Elin
The free roguelike-adjacent game Elona occupies so much of my wheelhouse that I kind of regret not being able to recommend it in good conscience. It combines tense crawls through random dungeons and fiddly character-building with a fixed overworld and town interactions pretty clearly inspired by the 90s Ultima games. You can build a house, even. It's also afflicted with the ambient body odor of 00s conservative anime otaku "humor." Whether the slurs in the random name tables are a quirk of translation or entirely deliberate, the maintainers of the English patch for the active fork of the game haven't seen fit to remove them 18 years later, so if you want to avoid being jumpscared by a legendary slur weapon at the bottom of a dungeon, you have to edit the relevant spreadsheet yourself. You can technically play a trans character, but it's presented as a joke option, subject to an understanding of gender consistent with a mediocre shounen comedy manga from about 2002. And while I'm pretty good at ignoring some of the weirder tangents of otaku fetish stuff at this point, that's in there too.
I'm sorry but not that surprised to have to report that Elin, the long-awaited sequel to Elona, is likewise impossible to recommend. The alias spreadsheet is functionally the same, except this time you have to pay for the privilege of looking at randomly-generated ableist language. This being the case, I have no interest in shilling for it, so I guess it's fortunate that it's also a downgrade mechanically--the things I like about Elona are mostly in there in some form, but now they're buried under a tedious survival/crafting layer that exacerbates the common RPG problem of a disproportionately hard early game. With Caves of Qud 1.0 around the corner and Dwarf Fort adventure mode coming along, there are better ways to spend your time.
