Tales of Maj'Eyal

Tales of Maj'Eyal — abbreviated ToME by long-time players — is a turn-based roguelike RPG with a heavy focus on tactical combat and deep character building. It's been in development for well over a decade and is genuinely one of the genre's foundational modern projects; large parts of the current build-sandbox roguelike vocabulary, including triggered class abilities, multi-class progression and stacking aura combos, trace back to choices this game made years before the wider audience caught up.

You pick from a long list of distinct races and classes, all of them mechanically and thematically different rather than just statistical variations, and drop into the world of Eyal — a setting with its own millennia-old history that the game reveals through scattered quests, lore drops, faction encounters and the occasional event triggered by what you've already done. Random dungeons, hand-built locations and a fully explorable world map all coexist, and combat is grid-based, turn-based, and built to reward thinking several moves ahead.

The design philosophy is unusually clean for the genre: no consumable resources that recharge between fights, no grinding loops, no padding. Unlocks and achievements carry over between runs, the interface is modern and customisable, and online stats and character sheets feed into a long-running community. Modding support is robust and tied to Steam Workshop, and the underlying game has been free to try for years — purchase mostly unlocks the additional content donors used to receive.