Sil

Sil
Stable game
Developer	half
Theme	Fantasy
Influences	Angband
Released	Jan 3 2012 (1.0)
Updated	Jan 04 2016 (1.3)
Licensing	Open Source
P. Language	C
Platforms	Windows Mac OS X Source
Interface	Keyboard
Game Length	10 hours
Official site of Sil

A game of adventure set

in the first age of Middle-earth,

when the world still rang with elven song

and gleamed with dwarven mail.

Walk the dark halls of Angband.

Slay creatures black and fell.

Wrest a shining Silmaril from Morgoth’s iron crown.

Sil is a computer role-playing game with a strong emphasis on discovery and tactical combat. It has a simple but rich combat system which allows for a great variety of choice: should you wear heavy armour that makes you easier to hit but reduces the damage you take? should you wield heavier weapons to overcome your opponents’ armour, or wield lighter weapons for more accuracy and a greater chance of critical hits? It depends on the situation and the type of character you become. You will also have the chance to retreat back into shadowy corridors to take the enemy one by one, or to stealthily creep up to your opponent and take him unawares.

It is also one of very few games that stays true to the writings of Tolkien. Carefully researched, it dispenses with many generic fantasy tropes and reveals a different world. There are no wizards or priests, no platemail or magical scrolls. Instead, it is the Norse Saga inspired world that Tolkien imagined, with warriors clad in shining mail, singing songs of rage or sorrow as they slay. The magic of the world is subtle yet powerful: there are songs of fear and of binding, rather than spells of fireball and teleportation.

Sil comes from a tradition of role-playing games known as roguelikes. They stem from a game called Rogue that was written before computers had graphics and instead used symbols on the screen to represent a dungeon filled with monsters and treasure, that was randomly generated each time you played. Rogue also had ‘permanent death’: you have only one life and must choose wisely lest you have to start again. Finally, it had a system of unidentified items whose powers you must discover for yourself. Sil inherits all of these features, though it is much more advanced in many ways.

Who will like Sil?

You will like Sil if you want to play a detailed and well balanced role-playing game with a rich and intuitive system of tactical combat. You will also like it if you are interested in the works of Tolkien, or even just want a less generic role-playing game. The greatest obstacle to enjoying Sil will be its lack of graphics, but if you can overcome an initial reaction and begin to explore the world, your imagination should fill in the details more effectively than a small clump of pixels would.

Forks

Sil-Q is a fork of Sil that is still under development as of 2020, currently on version 1.4.2. It concentrates on rebalancing the game so that all items and skills have some use in the right circumstances. It also aims to make Sil an easier game for newbies to get started with and a harder game for experienced players to master. Killing Morgoth is much more challenging than before, but escaping to the surface is far less tedious. Tile support and a custom tileset have also been added in the beta release of 1.5.0.

Over a dozen skills in Sil have been replaced, and even more have been tweaked. Some skills were replaced because they were too weak; some were replaced because they were far too strong and made other skills unnecessary.

There are many new objects, artifacts, and even a few new monsters. Many bugfixes and enhancements from the previous mpa-sil and ebering-sil forks have been also folded into Sil-Q.

Android version

An unofficial Android port of Sil 1.3 can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. There is a discussion thread for it on the Angband Forum.

Links

• Angband ladder: Sil
• Changelog
• Video series/tutorials on Sil