There is a game is called Nethack, known as a “rogue-like” game, which is FREE to download from the site www.nethack.org .
It’s a C-language open-source game, a pre-cursor of which (called Moria) I first played in the early 1980s. It’s been enhanced and improved upon by geeks though the internet over the years. The name doesn’t refer to any kind of code “hacking”, but refers to the “hack and slash” of weapons and armor, and the fact that the game was developed by people via the internet.
It’s a low-graphics dungeon game (just level maps and symbols), so, although the download is small, all the programming is in game-play, the depth of which is unequaled in the gaming world.
Indeed, no other such game comes close the the challenge and variability. The dungeon is approximately 50 levels deep, with several side-branches and quests, some of which are required for winning, and some of which are not. It’s also randomly generated every new game, so the replayability is endless. The problem with most games (IMO, of course), is that once you play a couple times, they suck. They’re the same each time you play them, no replayability. I’ve played many, many games in my day, and this and chess are the only ones that still interest me.
While there are hundreds of spoiler files available, they don’t ruin the game-play because the game is different and random every time you fire up a new character. Trust me when I say it’s the best game ever, and that you will die hundreds of times before ever coming close to winning, even if you study all the myriad spoilers. In addition, the game keeps track of various “conducts”, such as illiterate (if you read no scrolls or spellbooks), vegetarian (if you eat no monster corpses), and many other conducts. So if you can win normally, you can further challenge yourself with these conducts.
Download it, read the guidebook accompanying the download, and you will not regret it.