You are a lone adventurer in a strange world, where geometry does not work in the
expected way.
Gather as much treasure as
you can before the nasty monsters get you. Explore about 50 different worlds, each with
its own unique treasures, enemies, and terrain obstacles. Your quest is to find the
legendary treasure, the Orbs of Yendor. Collect one of them to win! Or just ignore
your quest and collect smaller treasures.

The twist is the unique, unusual geometry of the world: it is one of just few games
which takes place on the hyperbolic plane. Witness a grid composed of hexagons and
heptagons, straight lines which seem to be parallel, but then they diverge and never
cross, triangles whose angles add up to less than 180 degrees, how extremely unlikely
is it to reach the same place twice, and how the world seems to be rotated when you do
return. All this matters for the gameplay. The game is inspired by the roguelike genre
(although in a very minimalist way), works of
M. C. Escher, and by puzzle games such as
Deadly Rooms of Death.

A very infinite world

With more space than anything Euclidean.
The game dynamically generates new parts of the world as you move.
No previous understanding of hyperbolic
geometry is required — actually, playing HyperRogue is probably the best way to learn
about this, much better and deeper than any mathematical formulas.
It is virtually impossible to get back to a place where you have
been before, unless you go back exactly the same way.
Show your true mastery of hyperbolic navigation by
finding the Orb of Yendor, Holy Grail, rescuing the Prince(ss)!

Lots of variety

72 lands
(72 in the free version), each with unique theme, mechanics, graphics, terrain
features, native monsters, treasure type, and magical Orb power.
The ultimate Hyperstone Quest requires you to get 10 treasures in each of
the lands!

Simple but hard to master mechanics

In many ways, HyperRogue is closer to boardgames
like Chess, than to mainstream computer games — except that its “chessboard” is
a hyperbolic plane, with randomly generated features.
Enemies move predictably, and most can be killed simply by moving into them
— however, they could kill your character with a single attack too! Even though the game
disallows you from making moves which would lead to this immediately
(“check” in Chess), fighting large groups is still a challenge.

Even more challenge!

If you want even more challenge, you will get it easily, due to HyperRogue’s
difficulty/high score system. The more treasures you collect in a given land,
the more monster chase you there. Collect 10 treasures in the given land to show the
basic understanding of it,
25 treasures to show that you have mastered it, or go for
even more! The game never ends, but it gets harder and harder.

Multiple special modes

Enable the shoot’em
up mode, and the game is no longer turn-based or grid-based. Play together with your
friend (shmup mode is recommended). Try the Euclidean, elliptic, or spherical modes, to
see why the geometry matters, or enable the heptagonal mode to make the
hyperbolic effects stronger. Try extra challenges such as the Yendor Challenge or the
Pure Tactics Mode, or make the game look differently with the Hypersian Rug or
Conformal mode. The recently added Orb Strategy
mode emphasizes the resource management by giving you harder challenges while allowing
you to use your limited magical powers in difficult situations.

Great game, educational thing, or maybe an artistic or research tool?

HyperRogue has started as a small, weird technical experiment, but it turned out that hyperbolic geometry
combined with basic roguelike rules makes for exceptionally great gameplay, even if you do not care about
geometry! Further work improved the gameplay, but also turned HyperRogue into probably the most fully featured
engine for truly non-Euclidean geometry in existence. Even if you do not care about roguelikes, roguelites
and block puzzles, you can play the tutorial as an explorable explanation about hyperbolic geometry, use
HyperRogue for research in applied hyperbolic geometry, or use the
texture mode and vector graphics editor to create mathematical art. The possibilities are endless!

How to get it

HyperRogue can be downloaded freely from this website,
or bought on Steam or
itch.io; the paid versions are
updated more frequently and include social features such as achievements and leaderboards.
There are also Android and iOS versions.