The Tombs of the Asciiroth

Play The Tombs of the Asciiroth (v0.7.0, released 6/1/2026)

The Tombs of Asciiroth is a browser based game with arcade, puzzle and exploration-style game play, in an extensive world of font-based abstraction (similar to Nethack but really, closest to ZZT, which you can also play on-line).

Although named after the primary scenario that shipped with the game, there’s another completed scenario, “The Chalice of Goldcastle” (Anna Anthropy).

There is a Player’s Guide and a tutorial when you start the game.

Asciiroth was written in the late 2000s. It was posted for many years at icculus.org and to the best of my knowledge, only two people ever finished the main scenario: myself after a ten year hiatus (very hard), and one other person who wrote to tell me about it at the time. However, Anna Anthropy wrote a better scenario for the game which you can also play! And that was it for many years. Because it was written in Java and converted to JavaScript using GWT, I was no longer able to update it and the code seemed dead. It was just too big a job to re-write the game directly in JavaScript.

But then AI happened, and it became feasible to resurrect the code because the AI could do a lot of the translation work. So here it is again!

In addition there is a map editor and a guide to making maps for the game.