HyperRogue

About the game

HyperRogue looks like a classic roguelike: a lone adventurer, a map of cells, monsters that move when you move, treasure everywhere. The difference is the floor. The game is played on a hyperbolic plane, a surface where space opens up faster the further you go. Every cell has more room around it than flat geometry would allow, so the world fans out like the branches of a tree.

That changes everything. Walk a few steps in a straight line and the place you left is almost impossible to find again, unless you retrace the exact same path. Two monsters that start side by side drift apart quickly when they take different routes. Large walls run in perfectly straight lines forever, and the lands they separate are each their own world, with their own treasure, monsters and rules.

The rules themselves are short. You kill most monsters by stepping into them, and a monster next to you at the end of your turn kills you, so the game simply refuses any move that would get you killed on the spot. Every treasure you pick up attracts more monsters from that land. Collect enough and new lands open up; collect even more and you may reach Hell, where the Orbs of Yendor are hidden. Sooner or later you will be surrounded, and the run ends with your score recorded.

Zeno Rogue released the first version in 2011 and has kept expanding it ever since: there are now dozens of lands, each built around its own idea, from ice that melts as you pass to mirrors that conjure copies of you.

Playing it here

This is HyperRogue 13.1o, compiled for the browser from the official source code. Click Play now: the download is about 2.5 MB. The start menu calls it an "online demo", but it is the complete game. This build has no music or sound effects and is in English only; the shoot-'em-up mode of the desktop version is not included.

Your settings, scores and saved game stay in this browser. A run in progress is only kept if you quit properly (F10, or the quit option on the Esc screen) while you hold a powered Orb of Safety; quitting without one ends the run and records your score. Closing the tab without quitting loses the current run.

Some help screens link to the game's wiki and website. Those links only open, in a new tab, if you click them.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Read before you step. Hover over any monster, wall or item to see what it is, and right-click for the full description. Every land has its own rules, and the help text explains them better than trial and error.

Treasure is the clock. Each treasure you carry makes its land more crowded. When a land starts to feel dangerous, leave it and gather treasure somewhere else: the monsters only care about their own land's treasure.

Watch the totals. Around 30 treasures in total opens new lands, 60 opens more. Hell needs 10 treasures each from nine different lands. The Esc screen always tells you what the next goal is.

Orbs are the real power. Once you have collected enough of a land's treasure, magical orbs start to appear, each with a one-time or temporary ability. The Orb of Safety, found in the Land of Eternal Motion, both rescues you from a bad spot and lets you save the game.

Do not panic when cornered. The game will not let you walk into an instant death, so if a move is refused, look for the monster you missed.

Curious about the geometry? The start menu has a guided tour, "learn about hyperbolic geometry", that shows what makes this world different.

Credits and licence

HyperRogue was created by Zeno Rogue (Eryk Kopczyński), who wrote its design, code, texts and graphics, with bug reports, ports and other help from a long list of contributors named in the game's credits screen. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. The licence text and the complete source code of this build are linked from this page. Official site: roguetemple.com/z/hyper.