When comparing Dust: An Elysian Tail vs Nethack, the Slant community recommends Nethack for most people. In the question“What are the best games on Linux?” Nethack is ranked 74th while Dust: An Elysian Tail is ranked 85th. The most important reason people chose Nethack is:
The gameplay is very deep due to the amount of skills and systems present in the game.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Gorgeous visual aesthetic
Hand-drawn graphics are pleasing.
Pro Very emotional and funny
Cut scenes are deep and expressive.
Pro Spoken storyline
No need to read, just listen to the narration.
Pro Great combat system
The combat system is smooth and entertaining.
Pro Nice soundtrack
Pro Depth
The gameplay is very deep due to the amount of skills and systems present in the game.
Pro Potential for enormous skill growth
Nethack is a game that you can play for hundreds of hours and still not master. But you'll have tons of fun attempting to master it.
Pro Over two decades of constant development
Nethack was first released in 1987. The latest version, 3.6.0, came out in December 2015.
Pro ASCII and tiles available
Nethack is able to run on simple ASCII graphics or use graphic tiles instead.
Cons
Con Saving Issues
You can only save at fixed places, and sometimes it takes multiple tries to save a game.
Con Cheesy
Both character design and dialogues are incredibly cheesy. This may work well for kids though.
Con Burden of knowledge
There's simply too much information that the game expects you to know before you can properly take advantage of the systems in the game.
Con Feature creep
NetHack has an overwhelming amount of features mostly because the development team found them cool at the time, but with little thought of their greater impact. For example, a Nethack staple is Sokoban as a built-in minigame, which feels out of place in a dungeon crawler.
The extremely large amount of items and abilities break the game's balance and coherence.
Con Outdated controls
You need to study a wiki just to learn the most basic controls. The game is broken in this regard.
Con ASCII Art
Con Run of the mill story
The story of the game is pretty generic fantasy fare. It features orcs, elves, and trolls in an effort for the hero to save the world. While it does not detract from the gameplay, it does seem very familiar to those interested in the genre.