LARN is one of the oldest Roguelikes, having been originally released in 1986. Like most older games of the genre, ASCII characters represent the various objects in the game, and a whole slew of keyboard commands are used to control the game. The story here is that you are trying to collect a magical cure to your daughter’s ailment. To do so, you must navigate the dungeons (two of them in total), collecting items and treasure on the way. You begin in a town / outdoors area with shops and the dungeon entrances. Supposedly LARN is shorter than a lot of other similar games, and unlike other Roguelikes such as Nethack, LARN can be completed in a single shorter playthrough. Make sure you enable the “keypad” option in LARN.OPT to enable use of the numeric keypad, which by the way you will need if you want to move around efficiently!
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