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I'm surprised someone wrote an article about Umberto Eco and his influence on video games and neglected to mention Ultima Ratio Regum [0]. It's a roguelike under development that attempts to simulate an entire world with multiple civilizations and with some kind of conspiracy at play throughout the world's history.

[0] http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/

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That's an interesting looking game, but I'm a bit confused by the reliance on the ASCII aesthetic. True, many people associate it with roguelike games, but when you are using ASCII generate portraits[1] of the fidelity they are, I can't help but feel a lot of time is being wasted on an aspect that matters little to the end result. It will either be fun or it won't, and ASCII is really just a highly constrained tile-set when used in this way.

1: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2016/05/firstdr...

It's not even ASCII. Blocks and "double pipes" fall out of the 127-character range easily.

I also agree that a lot of the benefits and crude aesthetics is lost on using extra codepages and fancy characters: I enjoy my NetHack on plain ASCII mode as it doesn't depend on any particular font for instance.

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