If my play time doesn't make it obvious, this is one of my favorite video games of all time. Tales of Maj'Eyal takes the traditional roguelike structure to its very limits, and the result is nigh-infinitely replayable. On the surface, ToME may seem unassuming. It's a top-down turn-based RPG where death is (usually) permanent. But ToME is focused on creating a character build, managing skill cooldowns, and the chaos of leaving most everything else up to procedural generation.

There are a great many character classes to choose from, many of which have to be unlocked. Most of the starting classes are fairly easy to understand, standard Berserkers and Archers and such, but ideas quickly become utterly buckwild, like the Oozemancer or the Solipsist. Many come with different resources to manage, such as the Cursed's Hate (spent like a casting cost to their skills, but many of their skills and also all healing they receive are more effective with more Hate saved up) or the Paradox Mage's, well, Paradox (the more you use it, the higher it gets, the stronger your spells get--but the higher the chances of causing anomalies in spacetime). Each class has several skill trees and each skill can have up to five points put in it. Some trees are locked and require "category points" to unlock them and use the skills within, but category points are very few and far between. There are many ways to build and play each class, but it's not just the class itself.

Each race gets its own exclusive skill tree (except the Cornac, the "versatile human" archetype, which gains a free category point instead). Dwarves gain resilience against enemy melee attacks and debuffs, Shaloren elves can hasten themselves and their skill cooldowns, Ogres are so huge that they can wield 2-handed weapons in one hand, the list goes on. There are no healing potions or other such consumables in ToME; instead, there are "inscriptions", sort of tattoos imbued with power. These are often simple but very useful skills, like heals over time, instant heals, or debuff cleanses. Characters start with 3 slots for these inscriptions, and you can unlock extra slots with category points instead of unlocking skill trees if you like.

Using the additional choices conferred by race and inscriptions allows you to tweak a character class even more. If you're a mage and often find your spells sealed by the Silence debuff, you can choose the Yeek race for passive silence immunity, or carry a "wild infusion", a debuff cleansing inscription powered by nature and thus still usable while silenced. The majority of the Anorithil's spells are centered on the caster themself, so you may want the additional mobility a Shaloren or Doomelf character gets to more easily plant yourself in ideal epicenters--but Anorithil also want to land lots of critical hits, and Halflings can boost their crit rate and shake off debuffs that would impair their movement. The interplay of all of these choices allows you to tackle the game in just about any way you like.

ToME is a very easy game to learn, plan, and play. When investing skill points in the level-up menu, you're shown exactly what will and won't change. Skills and weapons will tell you what stats you need to invest in to make them more effective. You can pull up any character's info sheet just as easily as you can your own, and see all their talents and what they do. Tooltips will even update the projected damage output of a spell while under a buff that would increase it (or a debuff that would decrease it). I mentioned how consumables are supplanted here by infinite-use skills gained from inscriptions, but two items you get very early on are the Rod of Recall and the Chest of Transmogrification. The Rod takes you out of the dungeon you're in and right back to the world map, great for exiting a completed dungeon or escaping the most dire of straits. The Chest transforms unwanted items into gold, effectively the same as selling them, but without having to go to a merchant in a town every time, so you can pick up everything you see and quickly mulch whatever you don't want. The UI can be arranged and zoomed however you like, and every single key can be remapped. Hell, ToME's info says controllers aren't supported, but if you wanted to use a Steam controller profile to map keyboard keys to a Shiren the Wanderer-esque setup, it's certainly possible. ToME is a standout in the genre for just how snappy, informative, and accommodating it is.

And you'll need it. ToME's campaign is long. Not permadying is not a question of managing hunger or some such thing, but of being Put In Situations and finding ways out of them. No matter how tanky your build is, you will need an escape plan at some point to kite dangerous foes into bottlenecks and ambushes, or flee them altogether. Is that a movement infusion to boost your speed? (Hope you don't get surrounded!) Or is it a blink rune to teleport precisely? (Hope you don't get silenced!) The myriad combinations of class, race, and inscription skills the player can set up are insane enough, but then enemies can get them too. The higher the difficulty you select, the more "rare" enemies you'll find, which grants them the same classes and skill trees the player can choose from. Movement infusions are great and all, but Cursed and Wyrmic enemies can boost their own move speeds too. This adds yet another level of interplay, of complexity, of either learning the ins and outs of all the classes or getting in the habit of inspecting enemies closely before you make your move. Finding a rare enemy can change your gameplan drastically--much less finding two, or three, or more bunched up near one another.

The story of ToME and its world is mostly told in pieces. One of the categories of random loot is "lore", which are big text files. Most dungeons have a sequence of lore that follows a previous adventurer through that dungeon--often directly into the maw of the boss at the end. Some lore adds flavor to the wider world--granting a glimpse into its storied past, illustrating the depths the anti-magic hit squads of the Ziguranth will stoop to, and so on. There isn't really an overarching plot you're a part of; more often than not, you're told your character merely seeks treasure and glory--that is, until the loot you happen to purloin at the end of the Dreadfell catacombs just so happens to be terribly important. You can choose to join the Ziguranth yourself, but while this gives your character even more skill trees (in exchange for swearing off all magical powers and items forever), it doesn't open an alternate plotline or anything of that sort. There are definitely a lot of interesting events and characters, but these are spread out over ages of history, and you the character see almost none of them. All story information is depicted via text, which can be skipped through easily, and the lore notes can be set to, like, not pop up its text onscreen if you've already seen it in another run. The story is the least involved aspect of ToME, but then that makes this the one piece of roguelike convention ToME follows most closely--the plot is an excuse to get you to kill things.

Tales of Maj'Eyal is fantastic. It's hard to convey with words alone just how wondrous the process is, of finding a class you like, choosing a race and inscriptions and gear to complement its strengths or shore up its weaknesses, and seeing that click in the form of beating down all who would oppose you (even if they're rare monsters who have the same class as you). It's fun to experiment, and share your results with the ingame chat or the online character sheets. I've already won once with each class and with each race--but what about each class as each race, know what I mean? I plan on trying just about every permutation of race and class ToME has, because I like the game that much.