// PC GAMER — GAMING
My new favourite Tolkien game is free, has over 40 years of history, and would run on a toaster
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
One of the beautiful things about the PC—about open, general-use computing on the whole—is that you might, at any point, stumble across a GitHub repo that contains its own small civilisation. You'll find some hoary app or game that has lived a thousand lives before you ever became aware of it, that one magical lunatic, or team thereof, has been working on in their off-hours since the year still started with a one. They have communities, traditions, in-jokes, histories. They are worlds.
Sometimes, worlds that live within other worlds, as is the case with Sil-Q, a free-and-open-source take on Rogue (as in Rogue, the 'Rogue' in 'Roguelike') that extricates the action from an anonymous dungeon and transplants it into Tolkien's First Age of Arda: the setting of much of The Silmarillion.
Taken by itself, Sil-Q is not actually that old. Its first release only took place in 2017, but its ancestry, fittingly, stretches back a lot further. Sil-Q is a continuation of Sil, which released in 2012 and ceased development in the mid-2010s. Sil is based on Angband, which first came out in 1993 and which is still under active development today. Angband, meanwhile, derives from 1983's Moria—also still going, heroically.
Some or all of which you might already know, given that Moria was an influence on Diablo 1 namechecked by David Breivik himself, but it was new to me when I discovered Sil-Q on my weekly quest for reasons not to play videogames that came out this year.
Angband was sprawling—a hodgepodge of fantasy concepts in the Dungeons and Dragons mould, with a Tolkienian underpinning. Your goal was eventually to kill Morgoth, the legendarium's first and worst dark lord. This was not, strictly speaking, lore-friendly. In the history of Arda, Morgoth was never slain, but rather permanently kicked out of the party—banished from the world until the Battle of All Battles.
It's also just, you know, kind of at-odds with the general vibe of Tolkien's world. Sauron was not defeated because Frodo powerlevelled hard enough to stab him to death.
So Sil and its descendent take Angband's general gameplay, the Rogueness of it all, and tighten the corset around its fidelity to the setting. Its enemies are all ripped from Tolkien's pages. You can no longer play as races like kobold, or as classes like mage and druid. Instead, you choose between the Noldor (cool elves), Sindar (slightly less cool elves), Naugrim (an elvish borderline slur for dwarves, which seems rude), or the Edain (men, who suck).
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