Review RPG Codex Review: ADOM

[AMG]

All roguelikes rely on trial and error just by the virtue of featuring permadeath. You have to see the content to be able to plan and play around it. Whether you resort to guides and spoilers or discover the game at your own pace depends on how you want to experience the game.
I'd say that most of the popular roguelikes are theoretically always winnable when you mastered the game. It just differs in what it takes to master them.

 

[Damned Registrations]

While that's probably true in practice (I certainly hope nobody was dumb enough to make a game outright impossible to win without spoilers) in theory you could easily make a game that you'd never manage to win without a guide of some sort. I feel like a lot of games tend too closely towards that in an attempt to be novel. Puzzle elements don't add much to the game, since they're generally the kind of obscure senseless crap you need hints for anyways, so it's basically just a password you have to find in the game at least once and can then forget about from then on.