I tried Nethack, but I didn’t like it. You can’t get good at it by playing and learning. It’s full of bizarre, random gameplay mechanics that people originally figured out by reading the source code. You play it until you get fed with dying randomly. Then you go online and read all the bizarre secrets.
I think that's pretty accurate. I think you could play it "unspoiled" if you are okey with never beating it but only trying to beat how far you came last time.
I guess it's matter of taste. When I started playing I always died of hunger. Then I learned that I can and should eat enemies after I kill them. Then I learned that I should only eat some enemies as some are poisonous/give bad effects. That allowed me to get much farther, I made sure to eat all "good corpses". I came pretty far eventually, then suddenly dead and the game presented my with my tombstone. The cause of death was over-eating myself to death while eating a Yeti corpse. Start over, learned not to over-eat.
I thought that was a pretty fun way to die.
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