It’s been a while since I posted a free game, so I thought I’d mention the game that is largely responsible for inspiring Caverns of Underkeep

That game is Castle of the Winds - A graphical roguelike made by Rick Saada and published in 1989! That’s right, the game is nearly 20 years old, and guess what? It’s still fun and playable today.

Many roguelikes are complicated affairs with esoteric shortcut keys and a level of depth that can be hard for the newbie to fully grasp. Castle of the Winds (to my knowledge) was the first roguelike that bucked the trend in this regard and employed the new (at the time) windows 3.x interface to allow easier inventory management and provided buttons (as well as shortcut keys) to streamline the gameplay experience.

Castle of the Winds is a dungeon crawl at heart, there’s somekind of plot, but I forget what it is - Something about some bad guy doing bad or something?

You can get the full version of Castle of the Winds 1 and 2 from Rick Saada’s website

Additional Links

Read more about Castle of the Winds at Wikipedia

Read a 2007 interview with Rick Saada at Gamasutra