Every good roguelike requires at least one weapon that balances being powerful with being ornery and terrible to use

Me wishing for Grayswandir on a chaotic character in Nethack

SLASH’EM Extended is the deepest, lowest, most darksided part of the Nethack iceberg. You shouldn’t touch it.

This is a sprawling 11-year-old fork of the Nethack fork SLASH’EM, with a seemingly impossible amount of new content. It is developed by someone who is, in my honest opinion, literally insane and not in a ha-ha way. To give you an idea, there are well over 30,000 new monsters alone. There’s so much stuff here that it is pretty much “unlearnable” and violates the core gameplay tenets of Nethack where you win by building a knowledge base and then executing a game plan based on that. It’s like a nightmare, it’s incredibly difficult to get better because you’re never going to see the same thing twice and around every corner there’s a new obstacle with completely unique mechanics that you’ve never encountered before and probably never will again.

It’s also profoundly offensive and inappropriate. There is so much shit in here that legitimately disgusts me. Some people postulate that certain elements would render the game illegal in some countries, which is pretty impressive for a game with ASCII only. I don’t think these people are off base— I literally don’t want to elaborate on this content because I’m uncomfortable talking about it in any context. It’s really that bad; it is someone vomiting the worst obsessions and paraphilias in their head into a Nethack fork. The unbelievable scale of the game combined with how genuinely foul and bizarre it is make it fascinating to experience if you have a strong enough stomach and can take a couple of steps back. I cannot fathom the amount of time and labor that went into creating something like this.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough that this game is sick crazy and not funny crazy. It is not made by a well person. If you are the sort of person who needs any kind of content warning— I do mean any kind at all— don’t even think about playing it. But despite everything I have enjoyed exploring it from time to time; it’s interesting as both an example of the traditional roguelike format pushed up to and then far past its breaking point, and as a tour of a mind I’m happy I don’t inhabit. Playing it gives me much the same feeling as one of my weirder childhood activities, where I’d pore over the text-wall websites of unmedicated schizophrenic men because I was so fascinated by their elaborate belief systems. I’m not glad it exists but if there ever was a place for this kind of thing it’s the internet.

Something called a “fox brother” hypnotized me and tried to dismember me with a bidenhander but was killed by my starting pet, a “kickboxing girl” (??), who beat him to death with a women’s flat-soled shoe and devoured his corpse. I learned a new spell called “unmemorize”, which allows me to forget my own spells. How useful!

The new Mahou Shojo class is actually pretty damn funny and is one of the glimmers of brilliance within this mess of a game. It’s a fragile and slow role which is extremely accomplished at spellcasting and apparently immune to the usual hunger penalties, with the major drawback that you must yell the names of your spells whenever you cast them, immediately alerting every monster in the vicinity to your presence.

I was having a great game and then I got afflicted with some kind of severe version of hallucination tagged as "XHal" which has lasted for hundreds of turns and is unaffected by the Cure Hallucination skill or prayer. I also appear to have some sort of persistent amnesia; I will forget the map layout every couple dozen turns, along with my identified items. I think I might be done for if this is actually permanent, this shit is borderline unplayable.

SLASH’EM Extended is the deepest, lowest, most darksided part of the Nethack iceberg. You shouldn’t touch it.

This is a sprawling 11-year-old fork of the Nethack fork SLASH’EM, with a seemingly impossible amount of new content. It is developed by someone who is, in my honest opinion, literally insane and not in a ha-ha way. To give you an idea, there are well over 30,000 new monsters alone. There’s so much stuff here that it is pretty much “unlearnable” and violates the core gameplay tenets of Nethack where you win by building a knowledge base and then executing a game plan based on that. It’s like a nightmare, it’s incredibly difficult to get better because you’re never going to see the same thing twice and around every corner there’s a new obstacle with completely unique mechanics that you’ve never encountered before and probably never will again.

It’s also profoundly offensive and inappropriate. There is so much shit in here that legitimately disgusts me. Some people postulate that certain elements would render the game illegal in some countries, which is pretty impressive for a game with ASCII only. I don’t think these people are off base— I literally don’t want to elaborate on this content because I’m uncomfortable talking about it in any context. It’s really that bad; it is someone vomiting the worst obsessions and paraphilias in their head into a Nethack fork. The unbelievable scale of the game combined with how genuinely foul and bizarre it is make it fascinating to experience if you have a strong enough stomach and can take a couple of steps back. I cannot fathom the amount of time and labor that went into creating something like this.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough that this game is sick crazy and not funny crazy. It is not made by a well person. If you are the sort of person who needs any kind of content warning— I do mean any kind at all— don’t even think about playing it. But despite everything I have enjoyed exploring it from time to time; it’s interesting as both an example of the traditional roguelike format pushed up to and then far past its breaking point, and as a tour of a mind I’m happy I don’t inhabit. Playing it gives me much the same feeling as one of my weirder childhood activities, where I’d pore over the text-wall websites of unmedicated schizophrenic men because I was so fascinated by their elaborate belief systems. I’m not glad it exists but if there ever was a place for this kind of thing it’s the internet.

Something called a “fox brother” hypnotized me and tried to dismember me with a bidenhander but was killed by my starting pet, a “kickboxing girl” (??), who beat him to death with a women’s flat-soled shoe and devoured his corpse. I learned a new spell called “unmemorize”, which allows me to forget my own spells. How useful!

The new Mahou Shojo class is actually pretty damn funny and is one of the glimmers of brilliance within this mess of a game. It’s a fragile and slow role which is extremely accomplished at spellcasting and apparently immune to the usual hunger penalties, with the major drawback that you must yell the names of your spells whenever you cast them, immediately alerting every monster in the vicinity to your presence.

SLASH’EM Extended is the deepest, lowest, most darksided part of the Nethack iceberg. You shouldn’t touch it.

This is a sprawling 11-year-old fork of the Nethack fork SLASH’EM, with a seemingly impossible amount of new content. It is developed by someone who is, in my honest opinion, literally insane and not in a ha-ha way. To give you an idea, there are well over 30,000 new monsters alone. There’s so much stuff here that it is pretty much “unlearnable” and violates the core gameplay tenets of Nethack where you win by building a knowledge base and then executing a game plan based on that. It’s like a nightmare, it’s incredibly difficult to get better because you’re never going to see the same thing twice and around every corner there’s a new obstacle with completely unique mechanics that you’ve never encountered before and probably never will again.

It’s also profoundly offensive and inappropriate. There is so much shit in here that legitimately disgusts me. Some people postulate that certain elements would render the game illegal in some countries, which is pretty impressive for a game with ASCII only. I don’t think these people are off base— I literally don’t want to elaborate on this content because I’m uncomfortable talking about it in any context. It’s really that bad; it is someone vomiting the worst obsessions and paraphilias in their head into a Nethack fork. The unbelievable scale of the game combined with how genuinely foul and bizarre it is make it fascinating to experience if you have a strong enough stomach and can take a couple of steps back. I cannot fathom the amount of time and labor that went into creating something like this.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough that this game is sick crazy and not funny crazy. It is not made by a well person. If you are the sort of person who needs any kind of content warning— I do mean any kind at all— don’t even think about playing it. But despite everything I have enjoyed exploring it from time to time; it’s interesting as both an example of the traditional roguelike format pushed up to and then far past its breaking point, and as a tour of a mind I’m happy I don’t inhabit. Playing it gives me much the same feeling as one of my weirder childhood activities, where I’d pore over the text-wall websites of unmedicated schizophrenic men because I was so fascinated by their elaborate belief systems. I’m not glad it exists but if there ever was a place for this kind of thing it’s the internet.