Legerdemain: A Tale Fraught with Peril and Wonder is a interesting unique roguelike project under development.
Confused and memory-less, you wake up at a morbid prison cell, where are you? who are you? in time you will discover, exploring prisons, dungeons and a very detailed overworld.
Legerdemain is an epic adventure within the hallucinogenic realm of Phenomedom. You assume the role of an imprisoned dissenter seeking to learn the nature of your captivity. In doing so you shall uncover a vast conspiracy full of morbid secrets and ancient puzzles. Only by enlisting the aid of allies past and unearthing the remains of ancient cultures can you hope to solve the mystery of Legerdemain.
Focus of legerdemain is on story, along the game you will be collecting “paragraphs”, you can also check the local lore everytime to know where you are. The game is pretty detailed and complex, featuring backpack management, wounds, detailed environments and items, and anovel spell casting system (rituals)
While it is still being developed, it already contains an interesting world you can travel in and discover different places, cities and towns. You can also chat with the population in a much more depth fashion than in most roguelikes.
On the tech side, the game is written in Java and can be run via Java Web Start which is interesting. The game makes use of an emulated console and lots of unicode characters, yet another unusual thing for a roguelike.
I was glad to hear from Nathan Jerpe, creator of the game, that the project was being put back into production; this roguelike-IF hybrid will sure give more to talk within the next months.
Visit the official website for further info and downloads