Tales of Maj'Eyal is a roguelike RPG, featuring tactical turn-based combat and advanced character building.
Truth be told, I hadn't really touched the game until the developers emailed it in, so these thoughts are based on my first few attempts at it. The game is open source, but you can donate at the official website, or buy it on Steam and you get extra's for doing so. It's a nice way to get money to continue developing I think.
You can see the rather big changelog for 1.3 here, and it's full of little goodies, and I did enjoy it a lot more than when I briefly tried it around a year ago.
About the game (Official)
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.
With a modern graphical and customisable interface, intuitive mouse control, streamlined mechanics and deep, challenging combat, online stats and character sheets, Tales of Maj’Eyal offers engaging roguelike gameplay for the 21st century.
Some thoughts
The Linux port seems mostly solid, but the game has been around for quite a while, so I'm really not surprised by this! Everything bar the Steam thing below works fine, including Alt+Tab, woo!
The Steam Login button seems a bit buggy, as I told it to login with Steam, picked my email, but it claimed I was already registered, and after that the button seems to just do nothing now. So, I guess right now I don't get any of the extra goodies.
I like that it has a few different races each with sub races that all have different stats, but wow is that overwhelming at the start to have so much choice! I decided to go with an elven mage, so I appropriately chose a sub race with magic additions!
The first screen in the game is a bit confusing, as you're choosing your initial stats, and spells with your starting points, but there seems to be no accept button, or save, so it seems you need to hit ESC to finish (details people, come on!).
After starting I was greeted by a nice little intro about the race I chose being despised for creating something called "Spellblaze", so I imagine I'm going to have a bit of a rough time here...
I highly suggest doing the tutorial (I did it after my first run, and boy does it explain a lot you need to know to enjoy it fully), as there's a lot of different little things to get to grips with, and due to me skipping it I was left confused rather a lot at the start, but it was still fun enough to not need the tutorial for the majority of the games exploration. Learning the hot keys that the tutorial notifies you about makes the game much more fun!
While exploring the cave I started in, I did find a few research journals from a previous explorer, and started to learn a bit about the lore which was quite interesting. I hope there are more research journals to find!
I carried on my aimless exploring, and after reaching the third level in my starting cave, I ran dry of gems to bring back my dead Golem. R.I.P Golem, as I'm not sure how to replenish my gems just yet, so I can no longer revive him. Eventually I was killed by a Thief when not paying attention to my health, and since I didn't choose permadeath I was greeted by some sort of spiritual being who gave me a few options, like spawning somewhere else, and that was a pretty nice touch.
Final Verdict: It's quite interesting, and there's a lot of content and replayability here, so if you like your roguelikes it's probably a no brainer! Personally, I prefer a game with a more clearly laid out story, but I understand this is not what a roguelike is generally for, so the game doesn't completely appeal to me personally, but it's still quite good.
You can grab it (and donate if you wish) from their website, or just buy it on Steam where it's on sale and support them that way.