Winner of the Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2010: T.o.M.E. 4

I had written an obituary for ToME as a part of an article on how uncontrolled ambitions of developing a roguelike can ultimately cause the game to fall apart. Then there is the received wisdom that you should never ever rewrite your game from scratch, because you throw away all the learned knowledge embodied in the old code base. Then there are the design problems inherent in trying to build both a game engine, and an implementation of that engine, from an old code base which ultimately bogged down and halted development of ToME 3.0.

But DarkGod is irrepressible: with the words 'The board is set, the pieces are moving.' he unleashed the 3rd major iteration of a game that started as a variant of Zangband called PernAngband, changed its setting twice (to Middle Earth, and now a whole new fantasy world), but keeping his fans and development team intact and excited about his vision.

ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal to give its relatively new full name consists of a fantasy world designed from the ground up, but also a Lua based OpenGL game engine called T-Engine 4 that you can develop your own unique roguelike for. While the engine is in the early days of adoption, based on the number of roguelikes built on the earlier ToME engine versions, there will be plenty of modules coming out soon.

You can download ToME here and visit the forums and read the wiki here.