3 - Very polished. The only bug I could find is victory condition will not trigger if final boss is killed from range.

3 - Polish graphics and gameplay, story is thought out, items are pretty balanced, definite ending. Almost had to give it a 2 for so bugs like failing to track state between games and a crash on the final boss

2 - Crashes on occasion, and monster generation seems to glitch when crossing the mirror sometimes, but the interface is extremely well polished

3 - Perfect.

3 - Probably the best tile-based game of the year, the controls are tight and all that is missing is eerie music

3 - Incredibly slick interface with really great graphics

3 - Simply great. Constantly switching between two worlds to survive is like playing on two planes simultaneously.

3 - Definitely a fun game, despite crashing during my confrontation with the final boss, I'm still considering giving it another go

2 - Very interesting game, but it really lacks replayability. Going through the same early steps over and over is frustrating.

3 - Where your SANITY really IS as DANGEROUS as your insanity. Hallucinations are not just switching pictures with random things but actually do imperfectly hide living things.

3 - Mirror world mechanic and the sanity implementation are novel making it the most innovative game I played during this contest

3 - The mirror and insanity mechanics are fantastic and well-implemented

3 - There is intro, dialog, few distinct classes of enemies and plenty of items.

3 - More than I expected from a 7DRL

3 - This really stands out for its polished graphics and interesting gameplay

2 - The level is fixed.

3 - Procedure content, turn-based combat, items, all the mainstay of a RL

2 - Sorely lacks in procedural content

You have a demon deep within you ... right in your head! This slowly but steadily makes you insane. At first it is not as bad as it sounds. When your sanity is low you can let yourself slip into the world within. The catch is you let the demon outside at the same time. This reverses aforementioned process. The Man in the Mirror is about balancing this. You should never let yourself fall into any extreme. If you manage to do that you may live long enough to notice seemingly subtle differences. You cannot do anything to this strong locked door but if you slip into insanity it is just a feeble wooden gate waiting to be pushed gently. You cannot see your other self blasting the steel equivalent off its hinges. Good for you. Discover the rest yourself. It is really worth your time.

Despite getting straight 3's, The Man in the Mirror isn't perfect. It has a few bugs that may or may not be system specific. However, despite these bugs I wanted to complete this game. Aside from technical problems, the game does almost everything right. The combat is fast and tactical. Resources are useful and you usually don't end up swimming in health potions. The game does a great job of setting atmosphere and it kept me interested in getting to the ending for several attempts. It's my selection for best in show.

A very interesting game where you can switch into a mirrored version of the world where everything looks very different. However it's story-based with mostly static levels, and replaying the early game and story quickly becomes dull. The levels and the cutscene-esque story elements don't suit the repetitiveness induced through permadeath, and this game would be better suited as a non-roguelike RPG, or with severely expanded random content. Still, this is definitely one of the cream of the crop this year.

2 - Missing some polish. Death fade out and other effects cannot be interrupted. Menus do not remember last item chosen. Found a mysterious 'break' action for broken crude bows.

3 - Seems complete in all ways that matter

3 - Has a memory leak bug that will cause a crash if you don't restart now and then, but otherwise this seems very feature complete with a huge variety of polished content and multiple endings.

3 - This is beautiful. Love the coins shower.

3 - It's hard to get a 3 out of me for an ASCII UI, but this one squeaks by. In the end, the color palette is decent, the controls are tight and all the information I need is clear presented. Features like the gold failing and the 2D - 3D effect won me over

3 - I'm not fond of the overlapping caves, but otherwise the interface is excellent. Keys are good, but space as rest is a liability. Colours are well-chosen, and the smooth wall movement is bliss.

3 - In many ways. Money is central resource and deciding when to spend and on what is crucial.

2 - I'm cool with hard RLs, but I've never been a fan of frustrating ones. This game is hard in the sense that you have to plan your moves, converse your resources and think ahead, but it is also frustrating because you always need to plan your moves or you will get bled dry by the ranged opponents.

3 - Very fun game. The varied enemy behaviours make even dancing around in melee interesting. Only problems are linearity/repetitiveness and it's a bit too easy once you get the heal spell.

3 - Map rotating, swirling passageways. Non-euclidean dungeon. Equipment automatically swapped or discarded on pickup. Awesome portal spell. Money as central resource. Each of these is not outrageously innovative but combined together worthy of a 3.

2 - Pretty much par for the course from this competitor, but this game doesn't break all that much new ground compared to his prior work. Still, an innovative take on the story and graphics

2 - The portal back to town is cool, and it does some neat twists around money and items.

3 - Several dungeon themes with enemies native to environment. Weapon and armor progression. Much to see for a 7DRL.

3 - Though given this competitor's prior entries, I doubt this is much of a surprise

3 - Tempted to give this a 2 since I've come to expect this sort of immense featurecount from Jeff Lait ;)

3 - Not even a shadow of doubt.

3 - This game hits all the major points and some of the minor ones

3 - Hits all the main spots

Village reminds somewhat of Diablo's Tristram but gameplay is closer to Angband. Venture into the cave to get rich! Curiously there is no experience system so you need to kill monsters only if they stand in your way to get more shinies. In Diablo you had to identify stuff to use it. In Vicious Orcs you will find broken gear and need to pay for fixes to use it. The key is deciding when to progress with quality of your equipment.

A great entry from a veteran of this competition, but I just couldn't get into it as much as his prior entries. The main problem seems to be that combat is repetitive and very position oriented due to the designer's choice to go with a 8-direction ranged combat system. Effectively, this means that all ranged enemies need to be approached with an offset, which doesn't make for fluid gameplay, and this starts in the second zone and continued until I gave up. But, a solid game overall, if something could be done to make combat less tedious, it would easily be my favorite game of the competition.

Vicious Orcs is quite a detailed game with an extensive dungeon to explore. Inventory management and gold play a big part, as you have limited items you can carry and the only way to get better gear is to pay for salvaged items to be restored. You can also learn to create a portal back to town which will have you nipping in and out of the dungeon willy-nilly. Very fun game with a good level of variety and gameplay depth.

3

2 - Feels like it's lacking content, and there's some bugs in the turn order system

3 - Quite polished

3 - Full game with high score table. Played smoothly for me.

3

2 - Some nice graphical effects, but monsters can be hard to see and many inventory actions are cumbersome to perform

2 - Damn, it looks really cool but could use better text contrast, and it's very hard to play on a high resolution screen

3 - Excellent choice of colours, checkerboard floor works surprisingly well. Lots of flavour text, but poor grammar therein. Nice transitions and effects that don't get in the way. The message history confuses me with how it switches poisitions and also decays over time rather than per-turn.

3

3 - Addictive and very replayable, this is one of the most inherently fun 7DRLs this year

3 - Pretty fun and challenging

3 - Tight gameplay with lots of visual rewards. Scoring mechanic nicely encourages one to play suboptimally to train monsters to the viewing areas, thereby prevent the game from being over easy.

3

2 - The score mechanics are nifty, and some of the items are very cool and original

2 - I've seen survival roguelikes before, this one's got cool weapons and is set in modern times (with jeans, laser cannons and things like that)

2 - The game show theme is well carried out in the text and game play. But mechanically it is a straightforward hack and slash.

3

2 - There's some nice detail in graphical effects and descriptions, but it does lack a bit in variety

2

3 - Wide variety of enemies with their own death flavour, cleverly designed weapons with special effects.

3

3 - ASCII permadeath fun, though it could do with more random levels and some element of progression

2 - Lacks a sense of advancement, only one level, it's more of a survival thing

2 - Feels more like a smash tv arcade game than a roguelike.

Kill monsters in front of audience members to boost your ratings. It sports some neat items like laser megacannons and rocket launchers which can be found on the ground. It has some interface niggles but they don't detract too much from the gameplay, and the desire to keep playing to improve your score is quite compelling.

This is a survival game in which you score points by killing monsters in front of the audience with all sort of cool weapons, it's got nice visuals but some of them go against usability (menu contrast, for example). Keybindings could be better too.

Monster Slayer Show takes hack and slash to a new level. With over the top combat and weapons, your only danger lies in being to eager to please your fans,

3 - Polished with proper victory condition.

3

3 - Well polished, complete, and with end game.

3 - Good looking although spaced out ASCII characters could be a bit bigger.

2

3 - Clean aesthetics (perhaps due to T-engine) I would quibble there is too much message log text, especially for drunk effects. These are things important to the setting and really should be dumped overhead like the Level Up and damage.

3 - Finely balanced but a little on easy side. I won with 30 stims left. If you go withdrawal route game gets a bit hard and bandits can waste you in two shots. Not every weapon and armor are the same.

2

3 - Tough but well balanced. Sometimes you can be hit by unfair swarms, but that's roguelikes for you. Compelling story to work through.

1 - Drunk/withdrawal effect are something new but from mechanics standpoint it just limits your stamina.

1

2 - The drunk mechanics are well done. I see a message in the balance here: for both gameplay optimality and to avoid the brutal plot, you want keep at a constant low buzz. Which lets you as a player experience the awful minimal-energy trap that alcholism can capture people in.

3 - Fitting monsters and items, compelling story.

2

2 - While interactions are limited, there are a wide variety of "monsters" well themed to the setting. The changing nature of the monsters with respect to your drunkness plays very powerfully with the developed plot.

3 - 100% roguelikeness.

3

3 - No doubt.

A story about drunkard who does not have much will left to live. Hallucinations haunt him bringing back memories of all his sad and evil acts. Finally if you manage to ascend all you get is ... not a happy end. Broken Bottle has very fitting mood and well made addiction mechanic.

Unlike many dark post-apoclyptic games, this one actually delivers what it promises: a bleak vision from the viewpoint of a drunken failure.

2 - Quite polished although low HP messages appear when one is resting and gaining them. Moreover the game seriously encumbers CPU.

3

3 - Complete and stable

2 - Has Absolutely Infuriating Message Style. Unicode glyphs used for some monsters look good but choosing fancy 'f' (letters are better left for monsters) to represent terrain type is not the best idea. All other aesthetic things considered are positive.

3

3 - Nicely designed with a thoughtful layout. vi-key support appreciated. Esc to quit instantly not appreciated. I object to the message prompt: having new messages on top makes it hard to follow, so one ends up doing the grey-scale fade out, but then old messages are very hard to read. Couple this with the lack of onscreen effects and often I don't know what scroll or potion did. One memorable time I read a scroll just before a skeleton killed me, and only could learn its function by looking at the most greyed out entry of a new game. I really like the auto-pickup and squelch of inferior items

2 - Good old hack and slash. Having whole inventory on screen helps immersion very much. Worst thing is annoying tendency of monsters to flee.

2

2 - Well balanced and a fun game. Standard coffee-break roguelike.

2 - Inventory on screen has been done (also by 7DRL). Minimap with blinking monsters and items gives new depth to items of detection.

1

1 - Very standard dungeon crawl.

3 - Many monsters, quite a lot of items. Several dungeon generation algorithms. Minimap and timed effects. Has player statuses like confusion and poison.

3

3 - Impressive range of terrains, items, and monsters.

3

3

3 - Very much a roguelike

Average hack and slash with few twists added. If you can live with DoH eating most of your CPU time or have very good computer this can be given a go. Especially noteworthy is its interface. Whole inventory on screen with minimap ensures really smooth playing experience. No window except short queries for item choice ever appear. Mouse acts as constantly activated look command and is used for aiming ranged attacks.

Pretty game with a good variety of items and enemy behaviours. Also some really nice level generators. Quite a lot packed in here for 7 days.

Destiny of Heroes is a straightforward dungeon crawl. An impressive variety of terrains and monsters ensures each journey is memorable.

3

2 - A bit buggy when switching between windows, and could badly do with a quit-confirm when pressing escape. Can also bug out on death.

2 - Feature complete, but rough around the edges. Often the player can be placed in an unwinnable situation from the start

3

2 - Colours are messy but functional enough. 4-way movement is surprisingly frustrating

2 - Standard ASCII choices, though some of the color choices are a bit garish, would have been a 3 if I could remap the keys

2

3 - A really good laugh this. Flavour messages really help to add to the atmosphere, and the different mixes of monster abilities produce some cool results.

2 - Unless I am playing this game wrong, it is harder than most 7DRLs I've played. While I don't mind harder games, I was unable to get through the 3rd dungeon and the game didn't have the draw to keep me playing

2

3 - Enemy changing on the fly is very funky, and having it all displayed to the player makes the most of the interesting system.

2 - The mutating feature is interesting, but it doesn't have as much on an impact on gameplay as I expected.

2

3 - Could do with some polish, but the variety of traits and behaviours is very impressive

2 - The key and supporting features of this game are on par with most decent 7DRLs

3

3 - Very roguelike indeed. About as procedural as a game can get!

3 - ASCII, procedurally generated levels, permadeath

This is a game of you vs the RNG. Levels will randomly change over time, and enemy abilities or features will change greatly too. The god of chaos will taunt and threaten you as you make your passage through, and all current enemy traits are displayed on the side. An eminently replayable game. Beware the reproducing undead web-laying hivemind troglodytes!

A coffee break game that needs polish. The mutating feature is interesting, but it tends to be more of a timer to find the exit, as eventually the monsters will get ranged attacks that really ruin your day. This one would have probably had a lot more 3's as a 10DRL.

3 - Polished, didn't have it crash and felt like a real game albeit a bit unbalanced (if you are confronted with lv2 enemies in the starting rooms, you are dead)

2 - Gameplay could do with some polish, but a post-7drl release does address some issues

3 - Appears complete with no serious bugs.

3 - Looking nice, mouse based UI clean and straightforwards

2 - Wonderful graphics, but it's let down by poor camera controls and inventory niggles

2 - Amazing work on graphics and sound. The way the new "cards" drop into existence is very well done. The bounce-fight of enemies is good and the pop up of numbers is understandable. I love the whole card feel that is used for items. Feels like a table-top game. But.... the UI is painful. Focus and Rest are beside each other as buttons. Focus is a pure UI controller, Rest is a game command. I seriously thought focus was some special mode for your weapons rather than something to lock the camera, and was about to whine about how silly the wasd camera movement was when all I wanted was for it to follow my character. The inventory is very cryptic. I see a new item on the ground, I can't seem to see its stats, or even what it is, without picking it up. But if my inventory is full, I can't pick up. Light.... it is unclear if there is a gameplay use of torches other than making things easier for the human to see. Which means people will ignore them and just squint at the monitor and curse the dark colours. But even lit they seem too strong and garish - I'd instead dump torches entirely and put a strong ambient light everywhere so people can appreciate the art more.

3 - Nice challenge!

1 - Repetitive and lacking variety

2 - Difficulty figuring out where I could path find kept breaking me out of the zone of play. This could be a very fun dungeon crawl - I'd say abandon the movement point turn system (which just artificially breaks up any long walks into a series of stutters) and go full turn based. Then find a good camera and stick to it so players don't even have to know there are camera controls, and put in keyboard movement too - mice aren't good for this sort of d-pad crawling. If these UI roadblocks were removed, there'd be an addictive game here I think.

2 - Build the level as you explore sounds interesting, although the end effect may be the same for the playerl I found a cool scroll that seems to destroy a whole room though (and used it on the room I was standing on)

2 - Gameplay is mostly standard fair, but the equipment system has a touch of individuality and the dungeon exploration has a very different feel

2 - The explicit building of dungeons by revealing one card at a time is something that may often be done internally by roguelikes, but it is very cool to see done explicitly. I also like how that card metaphor spread throughout the game.

3 - Even if I imagine this as a console game, it still clicks me as a above average scope. Then they added the 3D graphics and sound (Unity may have helped a lot, but why are the tools there if not to use theml)

3 - Very impressive work for 7 days. Perhaps more style than substance, but it is rather nice style.

3 - Not only is this a 3d roguelike, and not only does it have tiles, but it also has a lot of roguelike to it too! Lots of stats, potions, items, etc.

2 - Random generation is pre-fab based which is a turndown, but it's a roguelike for the rest!

3 - Turn-based, random levels, random items, experience levels, hunger clock

3 - Random maps, random items, tactical combat on the actual map. Yep, a roguelike.

A nice room-based 3D-graphics roguelike

Not a traditional looking roguelike, but it's still dungeon-crawling of a sort. The 3D graphics are of a really nice quality, though the camera is hard to get as you want and map-clicking only works when it's at the right angle. Gameplay is simple fair, and enjoyable enough, but it gets old pretty fast, especially as the whole dungeon feels extremely samey.

When you see a web-based 3d roguelike you may fear you are seeing a techdemo. Pitman Krumb is no tech demo, but a serious attempt at a fully featured roguelike. Interestingly, the web-based and 3dness are not where it goes for innovation, but instead in its "card" system which results in a strong feeling of playing some tangible real world table top game.

3 - complete and fairly polished.

1 - May crash randomly. When you switch mind the pet is suddenly able to wear armor and wield weapons.

2 - A few bugs, but lots of features well-implemented

1 - Some crashing bugs prevent from enjoying the gameplay experience

3 - well made ascii aesthetics, nice font & colors and the structure of the UI and map is pleasing to the eye.

3 - Neato! Fading colored smell looks well too.

3 - Nice look and keybindings

3 - Looks pretty cool, gfx and console mode are provided. Seems to use the same engine as last year's 7DRLs

3 - the body switching mechanics is great & lets the player allow the computer to worry about picking up items and managing the inventory to a great extent. Otherwise standard roguelike gameplay.

2 - Helping your master is fun. Learning how not to cross him is not so funny though.

2 - Good AI on your master makes the game much more enjoyable, though it can be slow-paced

2 - Premise works, playing a dog/elf combo is pretty fun

3 - playing the pet and allowing for temporary body switching is a nice and well executed idea that changes the nature of the game in fundamental ways.

3 - Smell in dungeon has been talked a lot on rgrd newsgroup but this is actual implementation in action and done well! The effect is excellent when you go blind. A pity your nose is most useful in tracking your master but rarely good warns about monsters more than sight.

2 - Not an entirely new mechanic, but it is very neatly done

2 - Being able to control your pet: What every nethack player has wished for

2 - the game doesn't have an overwhelming supply of items or monsters, but enough to carry it through.

2 - One would wish senses unique to pets were developed even further.

2 - Good for 7 days, and post-7DRL releases fix a few bugs and add some nice tiles

2 - It's a basic dungeon crawl, only with the pet gimmick; introducing a novel feature into the existing roguelike formula

3 - classic roguelike gameplay beside the body switching.

3 - Yes, definitely.

3 - Most of the classic features are here

3 - Definitively Roguelike

Inversion of Control have you play a psychic pet (cat or dog) who is able to mind-control his human master for a limited amount of time. This seemingly small twist on standard roguelike game-play has a profound impact on the game, particularly where it comes to letting the human be controlled by the AI for all the tedious dungeon crawling mainstay (such as inventory management) and only taking control of them when the action begins.

You and your master ... no. Your master and you descend into some hole for a reason unknown to you. You love him very much. While journeying in the dungeon you bring him useful stuff, lead single enemies so he does not wade into a group and sometimes meow (or bark) at him to ask for something. Key in this game is to ask for a rest when you need it and ask to wait whenever necessary and do the scouting yourself. Bark away, your master has been so long with you he is able to understand you easily. Add temporary mind swapping (beware! it is buggy) on top of all that.

You are a pet following your master, but able to issue orders and control him directly now and then. The partner AI is very well-implemented, and there are some neat abilities. The scent-tracking is quite a cool idea, but ultimately not very useful. The latest version of the game is most definitely worth playing.

Pet control is a nice premise and it works pretty ok. A shame the game's a little buggy with weird messages and some crashes. Sniffing is interesting and works ok, some "control" commands don't seems to work properly. The Adventurer AI is pretty decent, he seems to explore the whole floor, pick up arrows and bolts for his weapons, rest when tired, and then go to the next level. Pretty nice entry!

3

3

2

2

3

2

3

2 - Would be nice to have better control over your companions

2

2

2 - Survive timer, goal other than finding the powerful artifact, inventory-less

2

3

2

2

3

2 - Misses some points for lack of tactical combat

3

Pretty fun and accessible, includes a simplified allied AI, would be cooler if you had better means to cooperate with them

A fun, short game where you must protect a village from hordes of undead. Other heroes are fighting them too, and it can be enjoyable to see them do battle and call for you to join in. Interface and display are a little lacking, but it's functional and doesn't detract much from the fun. A great work for 7 days.

3 - Multi-level dungeons, 3 classes, around 20 enemy types, seems pretty balanced

3

3 - Complete, stable, with victory screen. Nicely balanced.

2 - Nothing amazing and nothing disappointing. The use of the mouse seems forced though

3

2 - The health bars in particular are garish. The end of prayers isn't as obvious as the start. Some of the sfx, like poition drinking, pauses the game which is annoying. Use of vi-keys loved, but the Esc to quit the game instantly is not loved.

2 - Solid coffee break-style gameplay. Aside from the 3 classes, not a ton of replayability

2

2 - Well balanced fun game, a very standard coffee break game.

2 - Playing the villains has been done, but for removing the auto-heal feature earns it a two

1

2 - Reversing the dungeon crawl direction is always an interesting twist. A nice collection of 3 different playing types, too, which actually feel different.

2 - Pretty much exactly what I expect for a 7DRL

2

2 - The author properly cared more about polish than feature count.

3 - All the major features aside from auto-heal are here

3

3 - Definitely a roguelike

Decent coffee break game. The balance between the 3 classes seems a bit off, but I can accept that the Orc is the easy setting, Goblin as medium and Kobold as hard. Very complete as well, with many spells, weapons and armors available.

Polished roguelike in which you play an orc, kobold or goblin and fight against the horrid humans, elves, halflings and dwarves. Nice interface and interesting items help to make it a very enjoyable game.

Defender of the Deep provides you the chance to fight off the adventurer invasion. It goes beyond a simple reversal of dungeon direction and nicely themes the adventure. The choices of three different races: orc, kobold, or goblin, lead to three different mechanics and playstyles. Perfect for those looking for a normal roguelike.

3 - Really polished. Could not find anything obviously missing, a bug or even a typo.

3 - 6 unique areas, a variety of items and monsters, seems balanced

2 - Seems incomplete in areas

3 - Beautiful looks. Dark and light areas are easily distinguished at a glance. Small number of keys to learn.

2 - Functional, reminiscent of the Crawl interface, good use of lighting effects

3 - Very nice colour choices and interface, though the main map display is a bit small

2 - Exploring ruins of Dwarftown is like an adventure in search of treasure. Map generation is great and it feels like searching through a city built by intelligent race. Sadly not very replayable and balance is badly skewed. It is very hard to die even if careless.

2 - Solid coffee break game, low replayability, and it could have used a bit more difficulty

2 - Enemy variety is nice, but the game is too easy and lacks replayability

2 - This is second roguelike game I see with lights on walls. Features non-annoying peaceful monsters worth 0 xp like animals and glowing fungi.

1 - Nothing really new here, though I'm guessing that the developer had bigger plans

1

3 - There is forest, rat caves and four Dwarftown districts. Good number of items, few monsters even have various abilities. Quite impressive.

2 - But just barely, the game is a decent experience, but it is a bit thin on features

2

3

3 - Hits all the major and most of the minor points

3

Long ago dwarfs built a magnificent fortress but it fell under combined goblin, orc and ogre assault. Rumor says there are still two great artifacts to be found there. One giant map to be explored. Lighting mechanics are very well fleshed out. Well worth time spent playing.

Good one-shot coffee break game. A bit of a beginner's game, I didn't really have any problems beating it on my first serious attempt, but it was still fun to explore. Definitely in need of some more varied gameplay.

A simple dungeon crawler with a nice interface and branching dungeon choices. Seems like it was aiming for more than it achieved.

3 - seems to have everything a 7drl would need

2 - While the stealth features of this game are extremely well developed, some of the more common features of roguelike like items and such are missing

2 - Seems bug-free, but lacks some polish in the gameplay and could do with in-game help

2 - basic colored ascii terminal roguelike.

2 - Standard ASCII look and feel, controls are functional but not exceptional

2 - Colour choices are functional, but main display is frustratingly small, making it hard to navigate the large twisty levels

2 - Trying to sneak up on the enemies in order to stab them is fun for a while but I didn't feel the need to reply the game after the first go.

2 - The game is fun to play once but the high difficulty level makes it frustrating a game to master, and there isn't really a reason to replay after winning.

2 - Lurking round corners waiting to dash and stab is fun for a while, but gets repetitive

2 - the run & stab mechanics is uncommon in most roguelikes.

3 - The stealth mechanic in this game makes the game play completely differently than most roguelikes, the closest I can think of is an Assassin run in Crawl

3 - Very interesting stealth system with several unique features

2 - pretty much what i'd expect from a 7drl - a small but complete game

2 - The objective of this game appears to have been to develop and implement a quality stealth engine with a short demonstration

2

3 - it's a roguelike in every way.

3 - ASCII, procedurally generated levels and permadeath are all present

3 - Main roguelike features, but it's a shame the first level is always pre-set

In Kusemono you play a fast and agile assassin who goes down an anthill in a quest to kill its queen. Since ant are famously slow and confused creatures, the game's main mechanic involves running at unaware ants and stabbing them before they notice you. It's a nice and uncommon twist on an otherwise standard roguelike.

Playing kusemono is like playing a fun little tech demo for a stealth game. The demo shows off the stealth mechanism and lots of guards to cut down ninja style. In the end, I enjoy the game despite the sharp learning curve and short length, but I think that artificially lengthening the game but adding more levels, would have detracted from the fun.

A stealth roguelike where the only effective means of combat is hiding, luring enemies one by one, and then dashing up and slitting their throats. This is done in a very interesting and fun way, but it does get tiresome after a while. Getting immediately mobbed when descending stairs is also a major nuisance.

3

3

2 - Seems mostly bug-free but lacking polish

3

3

2 - Ugly colours and I'm not fond of the key choices but it all works

2

2 - Pretty standard roguelike fare

2 - Not a lot of variety to play, but decent enough

1

2 - Temperature, which hasn't been fully explored

1 - Has a touch of the Frozen Depths heat mechanic, but not enough to really affect gameplay

2

2

2 - A good featureset for 7 days

3

3

3 - Pure roguelike

Pretty standard roguelike, there's a plot but in my opinion the game itself fails to connect with it, it also has temperature mechanics

Whilst this doesn't break new boundaries it is a solid enough roguelike, with a decent interface, no terrible bugs, and it seems reasonably balanced. Equipment items have a nice variety to them, though enemies are mostly uninteresting. The heat mechanic could do with expanding upon, but overall it's a good game.

2 - Unpolished. Enemies are very dumb.

2 - Poor pathfinding and allied AI reveal missing polish

2 - Unbalanced later on, and freed revolutionaries do little, but seems bug-free with a polished interface

3 - Good user interface.

3 - Looks pretty nice with the help of libtcod. Keybindings pretty straightforward and guided in-game

3 - Good interface with nice libtcod colour choices (ie. not the usual ugly mess)

2 - Good for a while.

2 - It's fun, but nothing mind-breaking :)

2 - Lacks depth of play, later on becomes seemingly impossible to progress without extreme luck

1 - Allies have been done many times over.

2 - Releasing prisoners, inventory-less, bribing enemies, coffee-break gameplay

1 - Could have been better if the freed revolutionaries were more useful or relevant to the game

2 - Average scope.

2

2 - Two dungeon types and decent number of enemy types

3 - Passes cleanly.

3

3 - Pretty standard roguelike

Revolution has started and you play as one of the rebels. Potential allies are everywhere but you need either to free or bribe them. In ensuing chaos you go deep to kill the tyrant responsible for all this. Nothing too special.

Nice entry with pretty poor pathfinding which hurts gameplay badly. Variety on the roguelike levels. I appreciate the direction toward simple and fun gameplay.

A simple dungeon crawler with basic items and a few enemy types. Seems to lack a levelling system, which makes it very hard to progress as enemies get more powerful. You can rescue prisoners from cells, but this doesn't seem to have any gameplay advantages. General combat and exploration are fun, though as one would expect from a 7DRL they don't have much depth or variety.

2 - Could use some little more polish. Look mode has inconsistencies and flavor text has totally no effects.

2

3 - Complete game as designed

2 - Visuals okay but keys are very inconsistent. You need to turn off numlock in look mode and even then moving the cursor diagonally is impossible.

2

2 - Levels are very haphazard and hard to parse. Not being able to move look cursor through out of fov is frustrating. Lack of vi-keys makes diagonals annoying. I kept picking up spoons wondering where they were going - should likely just squelch. Lots of flavour text appreciated, but needs grammar work. Typoes like "piked" rather than "spiked"

2 - Hack 'n' slash plus lead 'em into lava for most part.

2

2 - Setting is intriguing, and gameplay interesting.

2 - Changing from lost soul through progressively more material undead forms is neat but that is all.

2

2 - Starting with 0 HP is a nice twist. Needs more clarity on level up/down, however. Very neat how one uses lava for offense.

2 - Suitable for a 7DRL.

2

2 - A good scope.

3 - Nothing to scoff at. Even using a spoon as a weapon is acceptable.

3

3 - I believe it qualifies.

Hack and slash meets infernal theme. You are a lost soul. To regain your humanity you need to ascend and see your enemies die at your hand or burn in lava. At first you are immaterial and may float over hazardous terrain but at some point you will get some flesh and should avoid it.

A game where you start dead and must try to work your way back up to life, fighting off the denizens of hell in the process. It has some interesting touches, such as starting off without HP (you have no body initially) and gaining levels by both enemy death and dungeon progression. Could be made into a more interesting and atmospheric game if the humour was cut out and some of the flavour text were given real game effects.

You start not as a young adventurer, but as a damned soul. Your battle to escape hell is also one to regain your lost self.

3 - game has a nice world map, many spells and interesting battles.

2 - Some scrolls and potions do not work.

1 - Buggy, crashes sometimes, can get stuck in walls, severely lacking polish

2 - standard ascii fare, nothing to write home about but not lacking in any way either.

2 - Average look but gets the job done. Curiously quit command is only accessible from help screen.

2 - Standard terminal look and controls. Some colour choices are very poor.

2 - I've had fun blasting spells at enemies, but the game was not challenging enough to keep me interested for long.

2 - With right scroll and potion available the Mad Mage is virtually untouchable. As long as you have enough known provisions this is way too easy.

1 - Very hard to get into, and very monotonous to play.

2 - nice twist on the identification game, with all items ID'd in the first turn and progressively become unknown.

2 - Forgetfulness is neat subversion of identification mechanic.

2 - Forgetting what items do is interesting, but ultimately affects gameplay very little. Side-by-side levels make for a change from the usual stairs-hunting, but not a particularly good change when the content is so low and not all the levels intersect well.

3 - tons of spells and items, plenty of options to choose from in combat.

3 - Quite a lot of different monsters. Varied locations each with own map generation algorithm. Many scrolls and potions.

2 - Was trying for more than it achieved, but ultimately failed to pull it off. The large world plays against the game, since you spend far too much time trying to explore. A good number of items, but many don't work or are very similar to each other.

3 - it's a classic roguelike with an unusual ID mechanic.

3

3 - Standard roguelike mechanics, with some twists here and there.

Mad Mage pits you as an elderly and forgetful wizard with a bag full of powerful magic scroll and potions. As you go through the game you progressively start forgetting what each of these do, which is an interesting twist on the usual id game & provides some interesting gameplay. It seems like the author has spent a lot of time adding content to this game and it shows with the plethora of spells and items you can use to fight your way.

Identify turned upside down. You have over two hundred different powerful magical items but over time may forget what they are. Of course like in a self respecting roguelike game neither scrolls nor potions come with labels. Find the Ossuary where it will become obvious why you intended to come there.

Mad Mage has a large number of very random environs and a weird array of randomly named creatures, but ultimately it's all very samey. Monsters can be ignored and the huge world explored freely, but there's not a lot to do. Gameplay itself is minimal, and most of your time is spent wandering lost around large levels, trying not to get stuck inside walls. The item forgetting mechanic is the most interesting aspect, but since items are mostly not needed it really doesn't do much for the game. The game would have been much better sticking to a standard dungeon crawler mechanic with the interesting item system. Ultimately I think the developer was trying to cram too much into 7 days - alas for such noble aspirations!

2 - You "kill" equipment instead of getting it when inventory is full. Items and monsters may start in impassable terrain.

3

2 - I guess it's as complete as the dev intended, but clearly missed polish

2 - Some item placement bugs and could do with some gameplay expansion

3

2

2 - Appearance is clean, keybindings are a bit weird

3 - Nice colour choices and the "valid moves" box is cool

2 - Each enemy requires slightly different approach.

2

1 - You can wander the forest and kill the King, or die, or be checkmated.

2 - Interesting for a while but lacks replayability

2 - Orb of the Turk and vulnerability ring create interesting combo. You can walk in deep "'s where your vision is limited without fear of getting hit because these two artifacts will stop you.

1

2 - There's the Orb of the Turk and the Ring of Vulnerability combo, they could prove as interesting uniques in a full fledged game.

3 - The chess-based features are very novel and well-implemented

2 - Could use some more content.

2

2

2 - Only one level and 5 enemy types

3 - In all aspects.

3

2

3 - Meets the core conditions

It is standard roguelike with a twist. Two items you get at a start allow you to block moves that would result in you getting hit. Used well this guarantees you can kill without taking a scratch semi-randomly walking drunkards and hounds even if you do not see them coming. Worth taking a shot.

A simple forest crawler focused around the "orb of the turk" feature. Which prevents you from taking damage or dying

You start with a ring that makes any hit kill you, and an orb that prevents you from making a move that would result in death. The end result is a very cool implementation of certain chess rules, where the only way to lose is to end up in checkmate. You can take these items off and just play it as a normal roguelike, but where's the fun in thatl Ultimately it's a bit too easy to just dash to the King and off with his head, and there's not a great deal of variety in content, but it's definitely worth having a play to enjoy the unique ruleset.

3 - nice village and overworld, seems like fairly nice amount of content for a 7drl.

2 - Everything in the game basically works, but either I'm not grasping the plot, or there isn't a ton of content

2 - Some bugs but mostly quite complete. Lacks balancing.

2 - colors could be nicer but otherwise standard ascii rl presentation.

2 - Standard terminal feel and controls for the most part, could have used key remapping

3 - Very nice ASCII with well-chosen colours and a decent interface.

1 - I'm sure there is more to the game than that but I couldn't find anything much to fight except for random encounters in the desert with dogs and jackals.

2 - The game isn't too deep at the moment, but I enjoyed playing until I ran out of options

1 - Unfortunately quite monotonous and gruelling to play.

2 - character creation system is unorthodox, otherwise I didn't manage to see enough of the game to encounter much innovation before dying.

2 - It might desire a higher score if all the features suggested were implemented, I've never played Crusader RL before

1 - Copies ADOM a lot, down to the same wilderness encounters and battle messages.

3 - seems like there's a lot of stuff in there, the town in particular is quite detailed & there is a nice overworld too.

2 - Good scope, managed to get a bunch down, also didn't manage to get a bunch done

2 - the game was not all made in 7 days - most code existed already (nothing wrong with that, just explaining why it doesn't get a high score for Scope)

3 - classic roguelike gameplay.

3 - An '@' running around killing letters and such, the only weakness is a lack procedurally generated content, but I have a suspicion that I am just missing it.

3

Alamut drops you in what i assume is the middle east at some point in the past. After you choose your religion (Islam or Christianity) and some other miscellaneous traits you find yourself in the overworld map (doesn't seem to be randomly generated). After a short walk you will find a village, which is nicely rendered and gives you some NPCs to talk to. I managed to get a quest from one of them but couldn't find a way to actually complete it. If you wander through the desert you will quickly be ambushed by jackles or dogs - since I found no way to heal these random encounters quickly spelled my demise. It really seems like a game with a lot of promise, but perhaps a bit more hand-holding would have helped bring its positive sides to light.

Looks to be an ambitious Crusader era roguelike that reached a bit to far, but still resulted in a playable, if short game. While I might pick this one up a few more times to make sure that I didn't miss anyone while reviewing it, I could see this earning a lot more 3's if the developer have settled for a 10DRL.

The middle-eastern theme is interesting, and it seems to have a decent amount of complexity to items and skills, but ultimately lacks enough polish to be easily playable. Kill x monster quests are rather dull, and the food clock will kill you before you get far if the unbalanced enemies don't. Still, this definitely has potential, especially if it can break itself free of the ADOM copying.

2 - Lacks a goal to pursue. Leveling for the sake of leveling is not enough. It is also slow.

2

2 - The single song resets everytime you die, frustrating you. SquidPony seems to have no end of powerups, eventually removing my status bar making me unkillable. And then I couldn't find the boss so gave up.

2 - Visuals great in all regards but vi keys are not easy to use for everyone.

2

1 - Health is way too hidden to tell if you are about to die. Message bar puts new messages on top in the same colour as old ones, making it hard to tell what is new. Colour scheme isn't bad at default depth, but near surface nearby fishes disappear into the colours. Controls are workable. l for help much appreciated. I see the intent of the zig-zag approach to the layers, but I totally misunderstood it until I got to the surface, having figured the top would be zlevel -7 to zlevel -2, not having looked at the numbers closely. Up is also backwards to me, I expect up to the left and top so as to match english text.

2 - Fighting g's can be fun but it is only thing to do. Collected rock candies do not get counter.

2

1 - Unfortunately the fun of exploring the 3d space is hampered by the difficulty in understanding enemy movements. I think there is an energy based movement system allowing enemies to move more than once a turn, which then means I often don't see where enemies come from - I keep having salmons and guppies seemingly teleport to my location. Then, when you power up to deal with this, you find yourself lost in an utterly huge ocean. Finding the boss in the 100,000 cells they might be in, looking at the top 10 layers of the map, is not something I want to do. A much smaller game, ideally one with important 3d cave structures, and with turn based movement for enemies so one can see how enemies move from screen to screen, would make a much better experience.

3 - Swimming in 3D. Wooot! Underwater roguelike.

3

3 - It is an impressive attempt at a true 3d roguelike. And a very clever way to display all layers at once.

2 - About average.

2

2 - The built ocean is huge and full of life, all living and fighting as one floats along as a squid.

3 - If I ever start to wonder what would a rogue do underwater EmoSquid can be the answer.

3

2 - There is turn based, random dungeon, and tactical on screen combat. But there is very little depth to said combat and the only item seems to be healing items.

As some kind of fish swim in 3D environment. You have beautiful spherical field of vision there. Worth playing just to see that. Gameplay itself is not especially interesting.

This game is weird... You are on a multi-plane surface, and so it's a roguelike with true 3D gameplay, allowing full Z-axis movement and interaction. This is... confusing, but interesting nonetheless. The controls take some getting used to, but they work well enough. The game's music ain't my taste, but it can be easily turned off or replaced. Overall lacking on varied content, but it's a pretty cool concept work.

EmoSquid is probably the only true 3d roguelike. Yep, ignore those webgl and unity games. In this, you are a squid exploring the depths of the ocean. Unfortunately, it does do a good job of showing you just how damn big things get when you add a third dimension.

2 - Runs a little slow, targeting interface is a bit awkward. You can kill the king who you are supposed to rescue and nothing happens. Cannot choose team member classes.

2 - Missing some polish as evidenced by the end game and some missing features

2 - Many obviously missing features, but it's stable and functional at least

2 - Good looks but chasms should be marked in something other than black. Controls fine except esc not asking before quitting.

3 - Very nice looking and usable

2 - A bit overwhelming at first, but the interface works well enough

3 - Makes you want play again with different teams to try building lots of golems, bribing strong enemies or going with musket soldier party.

2 - Even in its current stage there's some variety on the classes, weapons and enemies

2 - No real challenge and not much depth to the game at the moment. Post-7DRL fix is much much better.

2 - Its not the first team roguelike but gimmicks like throwing stuff at buddies are well executed.

2 - A "Final Fantasy Tactics" Roguelike has been tried some times, but this is the closer I've seen

2 - Multi-party roguelikes have been done before, but this does have some cool unique player abilities

2 - Few features did not made it in but otherwise strong 2.

3 - Full action points system including ranged combat, simple creature summoning and bribing, map extensibility

2 - Some nice features in here, but it was clearly aiming for more

2 - Qualifies but action point system is not roguelike.

2 - Fails Random Level Generation and single player. Levels are all one screen big but that's ok. It's a roguelike for the rest of it.

2 - The interface is roguelike, but the party and turns system is clearly of another genre

Lead a team of gnomish adventurers of varying classes to kill enemies, recruit or build additional members and finally lead the king back home. Gameplay is slow since you need to switch from character to character. When you clear the level things get a bit irritating. You are skipping turns to get that one gnome to collect then divide stuff or to use stairs. Lacks polish and the escape key instantly bailing you out is evil.

Pretty nice entry which allows you to play a band of gnomes going underground to rescue their king. The full tactics system is on place, coupled with traditional roguelike inventory management and combat system, there are different classes of gnomes each with special skills.

You play a party of 3 gnomes (with the ability to recruit/create others) in open caverns, moving and fighting in an X-COM style. Directional FOV and different class abilities are quite interesting, but a lot of intended features are very prominently missing, and the game only lasts 2 levels. With a bit of work this could be made much more fun.

2 - as the author said, basic exploration is there and the combat works (presumably as planned). However there are no spells, abilities, character progression or anything beyond "move into enemy to cause damage". As far as I can tell all player characters are identical except for their name & ascii art.

2

3 - Very well polished. There is a hiccup when you have a dead player that it doesn't highlight the next player properly.

3 - I think this looks very good for a curses game: extra points for ascii art for each character and monster and 3d.

3 - Extremely charming old school "graphics"

3 - Excellent use of ascii art. Dungeons shockingly well rendered. I would object to the dark blue map that is very bad contrast to read, however.

2 - the basic premise is Wizardry without the atrocious UI. I played it a several times, albeit not for very long. I think that if benhem would have managed to get some of other features he had planned like spells and character progression I could have easily spent an hour playing it.

2 - Nice for a short whilst but the novelty soon wears off

2 - Not sure about a win condition as I grew bored before reaching it. Having your party resurrect for each battle really avoids long term thinking. But the controls are smooth enough to make it worth tooling around the dungeon for a few minutes.

2 - ascii wizardry. You don't see that every day. On the other hand the innovation pretty much stops at that, gameplay-wise I didn't see anything I haven't seen before, but the novel presentation is well made.

2 - Not seen this done on ssh before! No real gameplay innovation but kudos for the amazing look.

1 - While all curses games could be built as an ssh tunnel, when you are forced into that it definitely affects one's perception. The gameplay is standard gold box - FPS four way dungeon transitioning to tactical gird.

2 - the scope is appropriate for a 7drl - it brings something to the table and you can play it several times before getting bored.

2

2 - The graphics are where the scope lies. A nice variety of monsters face you in the dungeons, and the dungeons themselves are very well rendered. But in terms of your own actionsl It seems to just be very rudimentary hack and slash.

2 - not a roguelike, but a related genre (pseudo-3d dungeon crawler).

2 - I'm guessing the dungeons are randomly generated, and there's permadeath, but this otherwise lacks any RL feel.

1 - Hack and slash dungeon crawls aren't roguelikes. Roguelikes live in the tactical realm where exploration of the dungeon is part and parcel with combat in the dungeon, not separate mini games. The lineage is much more from the dungeon modes of early Ultimas than from Rogue.

I think I would have played this game as originally planned by the author for a good while - controls are intuitive and I didn't really find myself puzzled by what anything on the screen meant, even without explanation. The "3d ascii" view is very well done (better than I would have imagined). Unfortunately the game currently offers little more than mindless bump-into-enemies-until-they-die combat, and it therefor gets boring quickly. Never the less I played it 4 times so it must get the basics right!

This game seeps "old school" from its pores. It's played by ssh and everything is represented in ASCII, but... it's a first person 3D-esque dungeon crawler, very much in the style of old AD&D Gold Box games. You control a party of 4, and monster encounters are fought on a grid. It all looks very funky, and is a fun short distraction, but unfortunately lacks any real depth of play.

If you have an ssh client, I would recommend quickly connecting to check this game out. Modern high speed internet connectivity results in an interactive game considerably unlike the BBS Door games I recall. The gameplay isn't roguelike, however, and isn't deep either, so it is mostly an art/tech demo.

2 - basically @ walking on the map bumping into rats & picking up torches and healing potions.

2 - Seems like the game meets the creator's intents, though it lack polish

2 - It is hard to tell browser problems from game problems. But my message list and health status wouldn't update, making it hard to know when or if I could chug potions. So I tended to die very unexpectedly.

3 - 3d semi-ascii looks good, better than most other 7drls.

3 - The game is basically a cut down Rogue with a gorgeous frontend. Even the controls and 1 person mode are decent

3 - The visuals are beautiful. 3d done right for a roguelike - it is a wonderful claustrophobic feeling peering down through the giant pillars at myself. The enemies are very nicely rendered.

1 - not much to it beyond walking around the map. If there was any challenge to it I didn't come across it.

1 - Basically just a tech demo, not much on the way of enjoyable gameplay.

3 - High rated because, while you will spend less than ten minutes with it, being web browser you won't spend any time getting it to work . Unless you aren't running chrome already :> It is one that should be played for a few minutes just to experience the 3d perspective which is very well done.

1 - we've seen 3d roguelikes before, and even ascii 3d roguelikes. Gameplay-wise there isn't much in it to innovate with.

2 - High quality graphics and lighting effects are cool in a roguelike, but nothing earth shaking here

1 - No gameplay innovation

1 - nothing but walking around and waking rats.

2 - Building a WebGL engine for a roguelike is a bit of work, but the scope of the gameplay is pretty cut down.

2 - The gameplay aspects are not exceptional - @ on map with monsters. But it is nice map generation and the WebGL is darn impressive.

3 - basically a roguelike but a very thin one.

3 - What gameplay there is, is very rogeulike

3 - Could be made pure ascii without affecting gameplay. But it would definitely change the feeling entirely.

A Little Anxious When It's Dark is a roguelike made in js and using webgl to run inside the browser without any plugins. Other than that I don't think there was an attempt to do anything out of the ordinary. You can pick up torches & healing potions and bump into rats to attack them. I didn't notice using or not using the torches to make any sort of gameplay difference.

This game is a good demonstration of what can be done with HTML 5, and the probably what would happen if EA commissioned a roguelike.

The underlying game is a very simple roguelike - smash rats, then kobolds, then goblins, then I don't know, as I'm not good enough. But the 3d perspective really rethinks the traditional FPS or isometric 3d into something functional, fun, and emotional.

2 - Needs balancing.

2

3 - Well packaged and presented

3 - Visuals fine but those NetHack style rooms mixed with tiles look weird. Reconfigurable keys with sensible defaults.

2

2 - Good look, default keybindings are a bit confusing, music is a bit annoying

2 - Fun, fast gameplay.

2

2 - There's a game here, although not many gameplay choices but the way of the warrior. Death by unnoticed hunger is common.

1

1

1 - Nothing new at all

2

2

2 - A worthy effort for 7 days

3

3

3 - Roguelike indeed, although I missed a leveling system

Yet another Rogue remake. This time with background music, sound effects and very weirdly looking dungeon. One room might be in NetHack style, another with stone walls and yet another carved out.

A basic dungeon crawler with cute 8-bit tiles. Object is to gather as much gold as you can before you die or starve. Has a very niggly inventory system, no warnings on low hunger or health, no item information, and potions mostly seem to be death in a bottle. Not much gameplay variety either. It is all presented nicely though, and the ability to redefine keys is especially welcome.

A simple and good looking classic dungeon crawler, only one class, gold-highscore oriented. Death by hunger is annoying so keep an eye on that country.

2 - Some polish, but enemy path-finding is poor and allies sometimes attack the player

3 - Achieved completeness, scope is not great but it's complete

3 - Complete, presumably is score based so lack of victory condition is intentional.

3 - Cute look, easy controls

3 - Excellent look and keybindings are straightforward

2 - I didn't find the 1 bit look helped the game. Felt a bit crowded in the small java window. Font choice is likewise odd. Press Any Key is a lie - you have to press a movement key. No vi-key support (though , to pick up is appreciated) which made diagonals a pain.

2 - Not much variety to the game, but public high scores add a bit of incentive to replay

2 - It won't change your life, but fighting for an high score is always fun

2 - Very straight forward dungeon crawl.

1 - Has there been a roguelike Facebook app beforel Game itself has nothing new about it.

1 - Innovation was not the goal of the developer, clearly

1 - Most interesting innovation is the facebook integration that I skipped out on.

2

2 - Map generators seems to work ok, graphics are on place, basic scope

1 - While the AI shows some thought, with monsters using items and the friendly lass, there is very little additional complexity.

3 - Feels more like a generic RPG actually, with little variety in the levels, but ultimately meets most core roguelike features

3 - Roguelike indeed, although I missed a leveling system

2 - Can't put my finger on it, but something is not roguelikish here. I began to suspect the levels may not be procedural, but just draw from a large library of premade levels.

A very simple roguelike that can be played as a javascript or as a Facebook app. The monochrome graphics are cute, and it's easy to get in to. Really lacking in detail or content, but perhaps that's part of the style.

A basic dungeon crawler using SaGa sprites and monster names. Doesn't bring much new to the table but it's stable and challenging. It also connects with facebook to share high scores (although there's no high score table, it just posts to your wall)

A quick to play 2-bit dungeon crawl. Well executed, just requiring more depth.

2 - other than somewhat incomplete GUI this game is surprisingly full-featured.

1 - Very buggy, especially the UI, and many features seem to be missing

2 - Was clearly going the right path but some critical things were missing (like... eh, game balance :P) On the other hand, there's a nice leveling system on place and several kind of enemies and weapons

3 - nice colors & lighting, like the use to Cyrillic signs in a post apocalyptic roguelike.

2 - Stairs can be hard to spot, different windows overlap, targeting is inconsistent, no feedback on what many items do

2 - Looks pretty nice, although there are some UI quirks.

3 - I enjoyed playing this game, nice ranged combat & character progression.

1 - Too easy, lacking content, very repetitive and the bugs ruin any remaining fun

1 - Lack of balance makes you invincible pretty quick, gameplay is linear and maps are one screen big. Generator is pretty poor. No variety on the different enemies

2 - a mix of fallout 1/2 and a roguelike.

1 - The weird characters used for enemies are cool, but there's no real innovation present

2 - Modeling the player as an expedition where each member enhances the qualities of the group in a specific way, including the captain which only job is to make the rest of the team become better more quickly (although very unbalanced)

3 - beyond what i'd expect of a 7drl: nice character progression, combat & items/inventory.

2 - I think it could have done with another day or two to polish off the bugs, as it was obviously aiming to be quite a detailed game

2

3 - entirely roguelike but with a focus on ranged combat.

3 - Simple roguelike fare with an alien theme

3

Kepler-10b is a nice roguelike with an (unstatedl) post apocalyptic theme. The music and sound effects add a lot to the ambience, as do the nice lighting/coloring and Cyrillic enemies. Character progression offers a nice mix of both traits and increasing base attributes.

A game of alien-busting, where you explore a faraway world and kill a bunch of odd looking symbols. You have several other @s following you, meant to be your squad, but they have no gameplay effect beyond increasing some skills/stats. Game is very easy with health regen being higher than the damage dealt by many monsters and what seems to be a bug with too many rank points awarded at level-up. Bugs can make the inventory stop working and in general the interface is badly lacking polish. There's the start of a decent game here, but it's clearly very incomplete.

The history (taken from the website, since there's none in the downloaded game) puts you in a far away planet as leader of a fleeing expedition, you must find the access keys to escape.... The game is pretty unbalanced so I was able to dive to about level 30 and found nothing of interest. I liked the Squad - Unit combo (you are a group but you only control one unit)

2 - seems to be a complete game but suffers from some bugs (crashed on me once) and there is no in-game help.

2 - Polished but contains few features.

3

1 - Buggy, crashes, seems very incomplete

3 - aesthetics are above average but not in any spectacular fashion. Nice colors and effects.

2 - Looks okay but I had to switch both brightness and contrast to 100% on my monitor to be able to play.

3

2 - Mostly okay interface, but the map colours are ugly and many things are hard to make out

2 - I played through several levels, and had a standard hack&slash experience. I am sure there is some twist with the light element but all i discovered is that the level gets very dark when i don't carry a light source.

2 - Figuring how to make most of the cave lit is entertaining for a short while but does not affect tactics much.

2

1 - Gameplay isn't interesting, and bugs make it frustrating to get into

1 - i am sure there is some innovation here but i failed to stumble on it.

2 - Lighting mechanic.

1

2 - The light mechanics are cool and add to the atmosphere significantly

2- standard 7drl scope.

2 - A little smallish but 1 would be undeserved.

2

2

3 - about as much of a roguelike as they get.

2 - Missing that knife or glowing blade on the floor because it is a gray '/' and it was blending with background tile color is unroguelike.

3

3

I can't help but think there is more to Light7DRL than meets the eye, but I didn't manage to find out what. Never the less it seems like a solid hack&slash rl with nice maps, some items to pick up and use, potions, a variety of enemies and an above average aesthetic.

A little demonstration how varying light may change roguelike game mechanics and play. Easy to win but offers not much incentive to be replayed.

The game tries to use light mechanics to add to the atmosphere, but suffers from the same flaws as the latest Doom game - it's *too* dark, making it difficult to navigate areas and many things are impossible to distinguish. Whether or not torches (a vital item) are generated seems down to chance, meaning you have to restart several times just to get going in the game. The frequent crashes are also a nuisance.

1 - Infrequent crashes, invisible messages in curses mode, free to kill civilians in town, suspects, witnesses and airport personnel. Cops do not react unless attacked.

2 - Some bugs and seriously missing polish and variety

3 - Reasonably complete. My main complaint is the lack of map generators and niggling interface issues I've put under aesthetics.

3 - Pretty color scheme and neat inventory. Keys easy plus always visible. Piano music reminds me of some wild west movies but fits nonetheless.

2 - The general look is funky, but not very functional

2 - The music and layout are well done. I object to the red wall colour scheme as a bit too garish. The major aesthetic issues are in the controls. Targeting re-targets everytime the closest person, grabbing citizens rather than criminals. Might argue this is to make crowded fire fights more dangerous, but then shooting citizens has no negative problems. Indeed, I'd expect citizens to flee when a fire fight starts! The message bar doesn't scroll, so you get strange freezes whenever it fills up. The [m]ove command oddly only can be used on the west area of maps, requiring you to hike all the way back. Why not enable whenever no criminals are in sightl The uniformity of the crime scene maps grows annoying. The first half of the town descriptions often seem cut off at the bottom. Talking to an informant, the last pop-up is the "I have something to tell you..", not the first. No vi-keys is annoying, but at least I found the undocumented [l]ook that way

1 - One enemy type. Combat consists of firing until enemy dies and running away when HP ("heroic luck") gets low. Then hide, wait until points regenerate and repeat.

1 - This is unfortunately just painful to play at the moment

1 - There are two possible fun components, the clue-solving and the combat. The combat I don't understand - it seems a mash on the space bar, then mash on '5' to heal. The clue solving is broken up by the combat so I quickly lose track of the mission. Indeed, with frequent deaths I'd fail to even read the mission text, ruining that whole half the game.

1 - Nothing new to find here.

2 - The cityscapes and travelling about looking for clues are kinda cool, though not as well-implemented as one might like

2 - I like the idea of marrying the room-only Where In the World game with a map exploration. Needs more interesting variety of maps, however.

3 - Lots of text included. There are descriptions of city locations, places in the world and enough dialog. Clues are easy to guess but numerous and well chosen.

2 - Was obviously aiming for a higher scope, but ultimately never achieved it

3 - There is a lot of detail here. Unfortunately, it isn't apparent to the casual player. Flavour text is lost in the message window which poorly highlights recent messages. New items are just a black box as I can't see how to tell which ones are better than others.

3 - Definitely. You can attack anyone including Boss Jeff and Lali in your own HQ.

3

2 - The combat engine is too weak to sustain this game - I'd thus say the detective portion becomes dominant, rendering this less roguelike.

Game where you as a detective go into series of places to do a go there and back mission. You need just not to die on way to and vice versa. Bland combat quickly becomes boring between getting clues, figuring out or looking them up and choosing the right city. There is time clock but unless one is going just to fly to all possible cities to check if this is the right one it is not dangerous.

The game is about jetting between cities looking for clues to track down criminals and shoot 'em dead. Has a fun Dick Tracy style to it, with cute music. However the game is itself frustrating to play, with no gameplay balance, poor auto-targeting, levels that are far too large and no variety of content. This was perhaps reaching too far for 7 days.

Elite Detective agency is a hard-boiled detective story. A bit too-hardboiled as you'll gladly leave a trail of innocent civilians dead in your wake rather than bother with correctly aiming your hand gun. The two halves of the game fight with one another, however, rather than form a synergistic whole. The uniform exploration mode experience robs the locals of their sense of identity, causing one to forget about that half the game when exploring them. The exploration sets could be made 1/4 smaller or more, have a bunch of local-themed room/tiles thrown in, and I think the system would mesh better.

2 - Difficulty menu accepts any key, displays dungeon then freezes the game until key corresponding to actual menu item is pressed. No way to quit. Getting 'l' to react instead of casting some spell around itself may fool player there is no help screen.

2 - Feels incomplete

3 - There do seem to be a lot of spells in here, and the game seem stable enough.

2 - Average visuals but game assumes user has some kind of QWER* keyboard layout. There is a try providing keys to play on laptops without numpad but chosen scheme is not guaranteed to be eight adjacent keys.

2 - I really dislike the keys, but it all works okay

2 - The lack of vi-keys is one thing, but the chosen controls made me want to submit a picture of my keyboard showing my [ is not beside my p key. The essential game mechanic is the rune-casting, but where is the on screen reminder of how q-r and a-f bind to the elementsl It took a while to try to determine if I was damaging the enemies or not, all cast spells trigger an "effect", but there is very little feedback if it was meaningful or not. Likewise, there is the trifectria of ctrl/alt/shift casting, which incidentally means hitting l for help will trigger a cast. And I always found the ctrl casting that almost-prompts for a direction to be odd, I almost wanted to hit both at once.

1 - This game seems to be a sandbox to try various elemental spells. Monsters are uninteresting targets for magic. Trying out combinations lasts only a short while.

2 - Without progression it isn't a very lasting game, and it could do with more interesting combinations, but there is still plenty of fun to be had mixing elements together and seeing some of the varied effects

1 - I really like the idea of exploring "spell space" and trying out the combinations - yes, I found all ten elements and have paid attention to the numerous status affectors. But that said, the feedback when I do find a spell is inconsistent, so I'm not sorely tempted to keep exploring.

3 - Rune magic system! A pity it is so undeveloped.

2 - The combination system is interesting and could be fleshed out to a much more fun game

3 - A very interesting approach to rune casting. Elemental effects are well thought out.

1- Magic system is bland and shallow. There is no difference whether you cast Fire or Fire Fire Fire Fire. Earth Life is going to both damage and heal the target hence is useless. Amount of castable different spells is surprisingly small.

2

2 - The scope of the rune casting system seems large, but the rest of the game is limitted.

2 - Itemsl

3 - Lacks progression, but still has most of the basic roguelike mechanics

2 - While there are random maps, the core gameplay is the spell casting system which is not randomized. Thus one brings your knowedge between games, leading to a non-roguelike feel.

Cast spells from ten components. After figuring out water + fire nets steam I was let down earth + fire does not result in magma. Finding out what combinations do what is fun. When this ends Magicko's lack of impressiveness becomes apparent.

A game of element-combining, where you can charge up several spells and combine them to produce varied effects. Some of these are very interesting, though the combinations ultimately seem limited, and there is no obvious advancement system in the game to help you improve your spells over time. The combining is cool, but a bit clunky at times, and could benefit from more complexity in how the elements react with terrain or different monsters. Still, a very funky 7drl that's fun to play.

Magicko allows you to cast any spell right from the beginning. The catch is that you have to figure out how the spells are built out of elements. The elemental system is well thought out and combined with persistent effects - do not try zapping electrical bolts while you are wet!

3

2 - Some bugginess, and lacking in content

2 - Complete with win condition. Message bar sticks around too long. Often tab for stats doesn't take effect until it first uses up a turn. Battles don't start with everyone on screen, players sort of come in over a few turns, especially with lots of troops. Ships never react to you on the water map.

2

2 - Keys are a bit odd, but game is well enough presented

1 -The ultra-wide layout first was a negative, but it grew on me when played with a large monitor. Keys require a number pad, don't even work with arrows or vi. There seems a spot for messages in the map, but messages just go on the top. I think the map could have used some colour in the water, or maybe coast line to disambiguate it from landl Hitting an incorrect key wastes a turn.

2

1 - Too short and lacking challenge

2 - Simple enough and different enough to be worth a play through.

2

2 - The movement between sea-faring and ship-fighting is cool

3 - Very nice approach to a ship board adventure. I like the idea of the boarding battles and ship chases, just wish ship chases had got into the game. And the difficulty was such that you'd not be getting a constant influx of free pistol fodder, but have to explicitly hire troops. And some counterbalance against just having a ridiculous number of troops.

3

2 - On the low end of the scale, as there's really not much variety to the game, but the way it's all done is interesting

1 - The ship boarding battle shows a lot of work in AI, but then there is no sign of that in the overland map where ships seem to mindlessly travel from port to port. Would have expected Ws to chase me down or similar, rather than just wait to be harvested. Only one map. There may be a lot of different player types in the combat system, but it is hard to tell when your role quickly becomes hiding in the backlines while your troops finish off the foe.

3

2 - No procedural environments, and no real tactical depth

1 - No random maps. Separate combat screens. "you" aren't doing the combat, but your comrades are.

A game of sailing the seas and boarding ships. Loot money from lesser ships so you can hire more pirates and take on bigger ships until you have a big enough crew to go for the boss. Reasonably well implemented but it lacks variety.

Piraten provides a big departure from the roguelike norm. Adventure in the high seas, pillaging trade ships, and building up a following of bloodthirsty comrades. If you get powerful enoughl Fight your way to the Golden Bay!

2 - Card descriptions contain typos, some have even wrong symbol. Rules are a bit unclear.

2 - Has all the cards you need to play for the most part. The instructions are a bit weak in places and there are some typos.

2 - Card distribution is surprisingly well balanced. Combat mechanics, however, are way too easy.

1 - Below average for a card game. Sure, it has to represent Rogue but monsters' numbers are placed inconsistently, traps lack symbol at all. It is monochrome. Some DOS versions of Rogue used extended ANSI characters but Cardlike missed that opportunity.

2 - Physical cards for a multiplayer game is one of the best techniques around, though in this case, the cards could have used better artwork or flavor text

2 - Frequent typos (buckLer, etc) mar the text. But the flavour text is interesting! The font for the characters could be better, ( and ] are pretty close together, for example.

3 - This is heaps of fun and very replayable.

2 - Definitely a game for groups of 4 or more. I played was 1 and 2 players and it was a bit dicey, but if enough players, you could have some politics at play to make the game more interesting

1 - You'll spend longer cutting cards than playing, sadly. That said, if the combat mechanic could be fixed, the rest of the game has a lot of interesting interactions between the cards.

3 - Just for being a card game.

2 - When push comes to shove, the game is pretty much Munchkin with the serial number filed off, but it is pretty innovative for a Roguelike

3 - Definitely thinking out of the roguelike box. I like the _idea_ of the "dice" mechanic, but as done it doesn't work well. It is a lot of fun to play a tactile game where the manipulation of the game is part of the game.

2 - Could use a room picture to represent area where to put drawn cards, dungeon picture to put deck and few others. Still amount of cards is good.

1 - Maybe a bit harsh, but the scope if effectively, "Port Rogue to Munchkin"

2 - An extremely respectable number of cards were produced.

2 - Really hard to give estimate here. It plays like Rogue and reminds very much of it so ...

2 - The game captures some of the feel of rogue, but it feels a lot more like Munchkin

2 - I'd almost put a 1, as this is more a DnD like as it is a purely room based crawl, missing the tactical component that differentiates roguelikes. But the attention to detail in depicting Rogue's monsters and items certainly swings me back to 2.

Pretty innovative 7DRL entry since this one is not a computer program but actually cards to print, cut and play. You can save on electricity costs. :P

An interesting game for the veteran Roguelike player. My wife lost interest in minutes, but as she isn't a gamer, it kind of make sense. Solitaire is almost trivially easy to beat without some sort of cap on inventory. The biggest problem I had is on the definition of a round or turn and how they factored into combat, especially when ranged weapons were involved.

This is a room based dungeon crawl. As such, I'd recommend pulling out some figures and drawing some rooms to crawl through to give you a sense of exploration absent in just the cards. The cards are fun and of a large variety. Unfortunately the combat mechanic swiftly becomes trivial - with a bow + fists you have 5 dice, making you almost always defeat the enemies prior to being threatened. Since I've printed the cards, I'm probably going to try a rule variant of giving monsters 5 tokens as HP and have the rule that each dice exceeding the monsters number costs a token, rather than slays the monster. And likely grant myself 5 HP that replenish each room (thanks to rest-to-heal)

2 - seems like it has everything the author planned, but the UI is rather spartan.

2

2

2 - looks just like an average ascii rl

1

2

2 - plain vanilla hack&slash rl.

2

2

1 - haven't noticed anything particularly ground braking about it.

1

1

2 - what I'd expect from a 7drl.

2

2

3 - 100% hack&slash roguelike.

3

3

Alfarogue's author seems to be aiming at the traditional roguelike at a smaller scale. It has most of what you'd expect from a plain vanilla roguelike - various medieval weapons, enemies, armor, amulets, etc. Combat include melee and shooting - no spells or special skills from what I can tell.

A simple roguelike with some standard features and blood spatter. Very challenging, so it's hard to get far and enjoy the game properly, but it's nice as a puritan roguelike.

2 - A high 2 to be sure, plenty of monsters, items and levels, but it feels unpolished

2 - Flickers a bit, message box is a bit buggy, completely unbalanced (too easy), many items in the floor but no use for them

2

2 - The controls are a bit awkward, but that comes with the platform, but the graphics are a little too "angry fruit salad"

2 - Appearance is ok. Keybindings are ok (having in mind it's targetted to NDS)

2

1 - Running around and push into hundreds of odd blobs isn't exactly my idea of fun

1 - Boring :)

2

1 - RLs on the DS has been done, see Powder, this game doesn't really bring anything new to the table

1 - Standard roguelike fair

1

2 - Seems about right for a 7DRL

2 - Random level generator looks interesting, bonus for targetting a handheld console, inventory management is straightforward

2

3 - Pure rogue, permadeath, random content, etc.

3

3

Unfortunately, this game is going to draw a lot of comparisons to the vastly superior Powder, which is kind of a shame as this game isn't bad, but it is on par with an Atari 2600 or NES game and not the DS. It is also plagued by quirks like stairs moving when monsters step on them. If levels were 1/4 the size and level progression twice or four times as fast, this might have been an interesting coffee break game.

A simple dungeon crawler with basic items and a few enemy types. UI is different, for it is a handheld game. Icons are too small, (But I wonder how would this actually look in a real NDS screen). Levels are non-traditional.

A roguelike for the Nintendo DS (can be easily played through an emulator). The controls are a bit fiddly and the graphics ain't exactly pretty, but it's all functional enough. Dungeons are large and open, and there's not a great deal of variety to the play, though there has been some attempt to make an interesting skills/magic system. Biggest nuisance is the lack of real information on what items or equipment affect. Game gets a bit monotonous after a while with the big open levels and samey enemies.

2 - Quite a lot of features. At least two ways to win but balancing is a little too much against the player. You can shoot yourself if you wish.

2 - Seems to be complete, though I couldn't clear more than 2 or 3 decks per attempt, but needs balancing, polish and a better manual or readme

2 - Basic functionality but needs polish. I tried timing out the LY meter to see if the ship escapes at the border, and it didn't, so am not sure of the completeness of end conditions.

1 - Color scheme acceptable. Keys sensible but only way to target anything is to move cursor space by space to destination. Only one line for messages.

2 - Clean but standard, remappable keys are a big plus

1 - ASCII display reasonable, but message prompt gets in the way of the stats, especially when trying terminals. Unsure of game design reason to make terminals same as charging station, seems to be more aggravating than a treasure hunt as one could always zero-turns look. Commands are a bit esoteric and only documented in keybindings.yml rather than in-game help. Lack of vi forgiven due to keybindings, but would rather the extra 8 lines to add vi were thence added. Key commands like activate and open don't have prompts, so you are unsure if you've hit the key or not until you hit direction. Unclear how to cancel an activate if you hit it rather than [s]hoot. I'd much rather bump to open than a prompt telling me to open (which also fails to tell me what key to hit to open).

2 - Quite fun until you get shot by marines which you cannot oppose until you get energy armor from science lab. Sabotaging stuff is good thing.

2 - Enjoyable for a while, but the constant deaths at the hands of 'm's is a tad annoying

1 - Combat seems very weak. Charging mechanism might be interesting, maybe degrade to laser pistol to conserve stations, but I never lasted long enough for that to work. Marines could track me through all but deck changes and always win firefights. Level design is nice in that it is ship like, but grows monotonous for that same reason. I worry that ship parts might have been put in quarters that are too painful to search rather than the named ends. Being able to get a map would help a lot to direct the player and give them an idea what to do.

2 - Unusual way to win is to wreck enough warp relay stations so that pursuit can catch up. Wrecking reactor core works too.

1 - I can't really think of any feature in this game that is particularly innovative. At it's heart, you are hunting a boss with a timer.

2 - The maps actually feel like ship maps, which is rather nice. The ability to move to all decks right away matches the idea of a ship rather than trying to shoehorm ship == dungeon like many ship based games do. The pursuit timing mechanic is a neat one, if it worked.

2 - Eight decks with plenty of room types to choose from. Unfortunately terminals seem only exist to direct security forces to chosen location. Too bad it seems not to work.

2 - Functionally shooting system, decent timer mechanism, what I'd expect for a 7DRL

2 - The author chose a good scope for seven days. There are enough things attempted to make this an interesting game.

3 - Qualifies but gameplay is a little shallow.

3 - Procedural levels, random drops, guns instead of ranged magic.

2 - I am not yet convinced the depth of combat is there for this to be a rogue. It is all ranged combat with no real positioning, enemies follow you through doors so I seem unable to hide out, so it really feels like a maze explorer more than a dungeon crawl.

Most roguelikes require you to retrieve some McGuffin, kill some Big Baddy or just descend to certain level. This game has all the conditions and a bit more. Big Baddy is rebel commander, a place to seek is ship's reactor core. You can optionally explore many sections of ship to find maintenance rooms where warp relay stations and shield emitters are. Wreck some of these to achieve victory. The bad thing exploring the ship is not really very fun.

While a functional game, this one feels incomplete. Marines are pretty much instant death and in around 20 attempts I only "won" once by destroying 3 shield generators that spawned on the first deck. I think this game has some promise, but the developer over reached on what he could accomplish in 7 days.

Storming the Ship has you not in a dungeon, but on a stolen space ship. Your objective might seem the same: kill the baddies, but in this case you have the more interesting option of sabotaging the ship instead, so as to let the chasing forces of good to the destruction for you.

3 - Feels complete but could use better balance. Later in the game one can safely lean on keys.

2 - A fairly complete game, though it needs balance and polish

2 - Lacks gameplay polish and win condition isn't properly enforced

3 - Well presented.

2 - Basic and functional ASCII, controls are simple

2 - Good colour choices and simple keybindings, but no rest key

1 - No challenge, lacks tactical decisions. Any interesting decisions at all.

1 - I wanted to like this game more, but the sheer randomness of the enhancement mechanic makes the game frustrating to play

1 - Fights are gruelling with high HP and defense on lots of enemy leading to simple button mashing

1 - Nothing interesting to be seen there.

1 - Nothing really new here, the heavy use of quoted works is interesting, but not overly innovative

1 - The current level only scroll effects are interesting, but not hugely innovative

2 - Monsters and items fit chosen theme.

2 - Nothing outside of the ordinary for a 7DRL entry, though I feel as though more is possible.

2 - A good effort for 7 days

2 - Roguelikes are hard by definition. This one lacks greatly in difficulty department.

3 - Pretty standard roguelike fare, permadeath, procedural content,etc

3 - Usual stuff

Hack and slash in world of lexicon where each monster is named after the letter it is represented by. Thats it.

This game feels like a strong idea that the developer had trouble implementing. The idea that you are trying to rid a library of hooligans with the power of books is pretty cool, Reading-Rainbow-style, but in practice the books are really just random buff that are rarely helpful. Might have been a decent 10DRL though.

Wordrogue has you fighting letters in a library 20 floors high. Some drop scrolls and books that have fun flavour messages when read, as well as providing temporary boosts that fade once you ascend the next flight of stairs. Gameplay is monotonous though, and the last boss seems to be physically impossible (but can simply be walked around).

1 - Lacks automatic walk mode and stay in place command. No messages turns monsters into faceless letters and you do not know whether you hit him or not.

2 - Basically functionally game - needs polish, especially on the UI side

3 - Everything is like it should be.

2 - Pretty minimalist, standard ASCII and controls (p for pickup is awkward for veteran players), could use UI love

2 - Rogue clone. At early levels you kill everything to stock up on goods and later try to avoid fights dashing for stairs instead.

1 - Very standard roguelike gameplay, hack, slash, repeat, no spells, etc.

1 - Nothing unique, new or interesting.

1 - You hack, you slash, you heal, then you do it again

2 - Game is at the point where you would add your dream feature that makes it unique.

1 - A little bare bones for a 7DRL, I'd expect a little more than recreating the basic functionality of Rogue

3 - Only absent messages hurt this score.

3 - As rogue as Rogue

Rogue clone with pleasant interface. You battle monsters to maybe get single item. Your goal is to descend alive ten stairways. Thus early on kill everything to get as much items as possible. When K's appear (source code names them Korreds) try to avoid these and kill everything else and find stairs. Use your displacements and teleportations to flee and hope RNG lets you escape. On the bad side there is total lack of messages. Anauroch is playable without them but their absence visibly hurts.

A success is a success in a 7DRL. The game avoids being actively bad and shows that the programmer had the follow through to complete a game in 7 days.

2 - Missing real gameplay.

2 - Doesn't crash, but there's no winning condition

2 - Looks pretty.

2 - Not really fond of the graphics, specially the floor tiles and the "garbage" graphics, which make gameplay confusing

1 - Boring! No goals.

1 - Pretty unbalanced and not many interesting activities other than roaming the huge, open map

1

2 - Theme is novel, but there's nothing new gameplay wise

1 - @ on a map with enemies and combat. Some items are present.

2

3 - Nothing against.

3 - Although didn't like the random level generator

You can wander around single level, kill some creatures and then get killed.

Post apocalyptic world, tries to set up a dark theme (although graphics and music are not really up to help with that), other than that it's a pretty standard crawler with a huge level and little tactical options

2 - Although it's closer to a tech demo than a to a game :)

2 - Lacks gameplay polish

2 - Pretty cool looking, sometimes darkness makes a bit difficult to navigate the levels and find the item boxes and terminals

3 - Very nice atmospheric look, though it could do with doors being highlighted better

1 - You'll spend a lot of time opening boxes and "hacking" into terminals, just to be hacked away by an alien. Fighting involves mashing your left click hoping the alien dies before your health / ammo runs out

1 - Really not my cup of tea, and the slow movement and searching make it unbearable. The joke" items only serve to annoy. A base melee attack is sorely missing for when you run out of ammo."

1 - Hack and slash in a space ship

2 - Good to see another genre using procedural generation of levels

3 - I'm guessing having something like this running on Unity requires a lot of effort

2 - Looks impressive for 7 days, but still lacks variety

2 - Misses being a roguelike specially because of the twitch-based combat

1 - A real-time shoot 'em up with procedural levels. Could really use more roguelike features like interesting items and enemy variety.

Another cool looking unity roguelike, this one has a great spacepunk ambient. It lacks real gameplay to be replayable, mainly because of boring item stocking and impossible combat.

Graphics are pretty and the atmosphere is well done, but the gameplay itself is unfortunately lacking. Still it does show that proceduralism can cross genres, and it could be very good with more variety of content.

1 - Enemies will generate inside walls, sometimes they just won't attack. Doesn't seem to have an advancement schema

2 - Enemies/items in walls, bad AI, crashed whilst playing

1 - On level two monsters forgot to fight me. Hitting esc quits without warning. Not picking a name means "You are" is left forever

3 - Good looking "programmer art" (seriously). Keybinding pretty easy. Font clear.

3 - Pretty graphics with good variety of tiles

1 - We are reminded that the advantage of ASCII is that you can have lots of monsters without creating art assets. Here we have lots of monsters, but the reuse of the same humanoid for death slugs is disconcerting. Key controls are unlabelled, drop I figured out by mashing everything, but I still am unconvinced there is a reason to pick stuff up.

1 - The premise is good but bugs keep from enjoying

1 - Gameplay is very dull with simplistic AI and no depth

1 - Very random difficulty. Not clear if there is a win condition. Got bored diving with broken AI opponents.

1 - The only differential feature I found was having only four inventory slots, one for weapon and another three for treasure.

1

1 - Very standard roguelike

2

2

2 - A lot of details - destructible terrain, lava, water, pits. Swimming, and wide variety of monsters.

3 - Hits most of the high value factors on the definition

3

3 - A buggy rogue, but a rogue nonetheless.

Nice looking tile graphics roguelike. Also score based with the difference that you must actually fetch valuable items and then resurface with them in your possession in order to win. I kind of like the "cardinal" or "orthogonal" look of the monsters, they are all uniform with variations for their unique features.

Biggest attraction is the cute tiles which are nicely varied. Other than that the game lacks real depth of play. Items exist, but with no obvious use. Enemies exist but can almost be ignored. There's little real fun in playing. Would be nice to see this extended though, as the tiles would look great on a deeper game.

Cute graphics that could almost work if a few more character models were present - especially for non-humanoid. The map engine is powerful, as show cased by the different terrains. The game play is opaque and of questionable balance, so should be overhauled.

1 - Buggy, Crashes, Seems to miss a winning condition, princess seems to be useless

2

2 - Pretty generic cRPG look

2

1 - Hack and Slash without picking up new weapons or skills...

1

1 - I guess the princess was supposed to have a role in the game...

2 - Escort mechanic could be fleshed out to be a lot better, but this is a nice start to the idea.

1

2

2 - Maps seems to be random...

3

This doesn't seem to be a complete entry, as far as I can perceive there's no winning condition and it seems the princess was meant to do something but never was

Tiled roguelike where you escort a princess through a dungeon. Game over if either you or the princess die. Not a lot of variety to the play, but it's an interesting mechanic and the graphics are nice enough. Can be tricky to get the game running at first - a readme file would be welcome.

2 - Controls sometimes are registered twice. You may start in a wall. Freezes when you eat a ghost in last banana turn.

1 - Spawns inside walls, movement irresponsive sometimes

2 - A bit buggy on the controls and placing actors inside walls

2 - Looks okay but I would not guess "gate" icon was supposed to look like gate.

2 - Pretty simple looks with nice icons

2 - Nice enough look, controls don't respond well, poor feedback on item usage, could really do with seeing more of the screen

1 - Original pac man was fun because it was a twitch game. You were faster when not eating dots and that counted.

1 - Not too fun, hard to devise a winning tactic (too random)

1 - Gets repetitive pretty fast

1 - Single hit point hero with autopickup and inventory needs to clean the dungeon.

1 - Pacman as a roguelike, not the first one :) It also fails to enroguelike it in my opinion (at least adding LOS would have helped)

2 - Interesting spin on this, though not a perfect implementation

2 - Very fitting for mobile phones.

2 - He seems to have made a pacman clone in 7days and added time slices to the real time functionalities.

2

2

1

2 - A roguelike interpretation of Pac-man

Turn based pac man with usable items. I found this to be less enjoyable than original game.

A fake turn based pac man clone. Not too polished.

This is Pac-man, but turn-based, and with random levels. Cool idea, and some things (such as having a fruit inventory) are nice. However the controls don't respond very well (sometimes moves twice at once, and hitting a wall waste a turn), and the enemies aren't much of a challenge unless you let yourself get mobbed by them. Gameplay overall gets a bit tedious. A very nice attempt at rogueing up this old classic though.

2 - the game is complete as far as all the basic functionality is in, would have been nice to have a way to start a new game tho or go back to the main menu in any way.

1 - Not sure if this is all that was intended, but it doesn't seem to have been playtested at all.

1 - monochrome ascii. It doesn't offend my sensibilities but there is nothing but the barest aesthetics.

1 - Could really do with the @ and > being coloured differently, and the keys don't seem to work reliably.

1 - it's not actively unfun as much as it is simply not very interesting - basically a maze game where the 2 main mechanics are your ability to destroy walls and jump over holes.

1 - Could be fun if the timer was longer and dungeons were guaranteed to be connected.

2 - it adds 2 small features to traditional maze games but they are not particularly exciting.

2 - It's a bit different, and the pit-jumping could be interesting if pulled off right. A procedural timed maze game may have potential.

1 - the game is very minimal.

2

2 - the presentation and basic structure of the world are 100% roguelike but there is no combat.

2

7DRLCC is a basic maze game - at every level you have to reach the stairs down before the level fades to black. Nothing particularly exciting, but it *is* a complete game. Its main claim to fame lays in the 2 basic actions you can do (besides walking): destroy all the surrounding walls & jump over holes. This is not far beyond the minimum possible complete 7drl, but it does pass that threshold.

You have a few seconds to bash your @ towards the downstairs. Keys don't seem to work right for jumping, dungeons can be disconnected, @ is hard to spot and it's so impossible it's not fun, but it's a kinda interesting concept.

1 - Terrible flicker combined with no readme. I learned how to enter store only thanks to reading source code.

2 - The game looks feature complete, but is needs a good bit of polishing

2 - UI is a bit unfriendly in regards to showing which window are you navigating right now. Otherwise acceptable looks.

2 - Standard function ASCII interface. This year's entrants seem to have something against diagonal movement though

1 - Aaarggh! The random encounters are highly irritating. Explored map is not remembered, making travel tiresome. Weakening monster and then enthralling is only fun thing in this game.

1 - This game is pretty tedious. To get to even the 2nd dungeon level you have to grind through quite a few encounters to level up your monsters so that you don't have to retreat to town or spend potions after every battle.

1 - Permanently turning monsters into allies has been done.

2 - Adding pokemon like features to a roguelike is certainly new, but this game does so by eschewing a lot of the features that make a roguelike a roguelike.

2 - Empty "towns" and several levels differing only in wall color or some other aesthetics. On the other hand much work has been put into user interface.

1 - If a single person had produced this, I probably would have gone with a 2, but I'd kind of expect more from a 2 person team

1 - Random encounters make no sense and deprive randomly generated maps of all their value.

1 - There is procedurally created levels, but that's about it for roguelike content

Final Fantasy meets Pokemon meets Roguelike. Roguelike gives interface and maps, Pokemon adds monsters with attacks to be enthralled and finally final fantasy decides on gameplay. That means you travel from town to town through a randomly generated nonpersistent map and running into unavoidable random encounters. If you fail to go through you need to use portal scroll. New maps, same monsters, more tedium. This mix turned out terrible. Avoid.

This game plays like an ASCII port of the original Pokemon gameboy games. It is currently feels like a grindfest running through bland backdrops back and forth to town, with some work this probably could become an interesting game, be this is pretty much out of the scope of a 7DRL contest

1 - No victory condition, levels are exactly the same. No point in playing more than once. Spits out "placeholder" on console.

1 - Only basic gameplay is in place, I don't even think that the level completion code is in place

2 - Wasn't aiming high, but it seems bug free

2 - Only arrow keys work for movement. Display is okay.

2 - Nothing too exciting or disappointing here

1 - Colour choices are poor, display is too small, no command instructions anywhere

1 - Turn based pacman clone. There is no indication when power pill stops working unless you watch "placeholders".

1 - It's a Pac Man done RL style with a sight radius

1 - Very simple and dull gameplay. Clearly the Pac-man mechanics don't translate well to a turn-based game.

2 - PM:theRL = Pacman the roguelike. Explains everything.

2 - Tries to put a new spin on Pac Man, success is debatable though

1 - This has been tried in various formats, and has simply never been successful

1 - Very limited.

1 - I'd expect at least a couple of maps and cherries or score tracking for a 2

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1 - Only remaining thing is turn based gameplay.

2 - It is a RL version of Pac man, it is ASCII, has permadeath and uses turn-based mechanics with a sight radius

2 - Level seems to be static and the game really lacks the tactical feel of roguelikes

Roguelike version if Pacman but hardly interesting. Only arrow keys work! If your laptop does not have them you cannot play.

Not at very complete game, but an interesting take on Pac Man. AI needs to be fleshed out and the UI needs some serious love, but I could see a finished product being a decent coffee break game.

This is a fairly faithful port of Pac-man to a roguelike style, turn-based with an ASCII dungeon and FOV around your little @. Collect dots, and the big pills let you eat ghosts (which otherwise kill you instantly). Being able to move in 4 directions is frustrating when you can be attacked from the diagonal.

1 - Very unpolished, only 1 class working (the others crash), some display glitches

1 - Frequent crashes, laggy, lots of print outs from server and client. System seemed a bit confused when I logged in twice as same character.

1 - Screen area is too small and digging is a pure pain

1 - Terrain looks nice, but a lot of space seems to be the perma help menu which you need. Do not show passwords as people type them in! Do not store passwords as plain text on either server or client! Instead, only store a salted hash of the password on the server and save nothing on the client.

1 - Very lacking in content

1 - Is currently more a tech demo than a game.

1 - Multiplayer roguelikes have been done in this style before, and this doesn't seem to add anything of value

1 - Multiplayer roguelikes are a tough challenge. However, I can't tell with the slow playing how this one addresses the interesting questions of speed, etc.

2 - A worthy effort for 7 days

2 - Not only is there the client server system, but there does also appear to be an actual roguelike attached to it.

2 - Real-time and seems to lack anything procedural

2 - It is hard to tell what this is at the moment.

This is an attempt at a multi-player roguelike. Mostly it's an empty world, with a few monsters to bump into, and I can't see how this could be any more enjoyable with extra players. That's not to say it has no potential though.

Gridfolk is a bold attempt at the bugbear of roguelikes: multiplayer. Unfortunately, after 7 days it is still in too early a stage to really tell if it would be a proper answer. A smoother client install would help a lot, as would providing a dedicated server.

1 - @ walking on the map. On occasion the enemies will try to attack you.

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1 - yellow on black ascii.

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1 - not much of a game.

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1 - not enough content to be innovating

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1 - walk around and try to get to the next level

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2 - it's a subset of a roguelike but there is basically nothing for the player to do.

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More of a skeleton than an actual game, JSRL comprises of an @ walking on the map trying to get to the next floor. Most of the time stairs to the next floor are reachable. When you go past the enemies they will on occasion try to attack you, but not very often. One time a k chased me through a level but I managed to get to the next level before he caught me.

I do not consider this to be a successful entry.

Sorry, but this isn't much to look at. It's little more than a walking @, with an ugly colour scheme, bad controls, immobile enemies and potentially disconnected levels. Hopefully the dev has learned some things from his week though and we'll see more interesting works in future.

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2 - Randomized colors. May select for example blue on blue.

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1 - Despite it was done in only one day.

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Game is totally unworthy of your time. However, you may have a look at the source. It looks like this entry was written just to have fun writing a program with lots of silliness and rude or improper words in code.

HA HA HA

A "challenge" of bomb-laying next to immobile enemies with puerile humour. Best avoided.