My new favourite Tolkien game is free, has over 40 years of history, and would run on a toaster

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).

These aren’t races in the D&D sense—you aren’t doing anything so mechanical as picking between different packages of advantages and disadvantages. Instead, they reflect Arda as-written: men really are kind of lame. They might be Eru Iluvatar’s favourite, but they’re neither fast, nor hearty, nor strong of will. They lack all the advantages the elves and even dwarves get. To play one is to deliberately hamstring yourself.

From there, you choose your House—the precise lineage of cool elf or lame guy you descend from, which then impacts your starting proficiencies and stats—and off you go into Morgoth’s fortress. But you’re no assassin, the goal is to pry one of the stolen Silmaril gems from the dark lord’s black crown, then run the hell away before he notices.

This is what grabbed me about Sil-Q, I think. It’s not that it doesn’t care about balance, it’s that balance and the game’s mechanics are all subservient to a dedication to the setting. The world is the thing, and if the world demands that being a mortal man confer no advantages whatsoever then that’s damn well how it’s going to work. This is probably not something they are teaching in game design school, but I like it.

And then you’re actually roaming around Morgoth’s dread fortress and, dammit, you’re in pure Silmarillion town, baby. You’re fighting orcs and picking up strange mythical weapons that glow blue when you’re near ’em, dying over and over and over again in classic Rogue style. You are a heightened hero of the first age, evading the blows of your enemies like Fingolfin at Dagor Bragollach. Or, possibly, getting devoured by a pack of wolves in the very first area. That is also a possibility.

If you’re as Silmarillion-brained as me (or moreso, which has been known to happen), I strongly recommend you check Sil-Q out. It’s a game that runs on anything and has 40 years of history and 5,000 years of lore. It doesn’t get much more Tolkien than that.