Skeptic043

Gears of War 3, Dom doing the unthinkable to protect his brother. I was utterly shook for days.

To follow up on what was said above, Thief: Gold/The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age are easily two of the best stealth games out there, especially with all the work fans have done to keep the games playable and fantastic on modern hardware. Between the phenomenal level design, a unique and pretty engaging story, and all around fun game play offering tons of ways to approach situations, they're always worth a recommend from me for at least a single playthrough, easily netting 15-30 hours of game time per game. The wide variance in time spent with each is partially due to the freedom you have, but also since each difficulty step up changes your objectives for each mission, giving you further reasons to explore and have fun with the world.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is harder to recommend due to it being built with consoles in mind, but once again, with some fan patches it becomes a much better experience and can definitely be worth the time, particularly when they're all on sale for so cheap. Each of them is currently just under $1 on steam, one of the best deals you can get.

Coming from someone who bought Thief 2014 at launch (and enjoyed it), I'd recommend a skip on that one. It's not a bad game by any means, but it doesn't feel like it's nearly as good as the original 3 for a variety of reasons.

Splinter Cell also are fantastic games in the stealth genre, but I'm not familiar enough with them to speak at length on them like the Thief series.

It's a fantastic game, I was blown away at how much the game has to offer and always enjoy checking out the terminal lore and uncovering its mysteries. It fits nicely in among the greats, and I strongly agree that it's criminally underrated!

All of the games you mentioned regularly destroy my characters and plans, but that's part of the fun of them I think. Dwarf Fortress is one I haven't put enough time into due to the sheer depth and confusion of learning everything, I do plan to revisit it when I've got the itch for a colony builder and want to fail horrifically.

For Caves of Qud and Tales, my best recommendation is to try out new things and builds and see what works. I had miserable luck in Caves with most of my melee focused builds, but using a ranged focused build (use your ammo semi sparingly until Grit Gate where you can buy 1k rounds per restock) was what got me further then ever before. There's some abilities that help immensely with survival too, the Precognition mutation allows you to see the future and reset on a cooldown, even if you stumble into an unfortunate death for example. Also look at domination or proselytize/beguiling, as those will allow you to recruit or control other characters, even shopkeepers who you can then drop the full inventory on the ground for you to utilize (though be careful, failure may turn them against you). Using a zone tier map like the one found on the Qud wiki if you don't mind knowing roughly how tough each over world area is also is a good way to avoid stumbling into an area you're not prepared for.

Tome I have less advice for even after 100+ hours, I had a blast trying out all sorts of build combos, but a good way to get an idea of what builds work well is to check out https://te4.org/characters-vault and search for your difficulty and campaign, and filter it to only show winners. This will show you a list of characters who have cleared the game, and allow you to see what their exact build was upon winning, including stats, talent choices, gear, and a few other useful things. Having a zone order guide pulled up absolutely helps as well and is a decent way to get familiar with where to go when still starting out, especially if you want to see every zone the game has to offer.

Lastly, for Qud, ToME, and even Dredmor, don't be afraid to turn on a difficulty that isn't permadeath. I love the thought of only having one life, but for learning the game it's never a bad thing to turn that off for your first run (or first few!), as it'll allow you to retry the same scenarios with different approaches to see what works best. Qud I think does this the best with it's Roleplay mode, checkpointing at settlements so you're set back usually by dying, but you can still continue on to get a better understanding of all the game has to offer, making future runs that much smoother. Death is all part of the fun either way, sometimes you've taken a character to the point where it's starting to feel stale and a new build can reinvigorate interest in wanting to continue exploring what the worlds have to offer!

I've very recently spent a close to a hundred hours on a single character on Caves of Qud, and I've hardly scratched the surface of what would be it's endgame areas. If you can handle the interface it's an incredible game with near endless possibilities. The build variety is pretty massive with the way mutations/cybernetics and skills/stats interact with each other, allowing you to build your characters exactly how you want.

Tales of Maj'Eyal is also an excellent choice with a huge variety of ways to play with it's dozens of classes and a wide variety of races to play to keep things fresh each run. The world itself is static, but each zone itself is random per run, and it also has the ability to tune the difficulty a bit to your liking, as well as having a couple expansions to check out too (with another on the way).

Cogmind is another one I've put a decent amount of time into that has a ton of depth, allowing you to pick and choose what parts to strap onto your bot for each run. Stealth hacker runs, ranged artillery explosion builds, incredibly fast ninja melee builds, there's a myriad of cool ways to experience all it has to offer.

These are all pretty in depth games, and the first 10-30 hours could easily be seen as your tutorial, so don't be discouraged by being overwhelmed by things, and don't be afraid to look things up if you need to!