There's a fine line between being a jolly prankster and being a jackass.

Back in college, my friends would fill enemy dorm lounges with weird, alien-looking seed pods, or write out cryptic messages in the snow in giant letters. Jolly prankster stuff that people can enjoy once they're done being confused.

Then there was jackass stuff, like burying a car in snow, then pouring water over the snow in winter weather to make the car into an impenetrable glacier. Or, simpler than that, chucking an apple at a friend's head while he was playing Smash Bros. No fun comes of this. No joy. Only sobbing, you jackass.

Ancient Domains of Mystery is a jackass, plain and simple. Fortunately, it is also an established, respected, and widely beloved roguelike, and for good reason. You arrive at a valley in a fantasy world, a place where terrible corruption forces are twisting reality and mutating all who live there into violent and hideous monsters. Go on in there and sort matters out however you see fit. Solid story, at least by the roguelike genre's standards, no?

You start things off by building a character from a very wide set of starting options. Once you've made your Lawful Hero / Neutral Tourist / Chaotic Murderer, you go out into the valley, exploring dungeons for loot and gathering experience, all so that you can successfully journey to the bottom of the Caverns of Chaos. Gameplay is interesting enough, introducing a number of unique and peculiar systems that take some research to really master. And boy oh boy is this game willing to put you through a lot of opportunities for research.

Expect to die often. While there are some character builds that are better or worse than others, pretty much any build suffers a bit from the fact that at low levels, the RNG just sometimes throws impossible challenges at you. But that's okay; as you play and learn, you can do things to reduce the risk. You find out which dungeons are safe to explore and which are basically guaranteed death. You learn just how important movement speed is and ways to boost it so you can flee from dangerous enemies. You find guaranteed stores that offer useful equipment and free identification of some of the game's scrolls and potions so you don't have to risk using them blindly. You can and will make progress, and it is rewarding.

But the game never stops throwing twists at you. New enemies will appear with instant-death attacks. Got petrification immunity? No? Sucks to be you. Or monsters with attacks that age your orc boy a century in a single hit, causing you to die of old age without warning. By the time you're reaching this late game content, you've put a lot of hours into your character. It hurts to lose them. But hey, that's the nature of roguelikes - no one ever said they had to be fair!

...But at the same time, they also don't have to be jackasses. And at the end of the day, that's what I come away from ADoM annoyed about; there are just too many jackass moves. Whether I'm frantically searching the valley for an ultra-rare "Amulet of Life Saving" so I can complete a quest the secret right way or screaming at the monitor because I'm being forced to fight a tiger in the arena, there's just so much the game does that feels arbitrarily cruel. Even so, the world is surprisingly rich, the writing fun, the wish engine builds delightfully broken. So long as you have many hours to kill and no need to 100% the Steam achievements, Ancient Domains of Mystery is still a game I'm glad I've spent the time on.