Thomas Biskup, the developer of ADOM, has just released “Grog”, a small and very traditional roguelike he has been developing on and off during the last years. Here’s the first-ever recorded gameplay of it; it’s a traditional roguelike to the bone, with some legit intense moments of despair, a rollercoaster of emotions.

Grog was born in 2018, Thomas was inspired to create it while playing rogue and some other very traditional roguelikes during the Roguelike celebration in San Francisco. We were using real terminals connecting to a PDP-11. He fell in love with the charming simplicity of these games.

Thomas started working on the game at his hotel, after the event, just trying to see how much of his idea of a game carrying the “simplicity and purity” of these games could be done on it for 7 days.

After this initial push, I believe he went on to all the work in Ultimate ADOM and his many other occupations; it wasn’t until next year’s roguelikecel that he let me know there had been some progress on it, and he even intended to release a version of it before the event started.

It was only until early 2022 that development was resumed. All the core aspects he set to do from the beginning are present in the current version: a small level count with a couple new monsters and a kind of special feature introduced on each.

From the beginning, this was a project that was meant to be more relaxed (and personal!) than the development of ADOM and uADOM. I hope you can enjoy it… get it now at https://roguelike.games/grog/ 🙂