotten better over time, so I hope dark7god continues to add cool things to this project.
Besides the regular roguelike stuff, there are quite a few quality of life advancements here -- ToME eschews some of the things that I would call antiquated like randomized potions and scrolls, for instance. Other systems are obviated after a couple of plays with items that automatically identify everything for you, automatically destroy items for money, and let you warp out of dungeons easily. This stuff is welcome, but it feels like those systems should have just been removed outright.
ToME does have some UX problems that get in the way, however, with tons of menu and stat gore that make things generally difficult to easily understand and make equipment and abilities hard to compare. It is unfortunate since other modern roguelikes like Brogue and Cogmind have done a ton to move the genre forward in ways that ToME misses.
I like the build options, even though things can be a bit obtuse and the number of things to choose from is a bit overwhelming. Your character is just a set of skill trees defined by your race and class choices which works well as an interesting, modular way to build characters in a game like this. I did find myself tending down the same paths for any given class, but there are enough possible characters you could build that it doesn't really matter at all.
I really liked unlocking new classes and seeing what they have to offer. There is a lot of creativity on display here from straightforward melee classes of various flavors to ranged attackers, magic users, summoners, and mages who use possession. No other roguelike I have played has quite this variety in character options that can fundamentally change gameplay to this degree. The flipside of this is that many of the classes can play pretty poorly. The aforementioned summoner and possessor seem cool, but I found the actual mechanics to be clunky and dissatisfying.
ToME is an open world, but is heavily gated by level ranges you are sort of intended to find by trial and error, I guess. You can wander the (static, predefined) overworld and find your way into (predefined) dungeons that are procedurally generated at a specific difficulty level. Going into a dungeon that is too tough for you will almost always just result in near instant death. Because of this, despite the world being ostensibly open, things end up very linear. It is unfortunate, since you can see a lot of potential in a game like this with a generated open world layout or simply more options for where to go at any given time.
This is ultimately what has made me shelve the game both times, since even though the builds feel unique, what I am doing in the world feels repetitive and boring.
This is a cool roguelike to mess around with and worth trying out if you are a fan of the genre. I bounce pretty hard off the world/level design aspects, but find myself wanting to return just to explore the classes and unlocks and I haven't really even tried the expansions.
Tales of Maj'Eyal has only gotten better over time, so I hope dark7god continues to add cool things to this project.
Insane build possibilities.