Finished Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, made a post in the subreddit which I might as well post here as well. There will be a bit of repetition with what I've already said about the game:
So after ascending my first character, an axe wielding minotaur fighter follower of the god Ru, with 3 runes and the Orb of Zot after 68 characters and about 33 hours I feel the need to write out my impressions of the game thus far. I'm going to be making some heavy comparisons to Nethack since that's the only other old-school roguelike I've spent much (read: a ridiculous amount) of time with. Also, bear in mind I pretty much exclusively played the above character combination so I have next to no experience with spells, piety (I chose Ru because he seemed a very straightforward god), and wands/magical artifacts (sacrificed artifice on most of my decent runs).
First off, I will say that I had fun. It's nice that the game can be won without extensive use of the wiki. Finding new artifacts was always exciting and exploring the different branches looking for new ones was the highlight of the game for me. I didn't do much exploration on my winning run because I learned my lesson on my first really promising run when after collecting two of the lair runes and the Abyss rune I kept exploring I eventually ended up in a dead end in the Tomb surrounded by mummies that kept draining half my health when I killed them unable to teleport because of Ru. There's a lot of game left for me to experience if I do decide to play some more.
However, there's also some aspects of the game I'm not sure I really like that much. First is that the dungeon floors are too big and there are far too many monsters. The developers have tried to alleviate this by including some very robust auto-explore and auto-fight functions, the problem with this is it's still boring, but now you're barely even paying attention to the game. In a game of Nethack, the dungeon is smaller but much more memorable because you personally explore every inch of it, and generally have much more interaction with your surroundings. Often as I'm ascending on Nethack I'll remember certain floors and the events that took place on them, but in DCSS I've got nothing, just a blur of autoexplore. Like, for the first 10 minutes I don't even have to actually play the game, just alternate between pressing 'o' and holding tab until DL6 or so. This contrasts to Nethack where the early game is the most interesting because you need to pay attention to every move you make. The quantity of monsters reminds me of the Astral Planes on Nethack where you are drowning in message spam from the attacks of the dozens of monsters all around you, except in DCSS this is at least 50% of the game. There are also just so many different types of monsters with so many spells that about halfway through I generally stopped reading monster descriptions. My character was strong enough that I could generally just melee without a care and only needed to worry when my screen started to flash red or I realized that the stupid fireball had given me 5 different negative mutations.
In general, I feel like you have far fewer option here than you do in Nethack, especially in the early game. I feel like if the RNG doesn't give you what you need by around DL7 there isn't a whole lot you can do. There are no random monster spawns so you can't stick around a floor and grind for drops or experience if you happen to be underpowered. You also don't have the many, many item interactions that can be useful in fringe situations like Nethack. There's also no polypiling, sacrificing, wishes, alchemy or stealing from shops, it's just 100% dependency on RNG to get what you need. Scrolls of enchant armor are also incredibly rare for how underpowered they are. The weighting on them is also weird in that I consistently find twice as many scrolls of enchant weapon as I do enchant armor, despite the fact that I have 5x as many pieces of armor as I do weapons. I also didn't find most potions or scrolls to be very useful. I don't know, maybe it's because I don't understand them, but most of them sounded as likely to hinder me as help or were just too rare to ever use, like silence which I ended the game with 4 and never used.
Overall Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup feels like a very streamlined experience, and that's not entirely a good thing. I might come back to the game and try a spellcaster some time later. I'm not even sure how you are supposed to survive without armor, though.
Edit: oh also I found it somewhat unsatisfying that there isn't a special screen when you ascend with the orb. Nethack makes it feel a bit of an achievement by showing you a dungeon overview and listing all the monsters you killed.
