Egoboo

An open source retro action RPG with some Roguelike elements. Developed by Aaron Bishop and later an open source developer team. The kingdom of Lorule is in distress, since the Dracolich abducted King Bishop, and various factions are trying to seize power. You play as some sort of hero, whose backstory and motivation differs by class, on a quest to gather all the Sporks of Yore (yes, you heard that right) so they can enter the lair of the Dracolich, slay him and save the king. Yeah, the plot isn't this game's focus.

Egoboo contains a load of different items and monsters that can interact in many ways, characters that support different playstyles, and there's usually more than one solution (or bypass) to each puzzle. Gameplay is mainly about combat, which is rather simple by design, but by no means easy or Hack and Slash, and dungeon exploration. It's split into individual levels, known as modules, and you "create" a character by completing their starter module, at which point you're free to progress in the main storyline by completing the "palace" modules (another Zelda nod), which are indefinitely replayable, visit a town to shop for equipment, or complete optional sidequests. Character customization is mostly done by picking your equipment (in this game, your choice of weaponry matters a lot), and thus fairly adaptible and open to experimentation.


 * Adorable Evil Minions: Cobols and Lumpkins.
 * Adventurer Archaeologist: The unlockable archeologist class is like this; as a reference, its design is incredibly close to the Indiana Jones archetype.
 * Exclusively Evil: Dimlock Elves, Lumpkins and Cobols.
 * Announcer Chatter: There's a (text-only) event ticker that tracks item acquisition, kills, triggered traps, completed objectives and so on (in a fairly whimsical manner).
 * Annoying Arrows: Averted - arrows ignore defense, are fairly powerful (powerful enough to One-Hit Kill low-level characters of a frail class), and deal damage over time on top of it.
 * Artificial Stupidity: The Hellrover's AI used to have trouble with walking. AI allies make decent use of their shield, but they can't really dodge or avoid unnecessary confrontations, so they often take damage in situations where no player character would.
 * Awesome but Impractical: The Death spell orb that can be used by the archmage - it's reliable, but takes an obscenely long time to charge and an according amount of Mana Points, and running around for ages waiting for the spell to finish channeling is in most cases much harder than just blasting the foe to death with lesser spells.
 * Back Stab: A class feat of rogues.
 * Ballistic Bone: Used by ulnas.
 * Blinding Camera Flash: Used by the tourist.
 * Cast from Hit Points: "Channel Life", an ability used by high-level healers and wearers of an Amulet of Life Channeling, allows this when out of mana. Having two life-channeling healers in your team in multiplayer basically makes you immortal, as they can spend 1 Hit Point to restore about four.
 * Catching Some Zs: Sleeping creatures display such an effect.
 * Character Level: In addition to upgrading stats, a level up also unlocks new skills depending on class.
 * Charged Attack: Most spells require channeling time, and some can, provided a good intelligence stat, be further charged for more power.
 * Cherry Tapping: Fighting with some sort of Improvised Weapon, like a stool or toilet plunger, or just plain weaker weapons like knives amounts to this.
 * Combat Medic: Healers.
 * Convection, Schmonvection: Only directly touching a lava pit or brazier hurts you.
 * Counterpart Artifacts: The Sporks of Yore.
 * Critical Hit: Only available to Warriors who reached a certain level.
 * Cycle of Hurting: Lumpkins are knocked down on hit, and even slow characters can hit them in faster succession than they can get up. Characters with high DEX can effectively stunlock almost any enemy with a fast weapon like a spear or a cinquedea, especially against a wall. Even most bosses, like the daemon lord, are suspectible to this when using appropriate weaponry.
 * Damsel in Distress: King Bishop serves as one.
 * Dem Bones: Ulnas.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything
 * Double Jump: Rogues can do this, and on high levels they can do a triple jump.
 * Dracolich: The Big Bad, creatively named the Dracolich, is a dracolich.
 * Dressing as the Enemy: Morphing into lumpkins is a favoured strategy for infiltrating their camps. They're stupid enough to not notice.
 * Dumb Muscle: Pure melee fighters generally have a low intelligence stat.
 * Egopolis: King Bishop rules the town of Bishopia. (Taken to a higher level, since the creator of the game is named Aaron Bishop.)
 * Epic Flail: If you're unlucky enough to have a ball-and-chain tied to your leg, you can use it as a powerful makeshift weapon.
 * Everything Fades: Luckily averted.
 * Fireballs: Fireball is a mid-tier spell.
 * Fire, Ice, Lightning: Fire, Cold and Zap (plus Holy and Evil, which are generally a special case) are the elemental damage types.
 * First-Person Snapshooter: The tourist can take photos with his cameras (and taking a photo of a certain enemy is even the objective of their starting quest).
 * Fragile Speedster: Elves and Rogues.
 * Friendly Fireproof: Melee attacks can't damage allies; spells and ranged weapons, however, can.
 * Glass Cannon: Wizards and Elves have a great amount of magical (and in the latter case, other) offensive power, but die when sneezed at.
 * Healing Factor: Trolls, high-level g'nomes and wearers of an Amulet of Regeneration possess one.
 * Healing Hands: The Healers have the Holy Touch, which replaces their melee attack and is somewhere between this and the Healing Shiv.
 * Healing Potion
 * Heal Thyself: Potions and the healer's Holy Touch ability instantly restore health.
 * Healing Spring: Healing fountains are found in a few modules, for example Wizard Starter.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: When idle, the elf says "Baseball Kirby!", a catchphrase from original creator Aaron Bishop's younger brother. Later, there was Super Smash Bros., in which the interaction of Kirby and a baseball bat was a frequent scenario.
 * Hoist by His Own Petard: Trying to cast the fireball spell without a sufficiently high intelligence stat will just result in blowing yourself up.
 * Horse of a Different Color: Chocobones and the Paladin's lizard mount.
 * Idle Animation: More noteworthy are the idle quotes, though. Especially iconic is the elf's "Baseball Kirby!".
 * Improvised Weapon: You can for example whack people with stools. Tourists have an ability that allows them to deal bonus damage with such items.
 * Instant Mount: The Paladin's Call Gelding spell.
 * Jack of All Stats: The Adventurer.
 * Lava Pit: The Ash Palace is full of 'em.
 * Lethal Joke Character: The Tourist class. Their distribution is highly random, so sometimes you'll end up playing a total wimp and in other cases, you'll have unrivalled level 1 stats. Some of their skills are Awesome but Impractical, like an absurdly low chance to respawn without losing anything, some are just plain Joke Character-ish, like the ability to deal more damage when wielding improvised items like a stool or toilet plunger as weapons, but they can also use technological items (including firearms), use poison in a failsafe manner, backstab enemies, always access a (sometimes otherwise unavailable) dungeon map, and stun enemies with their camera flashes.
 * Magic Missile: Averted, spell aiming is semi-automatic.
 * Malevolent Architecture
 * Mana Points
 * Master of None: Archeologists can wield advanced weapons, use magic and ..., but none of them especially well, their level requirements for feats that are basic for more specialized classes are stupidly high.
 * Master of Unlocking: Interestingly enough, not Rogues but Wizards. The Book of Unlock is easily available, though expensive.
 * The Maze: K'nife's Heist.
 * Meat Moss: Found in Abyss 2.
 * Mooks: Lumpkins, COBOLs and Mercenaries are the most commonly encountered ones.
 * No Flow in CGI
 * Non-Lethal KO: You just lose experience points and money and drop your equipment. However, this can actually reduce your level.
 * Outside the Box Tactic: You can crush tranches - and some much worse monsters - with doors.
 * Phantasy Spelling: There are several idiosyncratic spellings, like "gonne", "g'nome", "COBOL", and "d'warf".
 * Poison Is Evil: Just like in Dungeons & Dragons, paladins cannot use poison, and anything inflicting "EVIL"-type damage tends to also inflict poison.
 * Punctuation Shaker: G'nomes, to the point of a Running Gag.
 * Pun: "Lorule" is just the beginning.
 * Random Effect Spell: The Jester Wand and Orb of Wonder.
 * Random Number God: Your stats, especially those of the Tourist class, are very randomly distributed.
 * Revive Kills Zombie: Holy-type "damage" heals living characters and damages undead and demonic ones, even those that are normally invulnerable.
 * Shoplift and Die: Shopkeepers are formidable opponents, with high survivability and (usually) powerful offense. And even if you do manage to kill one, the guards will Zerg Rush you - and you won't be welcome in towns ever again.
 * Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness: Far on the silly side.
 * Splat: Classes, which include races; "Elf" and "G'nome" are classes.
 * Status Buff: Healers have some, and there are some arcane spells too, though most of the latter can only be used on yourself.
 * Stealth Pun: The COBOL species, among others.
 * Super-Deformed
 * Talks to Squirrels: Elves can talk to animals.
 * Teleport Spam: Warlocks and lichs like to do this.
 * The Guards Must Be Crazy
 * Toilet Humour: Bump into an outhouse, I dare you.
 * True Sight: An available spell temporarily bestows you with this ability.
 * Ugly Cute: Lumpkins.
 * Universal Poison
 * Useless Useful Stealth: Until you reach a high level with a stealth-capable character, stealth only works when standing still or sneaking.
 * Villain Teleportation: Until late in the game, the teleport spell is only available to some enemies.