NetHack is a dungeon crawl from 1987 that people are still finishing for the first time. Every level is generated as you walk into it, everything in the game interacts with everything else, and death is permanent — it is a game meant to be lost, repeatedly.
It is the game that gave the genre its name: roguelikes are games like Rogue, and NetHack is the one that never stopped being developed. The dungeon is fifty-odd levels of monsters, shops, altars and traps drawn in plain ASCII, and the rules are deep enough that "the DevTeam thinks of everything" became a saying. Kicking a wall, praying, reading an unknown scroll, dipping something into a fountain — all of it does something.
The demo drops you in as Ada, a human Valkyrie with a long sword and a pet
kitten. h j k l or the arrow keys walk, walking into a monster attacks
it, , picks up whatever you are standing on, i is your inventory, and
> takes the stairs down once you find them. The VM is private to your
browser tab; nothing you type leaves it.
Keys to know
h j k l / arrows | walk |
y u b n | walk diagonally |
walk into a monster | attack it |
, | pick up what you are standing on |
i | inventory |
e | eat |
w | wield a weapon |
s | search for hidden doors |
> | go down the stairs |
? | help |
S | save and quit |
Install NetHack on your own machine
| Alpine | apk add nethack |
| Debian / Ubuntu | apt install nethack-console |
| macOS (Homebrew) | brew install nethack |
| Arch | pacman -S nethack |
This VM was last built on Aug 19, 2026. How Demoshell demos work →
Similar tools you can try here
- FIGlet — The classic ASCII-art banner generator that has made big letters out of plain text since 1991, running live in a private Linux VM.
