1Quest is a short roguelike that seems to have gone unappreciated. It’s one of my favorite examples of this style done well, but player reviews in the places I’ve checked seem to be really harsh. I can’t understand it. The game really delivers the roguelike experience to a greater degree than I expect in something of this scope, with an involved skills and magic system, a good variety of loot, and the facilitation of the kind of environmental survival techniques that I expect in every roguelike but don’t always see – by that I mean the ability, and often necessity, to use traps and water and other environmental features to your advantage.

It’s difficult, but difficulty is a necessary part of the roguelike experience. In fact, 1Quest has a clever innovation in this respect: the princess and eight other children have been captured and your quest is to rescue them. Ideally all of them, but some is better than none. Unlike most rogulikes, failure doesn’t mean death for you but rather death for one of the children. How’s that for motivation? It allows you to keep going, it means you don’t lose everything when you make a mistake, but there’s a pretty strong incentive to try again until you get it right. There are also multiple paths to take on your journey, changing it up a little to keep things interesting, multiple spell schools which are (sort of) mutually exclusive and multiple weapons skills, all to ensure there’s some variety from game to game.

As you’d anticipate from a flash game, it’s short compared to the big names of the genre, Nethack, ADOM, etc., though roguelikes are unusual in that it’s free games which are the big headliner titles. Commercial roguelikes are always smaller in scope. Compared to its peers though, 1Quest really delivers a lot which will be familiar to roguelike veterans – managing to fit just about everything that you’d expect from a roguelike into its small package. (Seriously, a lot of these games don’t even let you move diagonally. It’s annoying.)

There’s several versions of this available: a free online version, another commercial version available from several sources (that’s three links), and a commercial Android version. As near as I can tell there aren’t any differences between the free version and the commercial one, though I will point out two things: flash cookies are an awful way to store data, so if you find yourself playing this a lot you might consider paying some money just to ensure that your records and saves don’t disappear. Second, it’s not a lot of money and this person hasn’t gotten either the praise or the livelihood that they deserved from this game.

Finally, I’m going to link to the dev’s blog, just because it seems polite. Maybe you all love the game so much that you want to keep abreast of anything new that the dev might be up to.