Roguelike

So, in Etrian Odyssey, there's like a home base on top of the Labyrinth, right? And you can manage characters in your party, buy stuff, sell loot, whatever. Sometimes when you sell loot it enables the shopkeeper to make new items that were previously unavailable. There's odd jobs to be had at the tavern and plot-line quests at the castle. So you get your marching orders, head in, mapping your merry way through the maze, and grab loot from random encounters and side quests. Then you dash back to the surface and regroup. The myth is that no one's ever been to the bottom of the Labyrinth...

In other words, it's a roguelike, but pretty, and with a more robust skill tree than ever before attempted in, say, Nethack (but maybe ADOM, which everyone says is awesome but which I cannot for the life of me bring myself to play, has more depth in that area?). And like all roguelikes, it's crack - at least to that very odd subset of people who like getting all the way down to the bottom of a massively multi-level dungeon.

This game will afford you hours of entertainment in the same way that Random, the Evil Human Tourist, afforded me months of entertainment in Nethack. Then he got sandwiched between a passel of orcs and a tea party of jellies, alas. At least in Etrian Odyssey there's no guilt associated with returning to a save point...

I have not yet investigated what happens if you try to solo. If the game adjusts to the number of PCs then you can probably go old-school. If not, you'll likely just die a lot with the more interesting classes. One of the hack-n-slashers could probably do it, though...