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The 2016 7DRL Challenge Evaluation Process Click a table header to sort. |
| Name | Author | Runs on | Play | Completeness | Aesthetics | Fun | Innovation | Scope | Roguelikeness | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Force of Nature | Evgenii Petrov |   
| Play | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 2.67 | 3.00 | 2.67 |
| Cambium | thp |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.67 | 2.33 | 1.67 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.61 |
| Long dark dark night | kipar |
| Play | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.33 | 3.00 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.61 |
| The Mind Eater | thatdarnedbob | 
| Play | 2.33 | 3.00 | 2.33 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 3.00 | 2.61 |
| The Only Shadow That the Desert Knows | jere |
| Play | 2.67 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.67 | 2.61 |
| The Trapped Heart | Darren Grey | 
| Play | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 3.00 | 2.61 |
| cr@sh | Ross Pinkstaff |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.67 | 2.33 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.61 |
| A Roguelike Where You Dodge Projectiles | Travis Moy |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.33 | 3.00 | 2.56 |
| Becoming Northerly | flend |
| Play | 2.33 | 3.00 | 2.33 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.56 |
| Switch Hook | Oleg Dolya |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.00 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.56 |
| Billiard Dungeon | pkenney |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.33 | 1.67 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.50 |
| Quaestum Facere | Philip Collin | 
| Play | 2.33 | 3.00 | 2.67 | 2.00 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.50 |
| Arachne | Paul Jeffries |
| Play | 2.67 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.33 | 2.33 | 2.44 |
| Cult | Numeron |
| Play | 2.67 | 3.00 | 2.67 | 2.00 | 2.67 | 1.67 | 2.44 |
| Helix | Brett Gildersleeve (TheSleeve) |
| Play | 2.33 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.00 | 2.67 | 2.44 |
| WRAITH | Daniel Trewin |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 2.33 | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.44 |
| Darkyr | Pål Trefall (code), Sebastian Boutin Blomfield (code), Bill Lowe (art), Ian Buckley (sound), Maurizio Scuiar (code), Gavin Philips (writing), Petur Agust (art) |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 2.42 |
| Beyaz Dag | Naburimannu |
| Play | 2.33 | 1.67 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.39 |
| Six Two One | Jeff Lait |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 2.67 | 2.39 |
| Skeleton Crew | Stephen Sherratt |
| Play | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.39 |
| MagicianRL | DeabDev |
| Play | 2.33 | 2.67 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.33 |
| My pet is a rogue?! | danbrani |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.33 |
| No Crypto For Old Men | LoneSpelunker |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.33 |
| Rogue Kudzu | Edwin DeNicholas |
| Play | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.33 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.33 |
| Schildkrötenformation | Verena, Ludwig, Georg, Kanu |
| Play | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.33 |
| Seek and you shall find | Tilded |
| Play | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.33 |
| Small World | Andrés Cathalifaud |
| Play | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.33 |
| The Prancing Bard | Jan |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.33 |
| ThiefRL2 | James McNeill |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.33 |
| ArtemisRL | Thom Robertson |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 2.25 |
| Bisbee's Escape | Matt Walsh |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.25 |
| Crowd Eraser | mr. a |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.25 |
| Lotus, a town for rogues | Andrew Wright (@roocey) |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.25 |
| Mad Maximillian's Codpiece | Roni Saari |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.25 |
| Metamorph | Junber |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.25 |
| Mythical Jetpack Journey | Geff Bourke |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.25 |
| Some Dogs Go To Hell | /u/TOASTEngineer |
| Play | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 2.25 |
| Timegame | Derrick Creamer |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.25 |
| Adventure Marsh | diego |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.17 |
| AutoFire | Patrick Lipo |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.17 |
| Café Havoc | Ondras |
| Play | 2.67 | 2.33 | 1.67 | 1.67 | 2.00 | 2.67 | 2.17 |
| Chronomaniac | Elliot Bonneville |
| Play | 2.67 | 2.33 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 1.67 | 1.33 | 2.17 |
| Night Terrors | Dan Clark (High Sodium Games) |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.17 |
| Snial Trial | Maurog |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.17 |
| Spice Digger | Alexander Shen | 
| Play | 2.50 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.17 |
| Thrust Vector Delta | Mark Knewstubb |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.17 |
| Tiny Tale | dbrabera |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.17 |
| Uncontrolled Doppleganger | Jose Gallardo |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.17 |
| Dungeon Racer | Gamepopper |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.00 | 2.08 |
| Dungeons of cards | Trystan Spangler |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.08 |
| Fantastic Dungeons | Tapio |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.08 |
| Hook & Shield | Tinytouchtales |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.08 |
| Tomb of RNGesus | Bunnyhop Games |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.08 |
| 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid RL | rubybliels |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.67 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.67 | 2.06 |
| Ancient Legends | Toni 'Viila' Ylisirniö |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 |
| Andromeda Divided | 0x0961h |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 |
| Camp Perdido | Oscar Morales |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 |
| Coming of Age | CrazyMLC |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 2.00 |
| Pixland | Luca Giacometti |
| Play | 3.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 |
| Skater | graspee |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 |
| Sporaculous | v4nz666 (Jeff Ripley) |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 |
| Star Squadron Commander | Ibology |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 |
| 12Down | Akhier Dragonheart |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 1.92 |
| Arcana Command | Geek of Geek and Dad |
| Play | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 1.92 |
| Dice Dungeon. | Luna Indigo Studio |
| Play | 2.50 | 3.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.92 |
| Don't Go Out The Airlock! | David York |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.92 |
| Fehlfunktion | purestrain |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 1.92 |
| Hanafuda Kenshi | char68 (@therealchar68) |
| Play | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.92 |
| NetRogue | Matthew Pfeiffer + Srinivas Kaza |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.92 |
| RAID: Rogue AI Dungeon | Bovard, Chris, Ambrose, Raphael |
| Play | 2.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 1.92 |
| Rise of Kramora | Slash |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.92 |
| Thoodiam | theq629 |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 3.00 | 1.92 |
| Dungeon Bard Ascii | dungeonbard |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.83 |
| Temple of Anguish | @eyuzwa |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.83 |
| supercold | Michal Brzozowski |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.83 |
| American Ball Hog or Landon's Last Run | Max Clark | 
| Play | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.75 |
| Doomed Looters | Marco Giorgini |
| Play | 3.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.75 |
| Iron Honx | Blendo Games |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.75 |
| Leaves Underfoot | Phil Cooper |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.75 |
| Rogue with Purple Heart | Ved |
| Play | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 3.00 | 1.75 |
| The Hunger | DangerMomentum |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.33 | 1.67 | 1.67 | 1.67 | 1.72 |
| Aim - Shoot - Repeat | mojo |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 1.67 |
| Glub: The Underwater Roguelike | Fang |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.67 |
| Systems Initialized 7DRL | Renaud D Marshall |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 1.67 |
| Fogward | headchant |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.67 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.61 |
| Cash Castle | Ashley Pringle |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.50 | 1.58 |
| Hordelike | horaguchi |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.58 |
| Rogmind | hi/winner |
| Play | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.58 |
| BYGR | Dom Crayford |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 |
| Euclid's Peril | Dave H and Tyler H |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 |
| Exploring The Bleak | Nathaniel Inman |
| Play | 1.50 | 2.50 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 |
| Mortuus insula | Smoke Fumus |
| Play | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 |
| Rogue Alpha | Michael Trupkin |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 2.00 | 1.50 |
| Abhorrent Swordmelting | dissensiondev |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.50 | 1.42 |
| ZEALOT | Dan Mc Grath/Tooth and Claw Games |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.42 |
| 100 Campfires | Mathias Myrland |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.33 |
| BatStick: The Saga - First Tale | Fenreliania |
| Play | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.33 |
| Before Dawn | jheard901 |
| Play | 1.50 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.33 |
| Kill of Goblins | exilegl |
| Play | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.33 |
| Mosi-oa-Tunya | fritzvd |
| Play | 2.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.33 |
| Push ON | Ryan Bone |
| Play | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.33 |
| S-expr Killer | Alex Mercader |
| Play | 2.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.33 |
| Synergy Rogue | iwiws |
| Play | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.33 |
| Alligator Survival | schemesmith |
| Play | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.50 | 1.17 |
| Violation: Escape | Max Philippov |
| Play | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 1.17 |
| Amalgam | Interfect |
| Play | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Void Dungeon | LittleBear101 |
| Play | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| YAZG | Sixstring982 |
| Play | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
Reviews
Force of Nature
Completeness
3 - There are minor problems with autorun (on my monitor it runs to the cell that is next to clicked), and absense of shift\\autorepeat increases keyboard wear, but these problems are barely noticeable.
3 - The game has seven levels that are beatable. I encountered no bugs and never got stuck either on terrain or by poor map generation.
3 - Very polished! I really appreciated the help screen.
Aesthetics
3 - UI, art, controls, everything is great. It's like tome4, but with stylish art instead of shaders chaos and made in Unity instead of lua.
3 - Self made "cartoony" graphics, a partially animated environment and varied enemies keep the game fresh if a touch simple looking.
3 - The game looks and plays great. It has animation and nice graphics with good use of color.
Fun
3 - It is impossible to stop playing
2 - This is one of the top games I've played from the competition this year. I came back and played this one for fun later.
2 - I really enjoyed playing this one although I never made it past level 2.The initial difficulty was highly unpredictable. Sometimes I would get wiped out within the first couple of rooms; other times I'd have an easy time throughout the first level. There always seemed to be a huge difficulty spike on arrival in the second level, though; I never made it more than a few rooms on the second level.It's not clear how the speed and strength stats figure into the game. The speed stat is much larger than the strength stat, but I never got a sense of their relative worth or what they did.
Innovation
2 - Well, basic mechanic is somewhat close to te4 Stone Warden class, but without cooldowns mess. Levelling mechanics is used in some other games, but together all parts make very playable combination.
2 - Level up, gain powers, bump combat with a little extra thrown in by the snaking, snaring roots. Fire is a big issue.
2 - Drawing your healing from healing the level is a really neat mechanic. It's a little at odds with the theme, I think. You continue to heal the level even after you're at full health, which seems like it would be desirable from a thematic perspective but if you're anticipating more combat you don't want to use up the available healing. I am a huge sucker for "checklist" gameplay where you do all the things, and I took the time to completely heal a level several times. It's kind of boring to do with the current structure of the game, though (resting repeatedly).
Scope
3 - The scope is good for a full-blown roguelike, I can't believe a mere human was able to create it in just 7 days.
2 - The game did everything that was set out for within a neat little 7DRL time limit. It's a little short, but 7DRL.
3 - I'm very impressed at the amount of stuff here. All the graphics, animation, skills, powerups, and enemies!
Roguelikeness
3 - Definitely a roguelike
3 - It can be brutal at times and unforgiving if you overextend and don't play to your strengths. Skilling up poorly is also punished. Bump combat, permadeath, procedural generation, turn based. This fits the bill.
3 - It's Roguelike!
This game at first resembles tome4. Same variety of skills, same responsible and smooth motion, many additional mechanics that makes dozens of digits appear after each turn. But the basical mechanic is cardinally different - there are no cooldowns, no stupid mmorpglike looking on bottom line - all abilities are passive. The player plays as an angry walking tree, killing many kinds of trolls and their machinery and descending over 7 levels. After several tries I've never was able to pass a second level, so i already wanted to say that balance is broken and second level absurdingly hard, but then... I've found the main feature of the game ()and eventually won) - melee is not your main weapon, your main weapon are roots. They hit enemies that are close to you enough, and there is additional skill to hit them even more when they goes out of roots. This makes all battles combination of kiting and pillardancing. Yes, you should kite even ranged atacking monsters (and most of dangerous monsters of game are ranged attacking and have greater radius then your roots). So much fun. There is also a lot more - fires and water, interesting rest mechanics, but review is supposed to be short so i'm stopping here. Go play it yourself.
You are an angry tree fighting fire loving trolls in your forest. Seven total levels (I got to six on my best run) that add new enemies each level. The tree has a lot of abilities you gain by consuming troll corpses.
In Force of Nature you play an angry, ambulatory tree (like Tolkien's Ents). Trolls are burning your forest down; you have to defeat them and heal the forest. Each turn you have a chance of healing one visible square of the forest. This heals you as well. If there's no visible damaged forest then you don't heal, although in practice I did not run into this as a limitation.Force of Nature feels like a complete game; it has stats to build up and a skill set to develop. Defeating enemies can leave powerups that boost your stats, or corpses which can be absorbed to gain talent points to spend on skill development. The corpses only last a few turns, though, so you have to decide whether you can afford to stand there for a few turns and absorb it in the middle of combat.
Cambium
Completeness
3 - Seems to have done everything the author aimed to do. Lore dumps on every examination don't tell you anything about gameplay but do give the impression of a huge world behind the scenes.
3 - The game is complete, no bugs found, and very polished.
3 - It's very polished. I got as far as level 7 in about an hour and half of play before dying.
Aesthetics
2 -
3 - The game looks great, for an ascii game. Umlauts on 'king' version of enemies is a nice touch. The only complain - black walls. And minor nitpicking - it would be nice to have single key that allows you to shoot at nearest enemy. 'f', 'enter', 'f', 'enter' quickly becomes a chore.
3 - The game has atmosphere in spades. Every item and enemy has a paragraph of descriptive prose about it. There are "cutscene" screens of text at certain points. The jungle levels have paths connecting the buildings and vines that can be hacked down. The look is great; it's very reminiscent of the IBM PC's 80-column color text mode. There are cool ASCII animation effects for some things like ranged weapons, special monsters and item effects. The menu interface for help and inventory is easy to use.
Fun
2 - I could see myself spending a lot more time here if the author added more content and a little more transparency.
2 - The game forces you to grind/explore everything, which is tedious. As well as fights with chieftains. It's not difficult, it's just takes quite some time.
3 - I had a great time playing the game.There were some things that struck me as unfinished or not quite thought out:It says "You pick up # items" when I think it really means "You now have # items."You seem to be able to auto-aim your ranged weapons at invisible monsters.Chests seem mostly to be empty which means a lot of disappointment. I'd have preferred fewer chests on the level that always contained some loot.Ranged weapons have no ammunition and no penalty for close-quarters use; I'm not entirely sure what the role of melee weapons is.Weapons have a rating from A-C which represents where they fall on the speed/power trade spectrum, but they also have unchanging percentages listed; I'm not sure what those represented. There are loads of different weapons and armor in the game, but there was no description of whether they differed from each other in any way other than their A-C rating. If they really are equivalent then it seems simply confusing to have the cosmetic variety.
Innovation
2 - A little bit more than "hack-slash-whatever” although the innovations are too opaque to really appreciate: you can see the slowdown from wearing heavy armor but not enough is revealed to really appreciate the protective effect or see the tradeoffs in weapon choices.
1 - Weapons with different speeds and armors that affect speed is not new.
2 - It's not hugely innovative, just very playable.
Scope
3 - Lore bubbling up through the cracks and growing amidst the brambles...
3 - The game is huge! For a 7drl. Lot's of enemies, weapons and devices, each with detailed description. Two different non trivial level generation algorithms. Very impressive.
3 - This is more than I'd expect to be able to do in a week, let alone the four days the author said they spent.
Roguelikeness
3 - Not just lore; but there's apparently a lot of gameplay-relevant content that I barely scratched the surface of.
3 - True roguelike.
3 - Very Roguelike.
Feels like the first prototype of the next Qudlike. Vibrantly-conveyed setting, interesting combat tradeoffs and looting mechanics - although they're far too opaque to make me happy.
This game is good. And only couple design decisions separate it from great game. First - experience from killing forces you to grind. You want to kill everything. And not only for experience, but for a slim chance to get device from the corpse. That was second. And third - not game design, but visual design, why on earth solid walls are pitch black? They are totally not different from unexplored space. And given their formless shape I was constantly moving to explore what I was thinking unexplored space only to find out a wall. Weapons, armors and devices have lengthy descriptions with fragments of a story, but have no stats. There are 3 speed classes, but, at least from my experience, net result is more or less the same. Light armor gives you speed, but protects less. In heavy armor you are slow, but well protected. But total amount of damage takes is more or less the same.
Cambium is a slick post-apocalyptic Roguelike. You start out in the savage jungle, poking amongst the half-eaten remnants of buildings for the stairs that will lead you down to the Cambium, some sort of ancient structure that contains the MacGuffin.The combat system is based on the idea of weapons and armor offering a speed/power tradeoff. Powerful weapons or heavy armor mean the monsters get to take more turns relative to you.
Long dark dark night
Completeness
3 - It all works, and the in-game tutorial is a great bit of polish.
3 - The game is playable, probably winnable, and even has a tutorial mode. I encountered no major bugs.
2 - It's stable and I didn't have any trouble running it. Mainly I felt the game was too difficult and lacked progression (possibly I did not see the progression due to the difficulty).
Aesthetics
2 - Unfortunately power lines vs signal lines get confused.
3 - This game uses lighting effectively for both creating a tense mood but also as an important facet of the gameplay. One small UI complaint I have was that the game forces player to press Enter key at certain times, but failed to bind the Enter key on the Num-pad (game uses diagonals), which is where the movement keys are. Not a deal breaker though, this is a visually interesting game with a simple control scheme that works!
3 - Lots of neat touches! The control scheme is streamlined. There are colored lighting effects, including a flashlight the player carries around. Doors open when you get within a couple steps of them, just like on Star Trek. (They also open when ghosts flit by on the other side, which is really cool!) There are pipes and wires running everywhere, and they run between actual devices in the ship: reactors, lights, switches, indicators, and so forth. You can see the whole ship layout dimly from the outset, which makes sense for someone operating in a known environment.
Fun
2 - Was interesting enough to play several times, but I never felt like I quite got the hang of it well enough to have a chance of completing. (The documentation in the post-7DRL helped over my original pass through the 7DRL tutorial without doing any reading.)
3 - The first couple plays were hard, as there is a lot going on, but with a few tries and experience the game reveals itself and is quite fun. The ghosts dissipate when the lights shine on them, but its not immediate, and there's a good bit of uncertainty in when they actually will disappear. Additionally the ghosts spawn in darkness. This combination makes darkened rooms very tense and I was always relieved to find lit rooms.
2 - Interesting ideas; just needs more balance and progression work.It's hard for a beginning player to know when it's better to wait for rescue and when it's better to repair things.The game would have benefited from having a progression of ship sizes and difficulties. As it is there is the tutorial level, which has one reactor to fix and no ghosts, and the full-blown massive ship with stuff failing all over the place.There's not a sense of overall strategy in terms of how you move about the ship or pick which order to fix things. Some sort of whole-ship schematic might be good, and if you had the ability to reshunt things in order to create defensible powered areas that might add some strategy.
Innovation
3 - Nice ideas I haven't seen before, well-explored.
3 - The non-combat combat with the ghosts is an excellent innovation. It adds a nice mix of uncertainty while giving the player enough agency to not feel completely at a loss.
3 - The game brings together several unusual ideas that all support the theme: following wires to broken devices; the flashlight; the ghosts that are afraid of the flashlight; the automatic doors. Lighting is tied in with the power grid you're trying to fix.
Scope
2 - Reasonable 7DRL scope: one or two core mechanics explored really well.
3 - Scope is higher than expected. The game has quite a few moving parts which work well together. Impressive.
2 - Feels pretty good for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
2 - Somewhere between a puzzle and a "proper" roguelike.
3 - The game has enough roguelike features to justify. You might be tempted to hide out in a well lit area, but there is a time pressure to keep moving and fixing parts of the ship. The level gen provides a fair variety of play, although each play will begin to feel the same once all the workings of the game are discovered. Encounters with enemies are tense affairs, requiring the player to think and move carefully.
3 - Yes, Roguelike!
One engineer against the dark doesn't sound so bad. But there are ghosts in the dark. And *lots* of things broken that are keeping the light sources from working. Fxing them without getting killed is a challenging, tricky puzzle.
Tense game about warding off ghosts using light.Fav: the directional light tied to the player's facing is awesome; the method to defeat the ghosts is brilliantNot so Fav: The game shuts down when you lose
"Ghosts" have boarded your starship (a hollowed-out asteroid) while it was in faster-than-light mode and are causing system malfunctions. Awakened from cryosleep and armed only with a flashlight you have to trace the wires to the faults and fix them.I played the 7DRL+ version; did not successfully finish a level. The game has interesting ideas but I'd like it if it worked its way up from small starships to larger ones so I could successfully finish a few.
The Mind Eater
Completeness
3 - All the little details of the world make the game feel polished. Mostly bug free, but there is a bug that occurs while using a certain ability. For no explicable reason, when using that ability I get teleported to the nearest doorway.
2 - I had one crash after a long period of play, but otherwise seems stable. There's a full game loop in place and the gameplay seems nicely balanced. Loses out on not being packaged well for the player and not having much documentation.
2 - Maybe a bug (should cows really be able to jump over the mind eater?), maybe a bit opaque to figure out... but not bad!
Aesthetics
3 - A very nice looking ASCII game. There are a good number of controls, but they're straightforward.
3 - Simple ASCII graphics support the gameplay very well - lots of sensible symbol and colour choices. Controls aren't always intuitive, but are simple enough. Menu choices have keyboard shortcuts, which is a nice touch. Overall good.
3 - Canonical roguelike display works well; the input is a little awkward to figure out, but then works fine.
Fun
2 - The premise is naturally fun. You're a monster and you really feel it. The townspeople hunt you while you try to hunt the most vulnerable amongst them. There's two big problems though. Lack of depth and lack of balance. Despite having a small HP resource (3 "wound" ticks), the combat still feels incredibly random. Sometimes I could kill one of the hardest enemies without taking a hit. Other times one of the weakest monsters would take me out. Getting abilities is fun, but didn't always seem to make much of a difference on survivability. SPOILERS: by far the biggest balance issue is that the wizard, who is not hard to kill, gives you a totally broken spell called Inferno. Inferno takes a few turns to charge, but then instakills everything in a huge radius. Doing this the first couple times was very satisfying, but it also trivialized the whole game.
3 - Really engaging and fun. Exploring the game and its mechanics takes a good bit of trial and error, but it never feels frustrating and there is always more to learn. Advancing in player knowledge across runs feels like peeling the layers off an onion, which is really great for encouraging replayability. The basic gameplay of ambushing creatures and eating their brains is very compelling, as is the feeling of slowly growing power.
2 - A bit too difficult to get going for my taste; seems to be dependent on discovering through trial-and-error a very narrow path through the enemies, which only works if the procedural village is helpfully laid out. Random early death seems unavoidable.
Innovation
2 - We've had lots of games in recent years with possession mechanics. This isn't possession, but is similar. You get abilities from enemies and the interesting part is each enemy type can several abilities you can steal. Stealing minds from fresh graves is also quite cool.
3 - The mind-eating mechanic is mostly quite original, gaining new abilities based on which corpse you plunder. On top of that I really like the parry mechanic, and how it gets joined up with a sprint ability. The game reveals new innovations as you progress, which is really nice.
2 - I'm not sure the theme is new, but it's more than hack-and-slash and is a well done take on the theme.
Scope
2 - There are a good number of enemies and a surprising number of abilities. Combined with the cool little village you explore, I was close to handing out a 3 here. However, the game is sorely lacking a victory condition. I think all you can do is kill everything and leave for a high score. Instructions on what to do are a bit thin as well.
3 - Really quite a bit bigger than one might expect. The game takes place on a single large level, but it's big and varied and detailed and it will take many runs before you see more than a quarter of it. Lots of enemy types, lots of abilities to plunder from their minds, lots of ways to play. Really impressive work!
3 - Impressive, from the variety of the village layouts to the variety of skills gained and the way they tie together into gameplay.
Roguelikeness
3 - Absolutely. Has all the staples, plus a persistent feeling of vulnerability.
3 - Not a traditional dungeon crawler, but solidly roguelike in spirit and mechanics. Indeed, few other games make you feel quite so much a "rogue" as this one.
3 - Mostly a roguelike; the world interaction is great within the system that has been developed.
In The Mind Eater, you play a monster that is terrorizing a small village. This monster can steal abilities by "eating minds". The theme is spectacularly implemented. There are several types of villagers like Lumberjacks, Farmers, and Anglers. Villagers are wary of you until they can attack in numbers. They shout "the monster is here!" when you are spotted. The game is interesting and worth checking out. I do think the game suffers from some balance problems, but maybe I wasn't great at using the abilities. In any case, there is one particular ability (not hard to acquire) that essentially turns on god mode. The game might benefit from some balancing and a better end game.
Kill enemies, steal abilities from their brains, advance in power to kill more enemies. A simple enough idea, but executed beautifully in The Mind Eater. You start off trying to pick off a few fishermen and chickens, and end up looting hunters and wizards and having a lot of fun. Low hit points and clever AI keep you from ever feel too powerful, mind, so there's a great tension throughout. What's especially fun in the game is learning across many deaths about which enemies to pick on and which to avoid.
You are what you eat. And there's something inside your head (grey matter). Eat a fisherman? Learn to swim. Eat a dog? Learn to dig. Eat a chicken? Umm... There may be a way to navigate your way through the menu of this very-well-built village to achieve overwhelming terror, but it's dreadfully difficult, and a bit random.
The Only Shadow That the Desert Knows
Completeness
2 - Feels mostly complete and polished but a few things, such as all the npcs saying just the one thing, made it feel not quite superpolished. Also I felt there was a balance issue with the combat being way too hard, but again, might just be me. Almost a 3.
3 - The game is complete. No bugs found. Probably. Once I've time traveled to the point of death of a person it he refused to die on assigned day. But I'm not sure if it's a bug or may be I missed something.
3 - Time travel being implemented is a bit tricky. I hopped forward in time thirty years and a frog was still waiting for me. This was patched a little, to scatter the frogs but I was informed that having enemies die from this would be tricky to implement. Easier win conditions (hp degraded too fast) and a societal war system was added late development too.
Aesthetics
2 - Clean, good, just maybe a bit heavy on the cyan and magenta.
2 - The game look ok for an ASCII roguelike. Functional, but nothing special.
3 - TOSTDK is a pretty game. Animated water, fluctuating Xenotime and vibrantly colored areas depending on your region on the world map.
Fun
2 - Again, the difficulty is a bit much. I would have enjoyed the game a lot, but felt the game would kill me before I could do that.
2 - It's quite hard to measure fun of this game. It's definitely fun to figure things out. There is some Wow factor when you understand how things work. But the actual game play is somewhat repetitive and boring. And depends on luck a lot. I have no idea how I can even read books in cities if my race is in war with ALL other races.
2 - This is a fun game, and surely one I'll be re-visiting soon. While patched, the desire to travel the world map without being dragged into tons of encounters sours things a little. Traveling on the regular world map has you constantly dodging trees and there are no paths or roads.
Innovation
3 - I'm giving it a 3. Time travel isn't such a novel concept, but here it was done in a way that is big and interesting to me, rather than the usual small-scale tactical thing.
3 - There were attempts to make a roguelike with time travel, but this is the first one where it is actually implemented and have meaning.
3 - The time travel artifact hunting and information gathering through delving into spoken history is clever and well implemented. I feel that the game may be done with development and progress has halted, but it's good.
Scope
3 - I felt the scope was very nice for a 7drl.
3 - This one is huge. All these books, relationships, overworld, caves, time travel. Much more than you would expect from an average 7drl.
3 - This game went after an odd win condition using a difficult mechanic and pulled it off. Things were rocky at first (Like when I did my let's play of it) but that was mostly sorted out and delivered a product that was what the developer envisioned.
Roguelikeness
3 - Certainly no problems here I think.
2 - Bluntly speaking combat in this game feels more like "because it's roguelike" addition. Without combat and with more complex artifacts destiny tracking it could be nice 'temporal detective'. So yeah, it feels more like roguelike influenced than true roguelike.
3 - Turn based bump combat, proc gen caves and overworld, permadeath that gets closer and closer the longer you take. Missing any character creation, but it's a roguelike.
For once time travel is done in an interesting and epic way. However, might just be my general sucking at roguelikes, but the game is really hard. The monsters are tough and I died all the time trying to get decent enough gear to even have a chance at the even tougher monsters earlier in the game (heh, time travel is fun). And then I died some more. I got some ideas as to where to look for the artifacts that are the goal of the game, but came nowhere near to finding them. Being hard is not wrong by any means, but here I felt the tough battles took away from the meat of the game, looking for clues about the artifacts through time, especially as I didn't feel there was very much tactical depth to the battles. Now I was mostly running from monsters or getting jumped by a townful of people when a war suddenly broke out. Still, all in all a nice, if a bit frustrating, experience. The game looks nice enough and is mostly clear visually. The game is interesting and innovative but suffers from too much too hard combat in a game that doesn't need it or do it in a very interesting way. Very much worth playing, you might suck at it less than I.
Major part of difficulty of this game is figuring out what to do. Basically you need to track legendary artifacts in time and acquire them.
An ambitious and far traveling title. Scour different time periods for artifacts while racing against your powers that are ripping you apart. Learning from locals to research the locations of artifacts is a fascinating touch.
The Trapped Heart
Completeness
2 - A great deal of effort was put into this game, clearly. However, I still encountered several crashes during my playthroughs. And the one of the biggest omissions is pixel art for the monsters. Menus also appear to need some more work. I'm assuming there's a menu that's supposed to display at the start of every level but is instantly closed.
2 - It is always hard to tell what are TEngine issues and what are Trapped Heart issues, but the sad part of using an engine is you get responsibility for all of them. Pop-ups don't go away until you click off them. This confused me for a long time as I hit keys or clicked on the pop up itself, I ended up thinking things were just long load times. Quit & Save and then reload and you will discover the exit portals don't work, forcing you to play in a single session. I managed to get a stack overflow in LUA when the red bull charged me one time.
3 - It's quite weak 3. I had some glitches, like unkillable ectoplasm and strange behavior of lightning. But none of them are gamebreaking.
Aesthetics
2 - The tiles are so damn good. I'm really amazed by them considering how many different levels have their own unique look. The effects are quite special too. Unfortunately, the monsters were not drawn in the same style as the tiles. Consistency counts for a lot and it's not here. A few other nitpicks: the handling of fonts feels a bit cheesy at times and there seems to be a momentarily lag where the character is drawn in the previous tile even after you've moved. No complaints with controls.
3 - While the comment on the blog was that it remained programmer art, I found a lot of the tiles delightfully cute, especially things like the turtles and swarms. The slug and red bull are probably the exception. Flying logos for new levels made for an excellent transition.Click to move is a dangerous thing to combine with click to attack; especially with no range indicator and with ranges that change as you level up! I was always horribly confused what my distances were, no doubt partially due to unfamiliarity with hexes.I liked the subtle indicators of being slow and fast. I really loved the custom death messages to try and train users in common errors; though admittedly they were of little help for me against the knights of undying friendship.I really, really, want wall-slide with hex movement and horizontal corridors! Especially when playing as earth!
3 - Nice sprites, convenient controls. At first it might be somewhat confusing, but in a good way.
Fun
3 - It's very compelling. Early on, I felt a lot of frustration, but I came to realize I was only frustrated because of my misunderstanding of the mechanics. Once that cleared, the game was really fun and often very tense.
3 - A lot of fun!I would have even more fun if it were less roguelike (blasphemy!), however. It is a lot of work to re-progress to a level which has you stuck, and while one could argue that gives you a chance to experiment with a different set of level ups, when one has determined a set you want to try out, it is very punishing to repeat over and over again. I began to really hate the first levels.I also argue with the design decision that the exit portals count as walls for being surrounded...
2 - Unfortunately there are two major problems that are somewhat lowering fun factor. First - only boss fights are of any threat. Exploration and kills of small fray feels like a waste of time. When playing for the first time it might be considered as learning phase, but on nth playthru it's cumbersome. Second - the game's replayability goes as far as 2 or 3 wins. Air build, earth build and may be hybrid.
Innovation
3 - No one component is totally original, but the synthesis is impressive. I've seen shields done at least once, but never even close to the extent we have here.
3 - I really like how the one-hit point mechanic didn't feel forced. It really doesn't play like a one hit point roguelike, it plays like a zero-hit point roguelike. The two-pass approach with inverting the player behaviour worked surprisingly well to force one to rethink all the levels one had played too many times already.
1 - It feels very much like variation of last 2 (or 3?) 7drl games by the same author. And bluntly speaking both air and earth abilities are quite dull and unoriginal. The only original thing here is the way how choice between builds is done. But it's not enough for a game changing innovation. After all there were games where finishing an enemy with some ability was increasing proficiency in ability itself or general field where this ability belongs to.
Scope
3 - Lots of monsters, lots of bosses, lots of abilities, and lots of pixel art.
2 - An excellent 7DRL scope. I would have loved to see more work on the theme; the start has an excellent exciting theme that sort of falls apart into random fever dreams rather than tie together...
3 - Slightly more that I would expect from an average 7drl.
Roguelikeness
3 - More roguelike than Darren's other recent entries. The levels are more like dungeons instead of just boxes. The best part is how you very often alternate between moments of power and vulnerability.
3 - It suffers from being too much like a roguelike. It needs a way to lock in level ups after multiple runs so you can experiment. Also, from running the debug mode, I'm convinced you can have wildly different luck for the knights room in particular. (Yes, I'm not smart enough to solve that without cheating...)
3 - Quite weak 3. From a true roguelike I would expect more variation and random factors.
Darren Grey has spent the last few years working on a formula for roguelikes: hex based, a failure state triggered when surrounded, and a focus on bosses that spawn minions. The Trapped Heart feels like the perfect culmination of this lineage. I was fortunate enough to review the previous incarnation, FireTail. It was good, but it really tested my patience with the insane amount of monster spawning. I have to say that The Trapped Heart knocks FireTail out of the water. There's two sets of abilities here: earthquakes and chain lightning. Both feel very distinct and very powerful. Likewise, the monsters and bosses each have their own unique identities. The theme of friendship is very interesting too, though sometimes it's seems to be tongue or cheek or outright cheesy ("BRO POWER"). Early on, I got very frustrated with the game and I assumed it was heavily dependent on luck. As it turned out, I had just spent many hours with the game while not understanding the core mechanics. Even with detailed in game tips, it can be challenging to visualize the effect of each ability. The game might benefit from some sort of visual preview during each turn or even for the abilities themselves. There are certainly some issues with The Trapped Heart (the programmer art for monsters being the most noticeable), but even so this is easily one of the best 7DRLs I have ever played... in any year. It's a must try.
With Trapped Heart we see another foray of Darren's into the world of hit-pointless roguelikes. As we've come to expect, we encounter numerous interesting mechanics interleaving cleverly and being unlocked level by level.
What I really love about this game is ... learning to play it! My first impression was 'what the heck is going on'? Than I started to notice 'uh. this' and 'ah. that'. And suddenly everything started to make sense. In a nutshell you have easier to obtain, but not as powerful air build and harder to obtain, but much more powerful earth build. And some variety of enemies.
cr@sh
Completeness
3 - No crashes, in game help, didn't encounter any game breaking bugs.
3 - The game is complete and mostly bugless. There are even online high scores!
3 - The game is playable, beatable and has a some nice graphics and a little sound. Looks good here.
Aesthetics
3 - My only complaint here is that the help screens were a bit hard for me to read, maybe due to the high contrast and thick font face. Otherwise looks beautiful. Controls are fairly well laid out and were easy to learn.
2 - The game looks cool. All these animated menus, radar, energy distribution. Main complains are: results of radar scan are damn hard too look at, radar and camera could have own hotkeys. They are actually used way more often than firing, so two key presses instead of one at some point becomes irritating.
3 - Cr@sh has a neat little tileset that doesn't fall short anywhere as long as you aren't allergic to ASCII. Effects like Radar and camera look good too.
Fun
3 - Intriguing game with a fun set of mechanics to learn. There's room for mastery it seems too. Recommended!
2 - The game is intriguing. Main fun killer is balance. There is a high chance to die right away. There is a chance to run out of conduits. Yes, you can pick them back, but not if they connect to solar batteries. And final target is so hard to notice/distinguish, that I have a feeling that I might have seen it several times, thinking that it's some kind of an alien plant.
2 - Crash is fun and challenging. Running out of Conduit and traveling is kind of a weak point and there are some overpowered enemies currently that almost ensure defeat.
Innovation
3 - Your probe is power hungry and must maintain a constant line of supply or quickly lose power and die. Vision is limited to a radar pulse, which is a one turn radial sweep. It's only accurate as the last sweep. You can turn on cameras for more traditional vision, but this requires more power. Which you are always hungry for. Very good innovation tying these together!
2 - There were engineering based roguelikes before. Movement limitation on conduits only and vision limitation caused by camera power consumption are interesting twist, but too specific for this very case.
2 - I feel that this game went for a concept, grabbed it and made starting off exploded and blind fun. Not sure if there are other interplanetary probe games out there this year, but this one is good.
Scope
3 - Leaderboards, a reputation system, and in game help? This is an impressive set of features and pretty much a full game.
3 - Much more than you would expect from your average 7drl.
2 - This game is about what I could expect from a 7DRL. It seems like a lot of work went into story and setting.
Roguelikeness
3 - The major factor here is variety of play. The game delivers in that the random distribution of item pickups and locations of the probe parts greatly influences how each new game plays out.
2 - Technically there are roguelike elements, but it doesn't really feels like roguelike.
3 - Turn based, permadeath, procedurally generated, resource management, shooting combat, not bump, but I'll give that a slide. It hits enough roguelike qualifiers for me.
Very fun sci-fi RL with an innovative take on hunger and vision.
This game is interesting and strange. I have a feeling that it's missing tools for 1) fending off aliens without killing them 2) automatic defense to kill anything that approaches. I won the game by being aggressive, because previously I lost a lot of games due to disconnection from controller.
Crash is a slick little game where you are a crashed probe trying to spread conduits around an alien planet. Your goal is to find the communications array, and you connect to storage units, solar cells, batteries and can build a couple structures. Game feels good to play, but there are a couple unfinished and imbalanced mechanics.
A Roguelike Where You Dodge Projectiles
Completeness
2 - The game is complete from a tutorial to a win condition. However, I ended up with some random crash to desktop on level 9. The game also frequently pauses making it unclear if it is just doing huge amounts of processing or is hung.
2 - Crash on the second-to-last level, but otherwise very nice.
2 - It's fairly playable. I experienced heavy slowdown in later levels as the number of projectiles increased, leading eventually to crashes. I think I also ran into a situation where the autopilot stopped working.
Aesthetics
2 - Excellent use of ascii. However, the inter-character spacing (kerning) which is fine for the map is painful to read for text, especially the intro screen. F seems to be re-used for Fighters and Frigates that are rather different beasts I think. Controls are standard, which is nice, but the jump-to-next level is backwards. > is downwards/onwards/next page, but the jump point requires <. I'd recommend accepting either in this sort of situation. The circles to give FOV and cutting beam range are cool, but the FOV circle has pimples on the sides that are unsightly, always add 0.5 to your radius cut off to clean this up. The in-game messages are very cute; I especially appreciated the red paint.
2 - Could use a little more UI and tutorial work, but once you learned the conventions it worked well enough.
2 - I understood most of the information I needed to, eventually, but it could probably be arranged more cleanly. It took me a while to understand how sectors related to the play space, for instance, and I would have liked rollover tips to extend to the projectiles themselves. On the other hand, I thought the game did a fantastic job of conveying the feeling of weaving and dodging flying projectiles.
Fun
3 - While I'm sure some players would find it on the easy side, I appreciated the slowly ramping difficulty that let me slowly learn the patterns of the enemy fire. The shot-highlighting is a genius way to allow people to deal with the somewhat chaotic motion of shots in ascii grids without making it trivial. Not only do you have to avoid getting into dangerous locations, but if you find yourself with no exit you will want to pick the exit path with least damage
3 - I can't believe it's just a libtcod tutorial retread. (It is, isn't it?) I stayed up way too late, and then started playing this again the next day instead of reviewing other 7DRLs. You win.
3 - I think this game's got the seed of a great idea. When my mind starts spinning with possible additions and changes I know I've got a good game on my hands. The game could use more effort put into depth of the flight mechanics; occasionally I'd get into degenerate strategies where I could destroy a carrier, say, by shuffling left and right alternately for a long time. But overall I enjoyed it and felt like most of the elements had a place.
Innovation
3 - A well done roguelike in a space-craft setting alone is worth some innovation, but this one also brings to the table some excellent combat mechanics. Clever ideas like removing the ability of the player to explicitly fire both makes the game manageable, but also feeds into the setting (why shouldn't a targeting computer just fire every turn). The zone-based exploration is likewise very cool; it lets the player make some risk vs rewards choices. But may require non-auto piloting to avoid intermediate war zones. Further, the wide stretches of empty space really sell the space-flight mechanic once more.
3 - Yeah, completely unexpcted. I could learn to like turn-based bullet hell.
3 - Dodging projectiles that move over time is not a mechanic I've seen used a lot, and it's a good fit for a space battling theme.
Scope
2 - An excellent scope for a 7drl game.
3 - I can't decide if this is expected-in-a-7DRL scope or OMG-so-awesome, but going with the latter on general principles.
2 - I thought the author chose a good scope for a 7DRL. Solid core action, some inventory management, character stats improvement, map exploration and level progression.
Roguelikeness
3 - In terms of raw combat mechanics this is very much not a roguelike. No melee, no bump to attack, no corridors. But its combat mechanics fit so perfectly to its theme that those things become irrelevant. An example of a 100% roguelike that escapes the Dungeon genre.
3 -
3 - Yeah, it's a Roguelike in my book.
The plain title, "A roguelike where you dodge projectiles” does little justice to the amount of flavor this roguelike actually possesses! It is a very impressive example of a roguelike that attempts many things that often destroy tactical combat: ranged combat
After the third level, I forgot to be inquisitive and experimental. After the fifth level, I forgot what time it was or that I was supposed to be reviewing it; I was just fighting to stay alive. Although it starts out easy, the game is quite serious by the later levels in saying that gaining intel is key to survival as your fly your lone ship armed with a single short-ranged (but extremely powerful!) weapon against the entire might of the enemy fleet. The *only* reason I'm writing this review instead of playing the game again is that it crashed in level 9 (of 10), and doesn't support saving the game; otherwise the most unexpected and gripping thing I've seen in this challenge.
A cool space-battling game with asymmetric abilities. Your ship has an instant-hit laser that will automatically shoot anything that comes into range. Enemy ships launch projectiles that fly through space a few squares each turn. Areas that will be intersected by projectiles in the next turn are highlighted. Missiles streak this way and that across the sky as you juke and dodge to keep the enemy ships in range of your own laser.The interface, while barebones, does convey the information you need. Mousing over items in the play space gives tooltips, for the most part, and inventory items have their effects clearly described. The game's got a wacky tone: the healing item is duct tape, and the speed boost is red paint, for example. Auto-fire for the player's own weapon keeps the game to around one key a turn, which gives it flow and helps make the projectile motion visually apparent.
Becoming Northerly
Completeness
3 - Functional from start to finish, no bugs
2 - The game is complete, playable, winnable, but have some glitches, especially near the end.
2 - The game seems complete. Minor slidy ice aside, the only thing that feels off is balance. Endgame is brutal if you've been picking up the wrong stuff and paradoxically trying to avoid fights while trying to kill enemies to get pelts.
Aesthetics
3 - Charming little sprites. Shows you information about enemies and items.
3 - The game looks cool. All compressed, but comprehensive information about all items and monsters on screen is displayed. Sprites are nice. Controls consist of 3 keys, but it feels like enough!
3 - Game looks nice, and controls well. From the Author's blog, he got some outside graphical help, and it not only looks good but appears to have changed the tone of the game?
Fun
3 - You slalom down the mountain and kill snowmen for their pelts, what's not to like!
2 - The game is quite fun, but there are a few problems that spoil it. First - accumulating error problem. You have to risk early in order to survive later. And random nature of the game sometimes creates unwinnable situations (IMO). Second - cracks in the ice. They behave unpredictable. I felt that my character was jumping around randomly. And horizontal walls. They just feel glitchy.
2 - I had a good time playing this odd skiing/animal crushing game.
Innovation
2 - Down down down you go, this is a nice twist. Psst - you can actually go left and right with 7 and 9 on the numpad, don't know if intentional or not.
2 - I wouldn't say that once direction game was never done before. But in this setting and with these implementation details it's more or less original.
3 - I don't think a lot of one way heroics-esque games made it in this year, and if they did, I doubt they would be as fun and well put together as this.
Scope
2 - It's a full scope poject, with a variety of enemies and attacks, enemies even get tougher over time (and so are you, buy those upgrades)
3 - Slightly more than I would expect from an average 7drl. So, it's not 'overwhelming' 3, but definitely more than 2.
3 - This game has a lot going for it, and i'd like to suggest lots of people play it to see if your experiences were as good as mine. Good luck!
Roguelikeness
3 - Has all the traditional roguelike features.
3 - Quite week, but 3. There are all elements of the roguelike, but in minimal quantities.
2 - Turn based with kinda vague auto combat, looks random genned, and you have one life. Just the content and feel don't seem all the way roguelite. More arcade game.
A perilous one way mountain slalom wherein you kill beasts for their pelts, collect items and buy upgrades and try to stay alive in general. Careful, some enemies have ranged attacks!
I have mixed feeling about this game. It seemed very fun at first, but after playing it quote a bit I came to conclusion that mechanics of this game have 'accumulating error' problem. If you miss some opportunities early, you might find yourself in a situation when your character is not dead, but there is very very low chance of winning. But for a game with 3 buttons controls it's full of meaningful decisions.
Becoming Northerly is an odd gem among this year's 7DRL entries. You are locked going one direction (downscreen, meant to symbolize going up a mountain?) and can move either straight or diagonally. I misunderstood the mechanics a couple times and that cost me the game, and a decent run.
Switch Hook
Completeness
3 -
3 - In a different game I'd have said that the enemies need more introduction, but in this case working out their mechanics in gameplay works just fine. Nothing here feels lacking.
3 - The game feels complete to me. The help is on the game's web site; that's perhaps the only thing I would have wanted included in the game itself.You can turn the sound off if you don't want it, and run full-screen or in a window. Clicking on an empty hex starts the player auto-moving to that hex, stopping when an enemy is sighted.
Aesthetics
3 - Polished simple graphics.
2 - The graphical style is quite bare and having sound at all in this game feels superfluous. Nothing particularly offensive, though.
3 - It looks, sounds, and plays great. There are simple sound effects and animation, and good use of color. There's an optional display to show enemies' attack ranges.
Fun
2 -
3 - It's paced for a single runthrough instead of several replays (as the enemies are always introduced in the same schedule), but that one runthrough was quite a lot of fun for me.
3 - Very good difficulty ramp. The enemies and items have interesting interactions, and the game lets you come up with strategies that feel clever. I was able to get all the enemies on a level to chase me into a side room, run to the exit and then swap places with a heavy stone moai, which locked them in. (Finishing a level without killing any enemies nets you an extra bonus health point. It's very difficult to do, generally.)You are at the mercy of the random level generator to some extent, in terms of whether the tools you need to get through the level unscathed will be accessible or not.
Innovation
2 - A sensible exploration of a novel mechanic. (Or, apparently, a mechanic used in Zelda many many years ago, but pretty novel in roguelikes.)
2 - While the hook a fun gameplay mechanic, there's pretty much no way it hasn't already been done by plenty of games.
2 - The game runs through a lot of the implications of its main mechanic, which is an unusual one.
Scope
2 -
2 - Simple but functional. The game was still introducing new enemies at the farthest point I got to, so I might not have got to see the entire scope of the game.
3 - It's a simple game but I'm impressed with the polish on everything, particularly on the difficulty.
Roguelikeness
2 - More roguelite than roguelike - not that there's anything wrong with that.
3 - Maybe slightly in the "procedural puzzle" direction in terms of game feel, but certainly a roguelike in terms of the mechanics.
3 - Yes, it's a Roguelike. It lives on the puzzle end of the spectrum (as opposed theme or role-playing).
A fun little puzzle game, extremely reminiscent of Hoplite.
Some 7DRLs are unfortunately hard to approach and figure out. They try to overload features and different sorts of gameplay into a package that probably never sees player testing before it's out and the challenge is over. But then, then there's games like Switch Hook. I clicked on the screen once and went "oh, so that's how you play": You click on enemies to switch position with them and do one point of damage, or you click on a hex without an enemy to move in its direction. Everything else after that is mechanics relating to different enemies: Wolves move two tiles a turn, trolls don't switch positions, bombs and toads explode upon death, archers shoot at you if they can see you on their turn, etc..
Switch Hook is a fun, very solidly-designed game built around the Zelda-inspired switch hook mechanic. The player attacks enemies by exchanging places with them on a hex grid, a move that also deals a point of damage to the enemy. Each level introduces a new enemy or item, or a new combination of enemies. For instance, there is an enemy that is damaged by the switch hook but does not swap places, or a bomb item that explodes after swapping twice. The levels are fairly small and you have to try to use walls and obstacles to your advantage.I made it as far as level 16 (out of 20).
Billiard Dungeon
Completeness
3 - Polished and well-done.
3 - I played the 7DRL build and then the post build and in both the game was pretty polished and only a minor weapon repeating bug was in evidence as far a problems went. The post version is very polished.
3 - It seems quite complete to me.
Aesthetics
3 -
2 - The game plays well. Being a ball that bounces around is a clever choice, but it seems that even with upgraded weaponry it is very difficult to try to position enemies where you can push them into spikes or hit without being hit, so you get worn down as the game progresses and run out of resources. Then die. Pretty much all you can do then.
2 - Billiard Dungeon has some wonderfully atmospheric music and sound effects. The levels with their oblique angles are rendered very nicely, and there is a snazzy exact rendering of line of sight (as in the old game Nox, for instance).I found myself wishing for some description of the weapons and their effects, and similar for the differently-colored potions.The view of the level is rather zoomed-in, and given the chaotic nature of the levels it's easy to get lost.
Fun
1 - Interaction modes are limited enough it just didn't hold my attention.
2 - This was fun! I suggest giving it a try. The bouncing concept should be enough to lure you in, and while it maintains a standard roguelike difficulty curve there is a good time to be had bouncing a goblin into some spikes.
2 - It's interesting but I found it fairly frustrating. The ball doesn't travel far enough to really take advantage of the bouncing and I found it was relatively rare when I could knock enemies into traps.This game has given me a newfound hatred for doves. They dart in and whack you and then fly off out of reach. On level six I once ran into an entire flock of them. Grrr!The use of potions takes experimentation. For instance it took me a long time to figure out that blue potions put out mushrooms which you could then roll over to regain health.I still don't really understand the difference between the various weapons, or their alternate attack modes.
Innovation
3 - Complete exploration of a novel mechanic.
3 - Yeah, this gets a 3 because there isn't anything else like this project this year (AS FAR AS I KNOW) and I think it's clever and makes a nice game.
2 - Suprisingly this is not the only billiards-inspired game I'm reviewing today. This one is turn-based; the player shoots her piece, then the NPCs shoot their pieces, etc. Still, there are ideas explored in this game that I haven't seen before.
Scope
3 - Music, sound, animation, itemization, enemies... a lot got done.
2 - The Author set a goal and got done in a timely fashion. I have no serious coding experience, and I don't know how long physics like this take to make, but everything got put together tidily in the allotted amount of time.
3 - I'm impressed at what the author has accomplished. There are help scrolls you can roll over, and I came across things like a "breather" level.
Roguelikeness
2 - Although it's got a roguelike theme, it's much more a puzzle game in my book.
3 - Not turn based, but bump combat to an extreme. Permadeath, hard as nails difficulty, procedural generation, items aren't randomized.. Still, I would classify this as a roguelike, partially because I'm not sure what else to call it.
3 - Despite the unusual control mechanic I think this falls pretty squarely in the Roguelike camp. It's turn-based with procedural dungeon levels and some progression as you acquire better weapons and an arsenal of potions.
The idea of navigating a dungeon as if you were a pool ball might leave you bouncing with joy, it just left me bouncing off the walls in frustration. Hack and slash - but a really complete and well-done hack-and-slash game.
Billiard Dungeon is a neat mouse and physics based dungeon delver. Like the name implies, you move like a pool ball and different weapons provide different ranges and strength. You need to get to level 12 and must bash and bump those that oppose you either into hazards or in melee to win.
A dungeon crawler with a movement mechanic inspired by billiards. Use the mouse to pick a direction and force; watch your character's ball bounce off walls or enemies and come to a stop. Then the enemies get a turn to shoot their balls. The level generation features lots of oblique angles, presumably to make bounces more interesting, and there are bumpers that function very much like a pinball machine. In practice I didn't find myself bouncing off walls that much though; my ball could not travel very far before coming to rest, and the dungeons tended to be rife with spike traps.I have not completed the game; I only managed to get down to level 6 or so in the dungeon.
Quaestum Facere
Completeness
2 - Was really proud when I successfully escorted the archaeologist back home, only to be told that the archaeologist had died and i was getting no pay for that mission. That was the only bug I ran into, although after that I avoided any sort of escort or rescue mission.
2 - Overall the engine (which the author has been developing for some time) is quite nice, and this entry has a nice level of polish because of it. I found some annoying bugs with the escort/rescue missions, basically, just avoid those. It would be nice to have a help file with the distribution, to explain some of the options in the HUD.
3 - The game feels very complete and polished, although I did spot 2 bugs: Occasional inaccessible diagonal map openings in caves, and a monster-infighting crash bug (but the game successfully recovered my file).
Aesthetics
3 - Polished graphics and UI.
3 - I found the game nice to look at and with good sounds. The music was fine. Controls are great, I used the mouse the whole time. The context sensitive mouse click worked great. There some learning curve as the guns have a narrow field of fire, enemies directly diagonal cannot be fired at.
3 - Gameplay is smooth, with keyboard shortcuts and mouse aiming available. The menus flow nicely (except a minor problem where item info sometimes gets cut off at the bottom). The graphics are clear and used well, and the game uses some excellent Kevin MacLeod music (I spent almost 5 minutes just listening to the title theme).
Fun
2 -
3 - I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game. The game lets you holding down left mouse to repeatedly fire or move. It has a great run and gun feel to it.
3 - There are two endings, and I played until I saw them both.
Innovation
2 -
2 - Abilities have cooldowns of different types than time, which I think is quite an improvement. For example, the stock Healing ability has a cooldown of 20 hits, you must land 20 hits against monsters before the ability is ready for another use.
2 - Recharging the utility items requires you to score some number of hits against enemies. Instead of being incredibly innovative, this game takes familiar mechanics and uses them well.
Scope
2 -
3 - There's quite a bit of utilities and gear in the game. There are also a bunch of missions to undertake on the quest to retirement. I completed the game a couple times and didn't feel I had seen all of them.
2 - Several different mission types, procedural caves and static spaceships, weapon modifiers, a handful of enemy types, and a bunch of nice story text.
Roguelikeness
3 -
2 - There doesn't seem to be a time pressure or mechanic to force the player to take risks, which makes this feel like more of a straightforward dungeon crawl than rogue.
3 - Turn-based, grid-based, single-character, tactical, permadeath, with some of its maps being PGC. Despite that list, I don't feel that this is a strong 3.
Great vertical slice of a sci-fi roguelike. Theme, details, itemization, sense of humor. With another day could have a much wider variety of things to do and thus be even more engrossing.
Fun little sci-fi dungeon crawler.Fav: The silly end goal of affording the prefect retirement plan.Not so Fav: There are some escort missions, and they end up being broken as all escort missions are.
Play this! Quaestum Facere is a primarily ranged combat game where you accept missions, buy new gear, and try to save up enough money to retire from the mercenary life. It's fun, atmospheric, and the goal is close enough to your grasp that you'll want to start another character immediately when a space pirate leader blows you up.
Arachne
Completeness
2 - If you throw your javelin at a spider on top of the chest, the javelin is lost?
3 - Seems be complete and bug free.
3 - It's a very polished game.
Aesthetics
2 - Serviceable for the gameplay, music and sound effects are a bonus.
2 - Looks a bit minimalistic, but it is good for this game. Web animation is great for this type of project and UI is clear. Although I have some complains about player / enemies tiles - there are simple colored letters. This looks (too) simple and (especially the red ones) doesn't fit to atmosphere of this game.
3 - The game's got music, sound effects, and animation, as well as a dialog box system.The powers are clearly described and straightforward to understand.
Fun
1 - A bit too unforgiving for me, and the short game length didn't fix that the way it's said to.
3 - Very enjoyable game. Mechanics is simple but provides a lots of possibilities. Disabling enemies, creating new links and nodes in the web, collecting and using items is very funny. Unfortunately gamplay is quite repetitive, but... Still '3' as score.
2 - It's interesting but I found it frustrating. I got the furthest when I ignored powerups and enemies and focused on just making a beeline for the exit.You can get yourself stuck if you stun enemies because you can't move through the nodes they occupy.The game (be)rates you when you die, assigning you a label such as "pitiful" or "atrocious" or "awful." I'd have preferred some hints about ways to get better, personally.
Innovation
3 - A completely different take on noneuclidean destructible maps. Great prototyping of a set of related mechanics!
3 - Very innovative. I never heard about game which relies on such a topic and uses such a mechanics.
3 - Moving around on a graph, and editing the graph as you go, is a great mechanic, and the game's got a good theme to go with that. The player and enemy abilities all tie nicely in with that central mechanic.
Scope
2 - Nicely put together, a good week's effort.
2 - Simple, small game, but scope is reasonable for 7DRL. Some enemies, few items - it's ok.
3 - It's an impressive job for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
2 -
2 - Ouh, it is hard to judge. It looks unlike roguelikes used to look, mechanics and style of gameplay are far from Rogue, but I still could evaluate Arachne as roguelike.
3 - Yes, it's mostly Roguelike. The web is a spring simulation so it bounces and bobs around. If the web is malformed it can be very hard to aim your powers at the intended nodes, making it the rare Roguelike that requires good reflexes and timing.
Not for the spider-phobic. Or the geometry-phobic. Or the dying a lot phobic. But interesting, and nicely riffing off of the Greek myth.
Nice entry by Paul Jeffries. Very unusual game about... about what? About managing spider's web? Yeah, sort of. This is one of the weirdest roguelikes this year. And still one of the best - regardless of how far from Berlin Interpretation Arachne is.
Arachne uses its spider theme pervasively. Each level is a graph shaped like a spiderweb. Each turn, the player and enemies move along the edges of the graph from node to node. Each level has a power-up you can grab and an exit to get to the next level. Different types of enemies, each with a graph-related poewr, appear as you work your way to the final boss. Some enemies can snip edges in the web, for instance, or burn away nodes, or jump across gaps. You can't (generally) harm the enemies so the focus is on evasion.Because of the graph nature of the game it has to be played with a mouse. It's also using a real-time spring simulation of the web, so timing is important to ensure you click on your intended nodes when you're moving. Apart from that the game is turn-based.I got to the final boss once but wasn't able to figure out how to beat her. I've died dozens of times on level 2 or 3.
Cult
Completeness
3 - Very polished. There's a lot of little details in this game. I did encounter one crash after several runs, but considering the high level of polish and completeness otherwise I think a 3 is still deserved.
3 - No bugs, in game help, works great.
2 - A few small bugs, and once you get a lead you pretty much win, but the game is all there. Equipment upgrades don't seem super effective.
Aesthetics
3 - From the dynamic lighting to the avatar effect, everything looks fantastic! Of course, it clearly looks like a Numeron game. It's somewhat amusing to see some of the same tiles being slightly modified and reused year and year, but I can't complain too much. The big NPCs like the Reaper and Azzafel are fricking amazing. Controls are excellent as well and the controls screen is really helpful.
3 - Perfect presentation as always. controls work excellent. No sound but oh well.
3 - The graphics look nice, the crypt is interesting and Azafel is nicely animated. Cult looks good and I wish I had more time in game to explore the map.
Fun
3 - Really fun. It's action packed and well balanced. I can't see a huge amount of replayability, but it took me several tries before winning. To be fair, there are 3 classes to try out.
3 - Really fun fast paced combat. Nice selection of abilities to use against the competing players. There's a cool push/pull dynamic as you've got to balance powering up with being king of the hill.
2 - Bump combat and abilities that vary between classes. Sometimes it's very diffucult to keep your health up and maintain demon form, but this may be on purpose to keep balance.
Innovation
2 - The king of the hill style combat is new to me, but it sounds like there may have been some similar games in the past (e.g. Twelve Hours). The style of map is pretty intriguing too, not just that it wraps but that certain map features like the shops are replicated. Thus you can travel in various directions and still come across what you need (I still got lost a lot early on though).
2 - It might be interesting to see something like this king of the hill arena somehow worked into a traditional roguelike.
2 - King of the hill isn't something you run into a lot in roguelites. I really wish there was a life counter at least, a way to die before the game's end.
Scope
3 - A bit above average with the graphics, the AI opponents, the abilities, and the shops.
3 - Really impressive array of abilities and features.
2 - Cult aimed to be a king of the hill action fest and got its target. Varying ability loadouts ,upgrading weapons and holding influence and staying alive balanced with gathering gold outside the center of the ring add a tactical edge to the game.
Roguelikeness
2 - Outside of the grid/turn based nature and bump combat, actually not very roguelike. There's no permadeath and I'm not even sure how much is procedural. The map layout is somewhat static, so if things are shuffled around I certainly didn't notice it.
1 - Different type of game. Focuses on combat and doesn't build on or use any other features that rogue has.
2 - Not a strong point here. Turn based tactical combat. Permadeath is nowhere to be seen, the level layout never changes. It's at the bottom of this 2.
A turn-based, yet very fast feeling "king of the hill" style game. You try to stay in the "altar” a 5x5 square
Fast paced and fun arena combat game.
Cult is a king of the hill style brawler where you fight to gain and retain the highest place of honor in the Demon Azafel's Cult. It's lite on roguelike elements, fun and only a little glitchy.
Helix
Completeness
2 - Runs without problems until winning a level, then may just get stuck
2 - All game mechanics work, but game always crashes after few levels, so I'm giving 2 due to this sad bug.
3 - Feels fairly complete and polished, to me. I didn't have any trouble picking up and playing the game. Much harder time getting anywhere in it. It has on-screen directions for most things.
Aesthetics
2 - Spirtes show what everything is, ranged guys, melee guys, wizards, obstacles, explosives, it's all pretty clear
2 - Looks very nice, but most of content seems copied from previous 7drl
3 - Looks and sounds good. The arena scrolls smoothly, the enemies slide from square to square. The main thing that's missing is good feedback showing shots hitting the player.
Fun
3 - Unusually fun distraction though sometime the RNG doesn't play fair
3 - Nonstop dodging from bullets and exploding the barrels, sign me in!
2 - It's fun but I don't tend to last more than a few turns.While you can only aim through the points on your current template, enemies can aim in any direction. It is hard to read which squares will be affected by an enemy shot when it's moving at an unusual angle across the board.The sequencing of whether shots hit you if they're arriving in a square on the same turn as you are leaving feels a bit off.The movement cards seem more useful than the firing cards; they're easier to play without leaving yourself exposed to harm, anyway. You can one-hit kill anyone with your bump attack, which you always have, and staying out of the line of fire is crucial.What if doing any of your always-available moves (move/wait/melee) discarded the current card from the list and advanced to the next?
Innovation
3 - Very unusual concept, you get served moves and attacks in a queue and must perform them in the order they come
2 - Random stream of abilities used both for atacks and escaping, even though as author says he planned more varied abilities. Also pseudorealtime enemies combined with turnbased player.
3 - It's an interesting system.
Scope
2 - There's just the arena, good for demonstrating the gimmick, but nothing beyond that
2 - Scope is good for a 7drl.
2 - It's a healthy amount of work! The game does not have progression (I think; I never managed to clear a board) or upgrades so it's more of a puzzle game. I like those, though.
Roguelikeness
2 - Tile based and randomized, good enough, I guess
3 - All important parts of a roguelike are present.
3 - Yeah, basically Roguelike.
A combat arena where your special moves, which can be teleports, attacks or a mix of both, are randomized. You have to spend your current move to get your next one. All in all pretty amusing
In this game player must kill all monsters on a randomly generated board that represents spaceship or something like this. Player have 4 hp, monsters have only 1, most of the monsters shoots and there is a lot exploding barrels, so fights are very dynamic - kill or get killed after few mistakes. The original part is player weapon - most of the time he must use a randomly given ability that is either blinking to a certain offset or shooting in some directions. Due to this the player chaotically jumps around the enemies, use obstracles and barrels to his profit and kill enemies while they are reloading. This is very fun, and doesn't require as much tactical planning and careful analysis as in 1-hp roguelikes. On the other side abilities and enemies aren't very diverse, so after a few hours there is no challenge in winning on a first 2 levels (and levels after second sadly always crash on both of my PCs). The second problem is that due to nondiscrete nature of monsters and bullets it is difficult to predict whether a bullet will hit a column or pass it, even in simple cases.
This is a wildly chaotic puzzle Roguelike. Try to clear a board full of enemies all shooting at you. You can do the usual Roguelike movement and bump-melee attack, or you can use the top card on a never-ending deck of "ability" cards. Each card illustrates (on a little grid) shooting through one or more squares, and/or teleporting to a nearby square. You get to pick whether to use it facing north, south, west or east. Once the card's used it is discarded and the next card becomes the current one. (It's a bit like how you can see the next piece in Tetris, except here you can see the next four cards.) Shots are always hitting unintended targets: walls, exploding barrels, other enemies.You have four hit points and that's it. The board is littered with obstacles and exploding barrels. Enemies have line of sight, and can shoot at any angle. They have a targeting turn, a firing turn, and a reloading turn (although I think the number of those varies by enemy type), so you can teleport in while they're aiming and melee them.
WRAITH
Completeness
3 - Seems to be complete.
3 - Dungeon has five levels and varying enemies. Balance is an issue with the inability to skip turns, you tend to get pinned into corners. Also, Poison is miserable.
3 - Complete, playable, and I encountered no game breaking bugs. There a help key, that tells you where the manual is located, which is better than nothing! Balance wise its OK, maybe on the unfair side. There's a good difficulty progression as the player dives deeper with new enemies being added along the way. I wish there was more healing options.
Aesthetics
2 - Great tiles and nice interface, but the FOV vas a bit too restrictive and behaved strangely now and then.
2 - The game plays well. The combo is hard to work up while staying safe and healing is too far between. Sometimes I wish the attacks were a toggle instead of an action queue.
3 - Game looks and feels good. Mouse over gives tool tips, keyboard binds are logical. Oryx tiles are always nice to look at. There's no sound, but that's not deserving of a -1 for this type of gameplay.
Fun
2 - Nice but gets repetitive quite quick.
2 - Very challenging, but not for all of the best reasons. Enemies like to remain tantalizingly out of reach either due to pathfinding or bad aggro range and healing isn't super easy to get to when you need it.
2 - The combo system adds some interest. The vault ability is a key feature that is refreshing. The 'dummy' slime monster is a nice addition as well, an enemy that is actually more useful when kept alive. I mention earlier in the review text that there's no ability to wait a turn. I think that the way combos decay over time are enough of a reason to keep moving. To make matters worse, some enemies will just blithely wait around until you try to pass within one square of them, at which point they instantly strike. Doesn't quite feel fair.
Innovation
2 - The combo idea is nice but does not feel relevant enough here.
3 - The captain system (The enemies with the red swords) were cool once I figured out what the heck they were. Having the area cleared after killing my prior killer was rewarding. Assuming I could do so without being torn to shreds.
2 - The vault ability is great. The dummy monster is quite interesting. Both fine aspects to learn from.
Scope
2 - Reasonable for a 7drl.
2 - I was unable to find what the author was aiming for, and only having a passing familiarity with Shadows of Mordor, I may be missing some stuff. Still, it was in on time, and rather playable.
3 - This game is pretty ambitious and I'm impressed how much depth of play there is. Great work.
Roguelikeness
3 - Clearly is one.
3 - Turn based Tactical combat, permadeath, brutal difficulty, resource management (sorta) and proc gen levels. Roguelike to me.
2 - The game just almost tips the scales of roguelike-ness. It's missing a certain feeling of tenseness and uncertainty that a fine roguelike creates. Gameplay felt like more of a puzzle than a rpg.
A nice simple puzzle kind of a roguelike all about managing groups and getting the first hit in. The player has three different attacks and choosing the right one is very important. Killing a lot of enemies in a row adds to a combo count, giving benefits, but the cound decreases too fast for the combp mechanic to be too relevant I feel. All in all I liked the game, certainly worth playing.
Shadow of Mordor inspired WRAITH has you playing a spooky ghost that has to position himself tactically to fight the hordes of darkness. Gain life by drinking from fountains and try not to get mashed by trolls.
Positioning and clever use of abilities and even opponents plays a key part in this clever entry.Fav: combo systemNot so Fav: Can only move, there's no wait. I get why some designers like this idea, as it forces the player to position carefully, but as a player I'm over it. It makes me do a silly tap dance routine just to avoid taking damage and makes no sense from a story/lore perspective.
Darkyr
Completeness
2 - Alt-F4 to quit is not really suitable for a complete game. Text in the new levels is often cut off when playing at 2560x1600. Pressing buttons doesn't work with a Wacom under Windows, forcing me to use a mouse rather than tablet (but this is likely Unity being silly) Many spells are missing icons on the map, resulting in empty halos that you pick up to get fireballs or frost bolts. Odd, as they have icons on the caster bar; surely those could have been used? Likewise I'd prefer the weapon icons rather than a generic sword on the ground so I know which weapon it is at a glance.
2 - The game needs some balance because you need weapons or spells to fight enemies, and in their current swiftly consumable rate you run out of oomph when trying to fight scaling foes.
Aesthetics
2 - I want to love the geometric aesthetic. And I think I do. The problem is having all monsters and yourself represented by the same tower-of-blocks really is too abstract for me to handle. I couldn't ever feel for the kobolds, or the orcs. I think this is a strong argument to have instead built them out of voxelized ascii, as a k or o would be easier to identify and relate to. The tooltips are nice and necessary to understand all the interactions, but often got in the way of actual targeting. I think I'd prefer if the roll over stayed in one spot on the screen with an arrow pointing to the current target so it doesn't jump around all the time. It was very unclear when I was frozen that all I could do was hit space, probably need to glow that menu or move the Frozen: Hit Space to center stage.With all the interactions, it is pretty important to have the tooltips reflect them, as far as I could tell this wasn't the case, kobolds didn't seem to get the +2 from a mushroom in their tooltip (but people with rage did increment...?)I appreciate how the mouse move switched seamlessly to single-step movement around enemies.
3 - The game has a pleasant glowing bloom and the in game audio (monster voices and sounds) is my favorite part.
Fun
2 - There is a remarkable amount of stuff to figure out. Unfortunately, a fair bit of it ends up being irrelevant as most play is seems to be about resource management rather than tactics. The low hit points per monster often makes sit & kill an effective strategy. Multiple play throughs are rewarded with cool encounters, however.
2 - I had a good time with Darkyr and I will likely continue to play it after the competition. Three classes with vague restrictions, enemies that respond synergistically with each other and varied pickups make the game keep my interest.
Innovation
3 - A lot of neat systems here. The UI/look is worth studying. The simple weapon/armour/spell mechanics is surprisingly deep with the various relationships between the systems.
2 - Using the resources of a small team Darkyr was able to get more polish in than some of it's competitors. nice graphics a little silliness, tight resource management and a consumable spell system. Also there is a nudist class.
Scope
3 - There is a lot more here than is apparent in any screen shot, which is why I wished the art-style would make the variety of creatures more obvious.
2 - The game delivered most of what it aimed to deliver. Needs some balance tweaks and a little more explanation of mechanice, but that's pretty much any 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
3 - Most definitely a roguelike.
3 - Bump combat, permadeath, rather unforgiving, procedural etc. Fits my description of Roguelike.
Darkyr is an isometric roguelike played with a very clean, geometric, look. You can pick your initial adventurer, and in the roguelike tradition, this has more to do with how much difficulty you want to face than your personal style. Gameplay is fluid and mouse-based. Monsters and items have many interactions based on triggered events; often making it wise to pick carefully which monster you defeat first.
Darkyr is a neat little 3D roguelike created by a small team. Resource management is difficult and vital in its current state, but continued development seems likely.
Beyaz Dag
Completeness
3 - This feels like a published game, not a 7DRL. The only weakness was enemy pathing, but that's stated up front in the readme.
2 - There is a lot going on here. Quests, lots and lots of area to cover that grants your exploration experience. Not sure if the game is beatable, considering how hard it is to stay alive, and a prominent pathfinding bug lets you force enemies like snow leopard face first into a rock while you flee to safety.
2 - The game is stable and feels mostly feature-complete. There are some oddities; for instance the game does not always erase an enemy from his old position as he moves, which can make it difficult to know where to aim your bow. As mentioned above the pathfinding is poor and in the notes the game says exploiting that is necessary to win. I did not win; the game takes quite a while to play.
Aesthetics
2 - The game interface is pretty typical and average. The fonts were not my favorite, nor the arrangement of the screen. The color palette for the world seemed appropriate for the theme.
1 - Graphics and interface are not this game's strong point. Not a fan of the tileset either. It gets a little better when you get out of the swamp, but it's pretty confusing at the start.
2 - It looks pretty good. There is a lot of space between the monospace font characters which decreases readability. I love the look of the elevation layers, though, and the different biomes as you go up the mountain.
Fun
3 - I spent longer than I should have playing this game, and I'll be back for more after I'm done with all my reviews.
2 - The game is intriguing, hints at depth and has a lot of story going on. Combat seems very interesting but it's super dangerous.
2 - It's a big game and I love the atmosphere. If the combat was balanced I would happily play this game a bunch more.
Innovation
2 - I like the varying altitude, dwarf fortress style. The exploration and skill point system has promise.
2 - The depth and scale of this game, and an overarching quest stand out amidst a lot of entries with little to no story at all.
2 - It's ground-breaking in having solid tone and an unusual combat system.
Scope
3 - I don't think I saw everything the game has to offer, in more than a few hours of [re]play.
3 - This may be one of the most ambitious projects I've judged this year, and if I wasn't bleeding to death all the time I would love to see how it goes, and even take a peek at the cyclops's maze.
3 - Very impressive scope for a 7DRL. You don't see NPCs and quests much in this time frame. The game has skills to develop, various weapons and enemies, and several distinct dungeon styles.
Roguelikeness
3 - Almost everything I expect from a Roguelike, and nothing that would disqualify it.
3 - Turn based combat, brutal difficulty, static world, static items, 9 key and bleeding to death with no way to stop your inevitable sad collapse.
3 - Yes, Roguelike!
One of the better 7DRL games I've played. I kept wanting to play it more to see more of it, but eventually had to stop. It is probably even more deep than my review accounts for.
Beyaz Dag has you looking to save your village from a terrible plague, no matter the cost. You should not fight in this game. The game's description tells you not to fight and if you do more than beat a deer to death with your bare hands you'll be in trouble.
You are on a quest to the top of a mountain (Beyaz Dag), to convince a goddess there to save your people from the plague.This is a deeply atmospheric game, with writing that hints at unseen depths. The main part of the quest has you clambering over the mountain and its surroundings, avoiding predator animals and bandits. The game is a series of quests: go talk to so-and-so, go kill so-and-so. The mountain map is always the same, so far as I can tell, while the occasional dungeons are randomized a bit (I think). The quest sequence is the same, too.The fact that the main map is always the same, and the quests are the same, means the game becomes increasingly repetitive to play as you gradually piece together how things work. The combat system, inspired by the old game Wizard's Crown, is interesting but fairly lethal, and I never found any additional healing bandages beyond what I started with. Combined with the fact that enemy pathing is very poor (it's easy to leave them stuck behind a boulder), and that you earn nothing from killing enemies beyond the occasional new weapon, it's clear that combat needs to be avoided. (The readme says as much.)You earn experience to spend on skill upgrades simply by exploring the maps, which is a design decision I applaud although with the pre-authored map it does get tiring when you replay it over and over as I did.
Six Two One
Completeness
3 - Complete and bug free. Includes an easy mode that gives you plenty of time and eliminates enemies.
3 - The game is clever, playable and beatable.
3 - It's polished.
Aesthetics
3 - Everything is clear. Colors are saturated, but appropriate. As is typical of a Jeff Lait game, the left of the screen has a cool looking visualization and this time it represents your "life force." The controls are fine, though strangely unused commands are still in the game. Even the first documented key (Rest) is useless as you're told that you don't have time to rest. Perhaps that's an intentional hint.
2 - The game looks nice, but just what the heck you are supposed to do and how to do it isn't very apparent off the bat. Also every time I tried to heal I was told I couldn't.
2 - A bit programmer-art but otherwise fine. It's using a demo-style animated fire effect for the health meter, and the game level can end up scrolling on top of that, which does not help readability.
Fun
2 - The fun part for me was figuring out how to discover all the words in the right amount of time. I didn't have the a Rubik's cube handy and couldn't find a good simulation online. Instead, I spent a little time thinking and came up with a simple solution. Unscrambling the words will be fun for some, but I only managed to solve a few before cheating and using an anagram solver. Some of the words are pretty obscure (e.g. Executrix);
2 - This game was very interesting, and it was neat to play a fresh game by a creator that I was told "was a legend" in the 7DRL competition.
2 - I did not enjoy it much. I was glad for Easy mode and an Internet anagram solver or I'd have given up in frustration.
Innovation
2 - The "tesseract" is rather unique, but it's another question how well the mechanics are incorporated into the roguelike genre.
2 - You certainly didn't run into a lot of word puzzle roguelikes out there this year. Or ones where you mash your face against a plinth to get letters. If anything this has taught me that the online anagram finders are woefully in need of more nine letter words.
3 - It is literally a twist on the Roguelike genre.
Scope
2 - The enemies are dead simple, but the word scrambling and face switching make it about average scope.
2 - This has all the fun and challenge that you could expect from a 7DRL title. I wish the words weren't quite so insane.
2 - Pretty good for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
2 - Seems like it's trying to jam a hypercube peg into a round hole. In other words, there are basic roguelike elements present, but they're somewhat superfluous to the main goal. As far as I could tell, the numbered enemies have almost no effect on the game besides being obstacles. There's permadeath technically, but it appears to only be triggered by your clock running out.
3 - Bump combat, demons saucy liches. Also permadeath, and rather high difficulty. It hits roguelike, at least in my book.
3 - It's Roguelike.
Your goal in Six Two One is to defeat the lich T'losh, who has trapped you on the face of an infernal Rubik's cube. Defeating T'losh is as simple as first discovering the letters in six nine-letter words and then descrambling them. The challenge is figuring out how to discover the letters quickly and then, if you really want a challenge, to descramble the words without an anagram solver. The game is not much of a roguelike, but it is a satisfying and mind-bending puzzle.
Six two one is a letter unscrambling roguelike that honestly I am not smart enough to beat under normal circumstances. Easy mode and an anagram unscrambler I still wasn't able to get super far. Damn.
The game's played on the surface of a Rubik's Cube; you can see one 3x3 grid of rooms at a time. Rotating the row or column that you're standing in reconfigures the rooms you can see and get to. The rooms of each face of the cube are color-coded so you can see where they came from.Each square of each face of the cube has a letter in it. You have to discover all 54 letters and build a 9-letter word out of the letters of each colored face. An optional easy mode lets you do this without being harassed by monsters.
Skeleton Crew
Completeness
2 - Simple but effective graphics; sometimes seems like the room starts venting for no discernable reason (if this isn't a bug it's a minor UI flaw).
2 - The game is complete, but execution is far from perfect. I experiences serious slowdowns and moments of unresponsiveness while playing it.
3 - This is a nicely polished game.
Aesthetics
3 - Entirely appropriate; nice level design.
2 - Looks nice. Not amazing, but nice. Color coded state of room is a nice touch. Some kind of targets cycling definitely will improve experience.
3 - It's got a good, coordinated color palette; the interface is clean and well thought out. The animated weapon effects are great; firing a machine gun and seeing the spray of bullets never gets old. The fire and atmosphere effects are quite effective too.My one complaint is that aiming and firing a weapon adds many keystrokes to a turn. One suggestion might be to allow firing only in the cardinal directions and rely on movement to get aligned with enemies. I found myself doing that anyway because then you don't have put the reticle directly on the enemy; you can just move it one square in their direction and rely on the bullet flying through to the enemy.
Fun
2 - My first playthrough left me cold (down around 2 kelvin?) but going back to it a couple of times proved it had some interest.
2 - It's moderately fun to win it once or twice.
3 - I cannot figure out if there is a way to kill bloats without them exploding. I can't figure out if there is a way to keep skeletons from re-animating. Recovering from a hull breach is something I've maybe succeeded at once. Nevertheless, the game is really playable and fun; it keeps me coming back for one more run.
Innovation
2 - Twist on a standard setting, nice variation in firearms.
2 - I'd say theme of space and fragile environment is not untouched, but definitely not well explored. This game is another two cents into general 'how things can be done' bank of ideas.
2 - The atmosphere, fire, and level destruction effects are all really cool. The level generation is pretty good, and the monster AI is reasonable (undead don't have high requirements, but they can at least open doors and make their way toward you).
Scope
2 - Feels like a solid week's effort.
2 - Just enough for a 7drl. 5 weapons, several enemies, basic pressure simulation.
2 - This seems like a good scope for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
3 -
3 - There are resources management (ammo, health), tactical decisions (run away, blow a hole in the wall so that enemies are sucked into space, kill bloat to kill lot's of enemies at once). So, while minimalistic, it's a roguelike.
3 - Yes, Roguelike.
Zombies, skeletons, bloated exploding corpses - in space. The whole 'damage the spaceship and get sucked out the whole or die from suffocation' thing seems a bit random (since explosive enemies can spawn next to the wall) and hard to recover from.
Nice little game. Destructive weapons/objects in fragile environment - hell yeah.
In Skeleton Crew, the crew of your starship have succumbed to some sort of undead plague. Fight your way through three levels of the ship to the escape teleporter. The arsenal of weapons is familiar: pistol, shotgun, machine gun, flamethrower, rocket launcher. Be careful where you aim, though; puncturing the hull will result in depressurization, and you'll find yourself scrambling against the escaping atmosphere to reach a bulkhead and slam it shut before your oxygen runs out.Enemies have tricks that make life more difficult: skeletons can be felled, but will rise again after a few turns. Bloats explode when they die, which generally blows a hole in the hull.All in all, it's a cool game that I am terrible at; I spent an hour or more and never managed to get to the third and final level.
MagicianRL
Completeness
2 - You can't zoom in with shift-=, but need a number pad +. I had to blow the dust off my number pad to play! The kill count doesn't seem to reset on death. I'm not sure there is a victory condition, I seemed to get set to a point where I could go arbitrarily far, so gave up.
2 - Not sure if this game ends. Pathfinding and enemies noticing you are a little buggy. Also the game ran out of memory and crashed when I cleared level 6.
3 - It's pretty polished! I did have one out-of-memory crash when exiting the fifth floor.
Aesthetics
2 - Cute graphics for the play area. The air elemental reminds me more of a tunic than a tornado, however. The surrounding UI is very harsh and unfinished. Using WASD is forgiven for a EQ inspired game, and thankfully arrow keys work as well. You can't close the death screen with the keyboard but have to go to the mouse.I had a lot of trouble figuring out when and how the 'q' key or attacks worked; as I neglected to first target the enemy. Perhaps a "no current target, hit tab" could float up when this occurs?Having to clear all the enemies to advance can work, but without a to-kill counter it feels like a sudden teleport. I'd rather a ladder/portal appear when this occurs to let me move forward at my own pace.Click-walk is nice, but there is no way interrupt when you click leading to watching yourself suicide. I'm also always worried about click target mixed with click walk, a misclick can be disastrous.
3 - This game is very nice looking. Combat animations, animated walking and what I assume is unique tileset tie this all together. It's been a while, but the color scheme reminds me of befallen.
3 - It looks good! The UI is clean and shows what I need to know. The occasional "Following, master!" from the pet is cute.Complaints: * The walls and floor look very similar to each other. * It seemed like sometimes, but not always, I could use the mouse to select a target. Eventually I switched to using Tab because the mouse was so unreliable. * The movement animation was a drag when I needed to move across long distances on the map.
Fun
1 - It was a miss not to make the spell book full screen when meditating. That was the case in EQ, and would make meditation a lot more of a no-brainer. As it is, as soon as one finds the right strategy it is pretty trivial to kill/mediate/repeat.Smooth movement between tiles looks great, but is *painful* to play when you have to move through empty areas.
3 - It was fun to re-visit Everquest, the game looks nice and the icons and spellbook meditation are true to the original source game.
2 - It's fun for a few minutes. I had a nice difficulty curve from "Why am I dying so fast?" to "Nobody can stop me!"There's some good positioning play in managing the approach, but I feel like there is basically one strategy that works, which is to arrange for you and your pet to be next to a single enemy, then command the pet to attack it. The pet leads out with a stun and then it takes a couple turns of whacking the enemy to defeat them. Rinse and repeat.
Innovation
2 - I like how the non-regenerating health guides is coupled with a respectable melee attack. It isn't readily obvious you shouldn't bash people because it will work, only when you analyze your renewable resources do you properly adjust your tactics.
2 - Pet class combat supplemented by your own spellcasting. I wish there were more of a variety in the enemy pool, well more than one.
2 - I think it's atypical to have a sidekick in 7DRLs, but it is very common in the big-box Roguelikes.
Scope
2 - Good for a 7drl.
2 - The creator stuck to a strict schedule and implemented features in a timely manner over their seven day schedule.
2 - It's quite good for a 7DRL. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of a role for the spells, or a second monster, or some kind of progression in ability or change in the environment. Perhaps I didn't go deep enough, but I saw eight levels of exactly the same thing.
Roguelikeness
3 - Good tactical combat, so yep. To be more roguelike I'd want to see more wandering monsters.
3 - Turn based, procedural generation, permadeath, no items, but roguelike enough to me.
3 - It's Roguelike!
Magician RL is a simple maze crawler that has you playing a summoning class from an Everquest-like game. It does an excellent job of gently guiding the player to a pet-first playstyle through its game mechanics, avoiding any outright telegraphing of how to play. Unfortunately, once learned, the gameplay becomes simple and rote.
Time to play a Gnome mage with his trusty air elemental beating up decaying skeletons probably in befallen. Clearing a floor advances you to the next floor. You have a few spells at your disposal including a powerful and vital air elemental ally.
It's you and your pet versus skeletal warriors in a 7DRL inspired by Everquest's magician class. You're not particularly beefy so you have to work as a team to take down the enemies. Tell your pet which enemy to target, and use a handful of spells to offer support.
My pet is a rogue?!
Completeness
2 - The core of the game is present and playable, but it needs a lot more to make a whole game.
2 - I can see this game being beatable with a touch of luck, but otherwise, starting with 0 food I died my first time without knowing why my little gang of creeps wouldn't eat. Still, I think this can be beaten.
Aesthetics
2 - The controls are mostly straightforward, and the art is not entirely unpleasant.
3 - This game is cute. The hex based dungeon looks nice, and the goblins are clearly definable as goblins. Also the animations of the actions you assign your pets make it very clear what they are doing.
Fun
2 - I sent way too many minons into the dungeons just to see how far they would get before they died. This is rather replayable, with something of an achievement-oriented goal.
2 - I want to raise my pets further, but they are stupid. I wish I could send them the occasional command, or if they were smart enough to stick together instead of splitting up and dying. Seeing only two or one next to the campfire is rather sad.
Innovation
2 - Indirectly controlling characters/units isn't new, but it's also not common.
3 - I don't think there are any other pet sim roguelikes out there this year. and this one is interesting enough that I'd like to see refinement and further progression.
Scope
2 - About the right amount of game and content for a 7DRL.
2 - This game still needs refinement, and probably a little balance tweaking. Your little buddies die super fast and could possibly stand to forage or something, getting a little food outside of the dungeon.
Roguelikeness
3 - Turn based, random dungeons, looting of food / weapons / armor, equipment decisions. Very roguelikelike, given the scope.
3 - Turn based, difficult dungeon crawling with random item distribution and goblins. Lots of goblins. Also corpse eating, a standard staple in roguelikes.
Tamagotchi meets a roguelike. You have control over what your three minions spend their time doing, but not how they go about it. Send them into the dungeon to explore, fight, and loot. Tell them to cook, eat, sleep, or exercise. See how long you can keep them alive!
My pet is a rogue?! is a goblin raising sim coupled with an indirect dungeon crawler. Your goal is to clear out the dungeon while bringing back other goblins for your cannibalistic goblins to eat. Your pets are not smart.
No Crypto For Old Men
Completeness
3 - Tends to crash after 45 minutes, but until then feels entirely polished.
3 - It does everything it claims to, as far as I can tell. Well, Mastermind nodes seemed to be broken (every password is always four letters, and guessing any four letter password will give you the real one so you just log in with that), but that was an improvement on actually solving Mastermind puzzles to play the game.
Aesthetics
3 -
1 - There's some basic scifi writing and political jokes which don't fall entirely flat, but actual gameplay mostly involves nodes whose symbols I still haven't managed to memorize. Occasionally the game generates really long corridors and you have to wait as your character auto-walks through them - and sometimes there's multiple of those between the stores and the nodes you're looting.
Fun
3 - I should probably stop taking "breaks" at work to hack through another Nakatomi ICE.
1 - I'm not a slow typist, but I found the amount of typing (of the same commands over and over) in this game tedious. The progression mechanic, so much as one exists in this game, did not feel rewarding to me.
Innovation
3 -
2 - Replacing enemies with little puzzles is probably the oldest idea in the book, as is having a command-line interface in a game about hacking, but there's some ambition in the puzzle design.
Scope
3 -
2 - There's a decent amount of stuff. I *assume* there's a victory condition based on the one hint of one you get.
Roguelikeness
2 -
2 - Doesn't really take place in a roguelike space, but a graph (well, a tree) of nodes and intersections. I'm not sure whether to even quite call it turn-based since there's not really any notion of time in the game, but there *are* node puzzles where you have to count objects that are moving around. Overall, though, it does have a vaguely roguelikey feel.
Met its goal of feeling like a semi-cyberpunk semi-real hacker; compelling one-more-turn play; good worldbuilding.
A not-very-approachable game of tapping into data streams, hacking through authentication portals, and looting data to sell it to random people on the internet. It takes a while to figure out what the game actually wants you to do even to increase your resources, but I did eventually find a gameplay loop that isn't too tedious (tap datastreams, sell sellable things to zBay and myFace, dump AUTH files into the first file store you come across as they seem useless) and filled out my wiki and workers. There's a hint of a win condition, but I never managed to make any apparent progress toward it.
Rogue Kudzu
Completeness
3 - No bugs. It does exactly what it sets out to do. Feels polished.
2 - Everything works, you can win, you can lose, except if you're standing next to an object then you can't lose because kudzu doesn't ever grow over objects
3 - It looks like he dev got pretty much everything in there in the 7 days they had. Nice daily progress too! We became a dragon at one point!
Aesthetics
3 - Controls are very straightforward, but thankfully there's also pathfinding. The painterly tiles are wonderful and make the game look more like a board game than a jam game. Animation is a nice touch too.
2 - The sprites are basic but very clear, interface could use tweaks, for example there is no indication that your flame bar is full
3 - The game looks nice, and the growing vines link and continue well. The inclusion of sound and music only made this better.
Fun
2 - It's very easy to get into and fun for a short while. It's a small game though. I feel that there are some major balance issues. I beat it on my first try within 5 minutes, but then couldn't win again until a dozen more attempts. In some cases, there is a clear path to the exit and in others the kudzu has totally swamped the exit before you can even get close.
3 - Very nice little game, the levels could use more variation but overall it's very fun
2 - I had a good time playing Rogue Kudzu and may re-visit it after the competition. It seems to be fully developed as a little game and won't be going anywhere, but it's a fun, if short play.
Innovation
2 - We've actually seen spreading plants before (HyperRogue), but its use as a hunger clock is unique.
3 - Dragon vs plants, how awesome is that
2 - A tweaked bump combat against an ever expanding enemy makes you carefully ration your flame breath, and balances out that the only way you can die is if you are surrounded. Beware the tide of Kudzu.
Scope
2 - A bit on the low side, but still pretty typical.
1 - It's a tiny little thing, but it's unexpectedly fun
3 - Sound music, graphics, a neat little game and mechanics. All done in a very timely fashion. He even had the seventh day for balance tweaks and playtesting. A good and balanced use of the week.
Roguelikeness
2 - Grid based, turn based, permadeath goodness. Missing too many key roguelike features though. Particularly disappointing is that the maps seem to be pulled from a small pool, rather than procedurally generated.
1 - More a puzzle game than a roguelike, really. It looks determenistic and the levels aren't really random either
3 - Bump combat, procedural generation, permadeath (can't make a single mistake) and tactical movement. Not much else you can call this.
Rogue Kudzu is a great example of how to make a small, but satisfying 7DRL. You play a dragon who has to escape sprawling kudzu while seeking out a treasure trove. Your only way to clear the kudzu is a fire breath ability, which takes 6 turns to charge/use, but only clears 3 pieces of kudzu. Do the math and you'll quickly find that the kudzu is a strict hunger clock! You can pick up gasoline to immediately charge your breath, but there's not much of it. That's the whole game. Though balance issues arise, Rogue Kudzu looks and plays great.
A great distraction in which you play a dragon trying to save its hoard from fast growing plants. Move fast before you get surrounded!
Some jerk adventurer put a virulent strain of the creeper vine Kudzu in a dragon's lair. Things grow faster and faster, and get a boost about halfway through. As I rated this it turns out that Rogue Kudzu may be one of the more solid titles I've played this year.
Schildkrötenformation
Completeness
3 - I experienced no crashes. Controls worked fine. Game can be completed (I won!)
3 - Feels simple but complete to me. There is a single level, which I managed to beat after several attempts.The only bit of polish that I thought was missing was the ability to use the mouse to select menu items (since you have to use the mouse for the main game).
Aesthetics
3 - The game looks and plays very well. I especially liked how a bird serves as your mouse cursor. There is no sound, sadly.
3 - Looks great! It has low-res, zoomed-in pixel art. The color palette is good and the there are lots of little details. Dead guys gradually decompose, for instance. There seems to be a lot of feasting in the forest; there are tables and barrels and such all over the place.I would have appreciated a mini-map or map; the forest is very samey-looking throughout and I could not be sure I was doing an effective sweep of it.
Fun
2 - There's the start of something fun here. It tasks you to kill all the enemies and find the golden eagle, but due to the way the level is laid out and it's size, I was forced to inspect every inch in a very systematic manner, which ultimately I did not enjoy. Worth checking out for the formation based gameplay.
2 - It's a fun (if not entirely successuful) experiment with formation management.The levels consist entirely of scattered, small, isolated obstacles (trees, tables, cages), so you don't have any protection from attack that you can work with to limit exposure. The small obstacles tend to get guys stuck with their very limited pathing, so you have to jiggle your formation around to keep them coming along. The limited pathing applies to the enemies too, though.I experimented with the five formations on offer and had my best success with the tightly-packed square because I could deliver spear thrusts accurately. The soldiers' spears did not interfere with each other so there was no reason for them not to be close together that I could see. The barbarians move quickly, come from all directions, and the view is zoomed-in so you don't get a lot of advance warning. Thus I did not find much use for the oriented formations. I did a lot of the classic thrust-while-running-backward combat tactic.There's a lot of latency between clicking to attack and the actual spear thrust; this meant I tended to click wildly when attempting to engage.
Innovation
2 - We've seen multiple characters controlled as one before in 7DRL, but this game takes it in a slightly different direction.
3 - I haven't seen a formation game like this before, and it's something I've been wanting to play around with so it's neat to see the idea tried out.
Scope
2 - There's a game here and it can be won. The formation system was ambitious however it did not seem to be paired with a reason for using it or really showing it off.
2 - The scope seems good for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
1 - No significant roguelike features.
2 - It's more Roguelike-like than Roguelike, due to the action-game format.
Fav: artwork is nice, it's good fun moving a phalanx around with WASDNot Fav: awkward hit detection, searching for the end goals becomes predictable
In Schildkroetenformation you command a Roman squadron in the forests of Gaul: fighting barbarians, freeing captured Roman soldiers, and hunting for your lost golden-eagle standard. The theme and look remind me a bit of Asterix and Obelix, which I remember fondly from childhood.It's an action game. You move your squadron with the WSAD keys, pick a formation with the 1-5 keys, and rotate the formation with the QE keys. The squadron members rotate to face the mouse cursor, and pressing the mouse button makes them attack. The squadron grows when you free captured soldiers and shrinks as your soldiers get killed by barbarians. The little men do their best to hold their assigned formation as they maneuver through the trees. Barbarians come running toward them by ones, twos, or small bunches, waving axes.
Seek and you shall find
Completeness
2 - Reasonably polished. Enemies being able to shoot through walls seems like a frustrating bug. Seems to be quite random in terms of balance - some runs have many empty rooms, some lots of archers.
2 - Rather complete experience, but there are several issues (mainly about destructing past rooms) and there is too little content.
Aesthetics
3 - Very pretty looking ASCII game. Nice colour choices, simple controls, runs nicely in the browser.
3 - Very simple graphics, looks like modernized (only a bit, for sure) Hack. But... You know, it creates the atmosphere. Controls are intuitive.
Fun
2 - Simple mechanics. Tactical options are few and the gameplay gets fairly monotonous after a while.
2 - This game provides lots of pleasure, but there are several bugs or issues which spoils a little overwall impression.
Innovation
2 - Enemies have an effect in the next room if you don't kill them - interesting twist, but I'm not sure it's used to its full potential here.
2 - As author wrote: "As you look, the world is created. As you turn away, it is destroyed. Basically, if you can no longer see a room, it is destroyed. If you see an undiscovered area, a room is created." Very simple innovation, but it has major consequences. Nice twist, Tilded!
Scope
2 - Fairly simple game.
2 - Adequate.
Roguelikeness
3 - Turn-based, grid-based, bump to kill procedural dungeon crawler. A bit light on the procedural side, but oh well.
3 - Definitely roguelike
Wander through rooms seeking out an item on the 12th room whilst fighting monsters. Or fleeing from them, if you prefer. But fleeing from a monster will give you side-effects in the next room - fleeing bats makes you blinded, for instance, or fleeing molds makes them multiply in the next room (which can quickly get out of control). It's an interesting mechanic which makes you think a little carefully about what you can get away with. The base mechanics are pretty simple though, with straightforward bump to attack, and most of the enemies aren't too engaging. It needs a little more going on to make the best use of its innovations.
I really like this game. It looks poorly, is unbalanced and repetitive, but... It is really good game. Minimalistic graphics fits to gameplay, petetitiveness doesn't bothers because it is game for really short coffebreak, but lack of balance... Well, it isn't *so* major issue. Whole gameplay is about simple, but very interesting twist. The dungeon is generating 'just in time' - if room is no longer in your field of view, this room is destroyed. Instead, new room is created in undiscovered area. This mechanics does not work well sometimes (if new room is too close old room).
Small World
Completeness
3 - Seems relatively complete and polished. No major bugs encountered.
3 - Everything works, you can win, you can lose, no bugs in sight
Aesthetics
3 - The black-and-white colour scheme and animated graphics are nice and the mouse-based controls are straightforward and simple to pick up.
3 - It looks nice, it's even animated, controls are click and right-click, that's all
Fun
2 - The gameplay of having to move around your teleporter while simultaneously fending off enemies is fun and interesting, especially in the way that interacts with the day/night system. It is pretty easy to win and could do with a few more enemy types and other features to keep it interesting for longer, however.
2 - It's a fun little disraction, totally recommended
Innovation
3 - The central mechanic of having to keep the exit in sunlight until charged is not one I've seen before in a roguelike and there are numerous smaller bits of novel design such as the upgrade totems and enemy effects.
2 - The ultra fast light cycle is pretty innovative.
Scope
2 - It is easy to see everything the game has to offer in a relatively short space of time.
1 - At the bottom of it, it's a really small project, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else and is 100% complete and playable
Roguelikeness
2 - While not particularly traditional in many ways, possesses the core elements.
2 - Limited in scope, but roguelikey enough. There are enemies (three types), upgrades, health and progression bars
A strong 7DRL with a novel core concept which is executed well and which provides some good tactical gameplay. It suffers slightly from a lack of longevity, however.
You're stranded on a tiny planet with ultra-fast day and night cycle, and you need to recharge your solar-powered beacon to get outta there. Drag it around to keep it in the light, but be careful of the enemies which want to eat you and drain your beacon and gun of energy.
The Prancing Bard
Completeness
3 - Absolutely a finished and complete work. With little touches like the mouse-over tooltips explaining some of the terrain, this game in fact feels downright polished.
3 - The game is complete, winnable, have two modes, have instructions, and no bugs found.
Aesthetics
3 - There's a storybookish theme to the game, especially in the way each of the boss monsters makes their noises (mechanically this puts holes in the note sequence you use for attacks, the Melody of the World, upping the challenge when there's a boss on the screen since you have fewer options for attack). The beam attack animation is highly satisfying. One unfortunate part is that the colors for the right and right-down direction notes were hard to distinguish (or at least were for me) - but the game has a colorblind mode which replaces the notes with letters, which made things a lot easier for me.
2 - Storm magical effect looks very nice. And controls are fine. But colors... I'm not color blind, but it's damn hard to distinguish several of them. And turning on 'color blind' mode doesn't help much because it doesn't remove colors from song of the world! When trying to choose between letters and colors, brain chooses colors first. You have to do some mental effort to recognize next tune. And it doesn't show your hp. And if your last 3 messages are the same (Player took 1 damage), you cannot even track your hp on your own.
Fun
2 - The game unfortunately breaks down a little bit once you realize that you really, really just want another line of notes that tells you, for each note, which direction you'll attack at the end of the tune starting from that note. Actually staring at the line looking for ways to make attacks gets old pretty soon. Maybe there's a way to redesign the attack direction mechanic that makes this better, I don't know - it might be worth a bit of experimentation to find out, though. As it is, the game is mostly carried by its polish and aesthetics.
2 - It's fun at first, but quickly becomes cumbersome. You have to estimate result direction of sequence of tunes a lot, which tires both your mind and your eyes.
Innovation
2 - Hack and slash at the bottom, interesting (but flawed) study of roguelike movement mechanics on the top.
2 - Special effects tied to movement patter is not new in itself. 'Song of the world' concept is somewhat original though.
Scope
2 - A good well-focused 7DRL that doesn't try to be a grand adventure.
2 - Several levels, several monsters, original mechanics. More or less fine for a 7drl.
Roguelikeness
3 - Yep, it's a roguelike.
2 - There are some roguelike elements, but too enough to call it full fledged roguelike.
You kill hordes of enemies pouring out of every entrance, and while part of your toolkit for doing so is a very simple bump-to-attack (still good enough for getting rid of the popcorn), your main weapon for killing tougher monsters and bosses is playing a sort of freeform DDR with a long sequence of notes scrolling across the screen turn by turn; hitting a five-note subsequence with your moves unleashes your beam attack. This goes on for five levels, with the challenge ramping up pleasantly fast. Early on it's enough to just run away from everything (you run faster than most enemies) until you're far enough to prance an attack at them without having to worry about anything hitting you, but you'll soon have to actually start figuring out how you can incorporate killing smaller enemies to making beam attacks, because you'll just be overwhelmed if you can't do both at the same time.
This game have an interesting on paper idea that is quite boring on practice. You can 'play' tunes by ... moving around! There is song of the world - random sequence of notes. If your current song matches part of world of the song, up to 5 tunes, your harp will unleash song of the storm, or something like this, devastating attack that kills everything in line. However, direction of attack is choosen by ... relative offset of your current position from position where you started current song. And ... that's it. Nothing more. It's easy to play a song, but hard to direct attack where needed. Over time the game becomes more cumbersome than fun.
ThiefRL2
Completeness
3 - Bug-free, great intro & help text.
3 - The game is simple, but well rounded and from what I saw, bug free. Things get more complex as you advance in levels, but that's not uncommon.
Aesthetics
3 - Nice tiles that perfectly convey game information.
2 - THiefrl2 is pretty. Charming simple graphics are easy to look at and intuit.
Fun
2 -
2 - This game is a neat and challenging little puzzler. There is a little interesting dialogue that adds a little levity to the situation, though less so when it immediately precedes you getting clubbed to death.
Innovation
2 -
2 - 9 key movement, grabbing coins and hiding in bushes or under tables. The most interesting thing is smashing out a window and fleeing when the level is over.
Scope
2 -
2 - The game delivers a vibrant thieving experience, like promised. Guards have rough AI, and are easily fooled, but that's part of the fun.
Roguelikeness
2 - A procedural puzzle game with no abilities or advancement; right on the unroguey/roguelite cusp for me.
3 - No combat (Well, you getting hit), turn based stealth, procedural generation, permadeath after your measly three hp are depleted.
A very polished stealth game; despite simplicity it appeals for eight or ten levels. Level generation feels like it's doing an *excellent* degree of mixing realism with slowly increasing difficulty; AI is likewise perfect for the game (even if the behavior looks simple, the balance between predictability and randomness appears superb).
ThiefRL2 has you robbing more and more opulent mansions hiding sneaking and otherwise trying to avoid detection as more and more guards are hired on by the upper class that you have yet to rob blind. It's colorful and easy to get in to.
ArtemisRL
Completeness
3 - Very polished. No bugs encountered, beyond a minor visual one whereby injured enemies that were no longer in view still had their health bars displayed.
3 - I didn't encounter bugs or underdeveloped features. Game seems be finished and even quite polished.
Aesthetics
2 - Uses a standard Oryx tileset that I've seen quite often before, but still looks quite nice with it. Weapons all have different special effects and sounds. The news reports on the map screen are a nice touch, as are the 'excuse me' texts when you move past friendlies. One issue is that your FOV is not indicated by greying out tiles so it's not entirely clear what your FOV is at first - enemies simply pop into view while items are for some reason always visible. It also seems weird that your inventory is mouse-controlled while shooting isn't. But, on the whole, very good.
2 - Nice tiles, but they were used in several other roguelikes already. So nice, but not original and not above average. Controls are simple and intuitive, but I miss diagonal movement a bit. However, movement system works well.
Fun
2 - Everything is nicely juicy and it's enjoyable for a while, but it gets repetitive quite quickly. Difficulty is very low; I didn't feel in any danger at all until I travelled to the system with the maximum threat level. Enemy AI is quite dumb and easily exploitable - ranged enemies will sit there and shoot at you even when you are beyond the maximum range of their weapons. There also doesn't seem to be an end-goal to the game so there's not much reason to do anything besides try to get more cash.
2 - Gameplay is very smooth and addictive, but lack of depth and clear goal, and character progression restricted to gaining new gear are major disadvantages.
Innovation
1 - Beyond the relative rarity of sci-fi roguelikes, the game is fairly bog-standard; nothing here I haven't seen before.
1 - Quite generic roguelike shooter.
Scope
3 - Many different star systems to explore, lots of enemies and item types, shops and NPCs. Pretty much everything you could hope for in 7 days.
2 - Adequate. Small roguelike with standard 'kill, loot, equip' loop as main assumption.
Roguelikeness
3 - Yep.
3 - Roguelike. Space based, without character progression, but roguelike.
ArtemisRL is an ambitious 7drl that lets you potter around in space, journeying to different star systems, boarding and raiding (not so) derelict starships and popping back to the nearest friendly space station to sell your loot. The lack of challenge and overarching goals means that it won't hold your interest for too long, but nonetheless a very well put-together game and an impressive effort for a 7DRL.
Nice, simple sci-fi roguelike. Looks very polished, gameplay is very smooth and nice, but there is lack of depth. Good game for 5-10 min breaks, but isn't suitable to longer sessions due to very high repetitiveness.
Bisbee's Escape
Completeness
2 - Runs well. Not sure if enemies are supposed to have free movement or be limited to tunnels. If they are supposed to move freely why do they not carve paths like the player and cause the crates to fall. If they are supposed to be limited to tunnels then that is a large bug.
3 - Bisbee's escape is all there. I didn't hit a single bug while I was playing. Unless one of the enemies is a bug, and then I tried to crush it with a box.
Aesthetics
2 - Minimalist and clean. Gets the point across
3 - The graphics portray the era as well as the inspiration well. The boxes icons can be a bit confusing at first, but things fall into place pretty well after a couple tries.
Fun
2 - It is a on the hard side since the enemies don't seem to follow the same rules as the player.
2 - This was a good and simple game. Challenging and nostalgic, though not exactly what I'd expect from my roguelikes.
Innovation
2 - Simple one hit RL using indirect combat from falling boxes
2 - This game takes an atari/arcade classic and slaps a couple rules on it to make it fit in with and surpass some of the other 7DRL entries this year.
Scope
2 - A feature complete 7DRL from what I can tell
2 - I think the author accomplished all he set out for in this coffebreak roguelike and got it done in the amount of time he had.
Roguelikeness
2 - It has an interesting blend of puzzle and roguelike elements. Close enough to be sufficiently RL for a 7DRL
3 - Turn based and could be considered tactical combat (lining enemies up to be crushed) permadeath. One touch, game over in all it's quarter eating glory, levels seem to be randomized, as are boxes possibly?
Couldn't get far enough to see if there was more to the game than the first four levels. The enemy mechanic of being able to move freely didn't really line up with the story of the game being set in mines. A decent 7drl completion.
Bisbee's escape is very similar to Digdug, and other games of that digging monsters chasing you variety. So similar it could fit right in with the games it's based on and that's a good thing. Dodge around a few levels of some mines dealing with enemies that move in step with you and you can make it through this game as long as you keep a keen eye on your surroundings.
Crowd Eraser
Completeness
3 - No bugs encountered. Feels complete.
2 - The game is more or less complete, bugless and winnable, but seriously lacks polishing. Short match animation would significantly improve experience, especially at first, while you are getting used to mechanics.
Aesthetics
2 - The primary colors are obviously a bit much. Also, there's a small issue with artifacts from words in the console getting cut off or something, but I usually didn't notice it. Controls are near perfect. Not being able to wait on stairs was concern, but I think it's much better to have that than an extra key.
2 - Controls are fine, but colors could be slightly more contrast. Yellow and white are too close, when you are yellow, it's easy to miss dangerous combination of walls.
Fun
2 - At first I didn't see much point to it. Things get a bit more challenging as you go on though. The last level in particular was a sort of "holy shit" moment and by that point I was kind of impressed. Still, the fun was tempered by how easy it is to get "stuck" in the later levels. Unless I'm missing something, the only way to get out of these situations is to wait (literally mashing the wait button hundreds of times) so that an enemy will come nearby. You'll need the enemy to change your color so you can clear certain walls. And I don't think monsters respawn.
2 - It's moderately fun. But the fact that game can generate impossible to pass corridor seriously irritates.
Innovation
3 - Like I said, I wasn't very impressed at first. Match-3 is certainly unusual, but it didn't seem to bring much to the table besides the occasional surprising death. The last level changed at all that and turned Crowd Eraser into the most tense 7drl I have played this year.
3 - I haven't seen this mechanics in roguelike. But this is weak 3, since it's quite barebone, and I don't see how it can be extended into a bigger game.
Scope
2 - Other than the new mechanics, pretty small.
2 - Just fine for a 7drl.
Roguelikeness
2 - It has several roguelike staples, but the biggest problem for me is the static levels. Monsters and block colors change, but the layouts appear the same.
2 - There are some moderately interesting tactical decisions in this game, but not enough to call it true roguelike. There are no parameters, no abilities, no items, basically 1 type of enemy. It's closer to puzzles than roguelikes.
Crowd Eraser is an interesting combination of roguelike and Match-3. Oddly, the idea here is that matches can actually kill you. Instead of the whole game having Match-3 rules, only a 5x5 grid around you does. I was curious what the world would look like with global Match-3 rules, but it turns out there is a good reason for not having them. At first, the whole addition of Match-3 mechanics is questionable. If you are patient, the monsters offer almost no challenge. You do have some unexpected deaths at first, due to getting wiped out by combos. Later, due to the level layouts, the game gets harder and the last level is actually rather brilliant. I would discuss it more, but I really don't want to spoil the fun. There's even a small little narrative surprise waiting for the player, which I definitely enjoyed. I was wishing that Crowd Eraser did more to combine roguelike gameplay with Match-3 in interesting ways. However, the game is pretty cool as is.
Crossbreed of roguelike and match3? I was thinking about such combination. And this implementation is actually quite interesting, but somewhat barebone and short.You have a color, and everything around, walls and enemies also have a color. You have 5x5 'aura' around you which triggers match-3 reaction. That's all. If enemy attacks you, you will change color to his and that's all. You can kill any enemy with one hit. Single enemy is thus harmless, unless you he is of your color and you are standing next to wall of your color. But two enemies, especially of your color are dangerous. My main complain about the game can generate impassible fragments for any color. Limited ability to change your color could solve the problem.
Lotus, a town for rogues
Completeness
3 - Feels polished, reasonably balanced.
2 - I didn't encounter any bug, games looks complete, nice and polished, but... But there are strange issues which surprises me in contrasts to overwall impression. So: lack of the walls as borders on the ends of the screen, underdeveloped controls, etc.
Aesthetics
3 - Very pretty, controls are straightforward enough.
2 - I absolutely love Lotus' presentation, especially colours! But controls should be more polished. Strange way to use 'e'xamine function and lack of diagonals if you have no numpad are the major issues for me.
Fun
2 - The gameplay doesn't stand out in any way, but overall the game is enjoyable to run through.
2 - Not very exciting, but Lotus is worth to playing.
Innovation
1 - Fairly standard roguelike fare.
2 - At the first glace, Lotus, a town for rogues looks quite innovative. Unusual player's attributes mechanics, orbs of experience, rarely seen dungeon generation algorithm (it looks like drunkard's walk)... But after all, it's all about hack and slash.
Scope
2 - Medium sized 7DRL, though the different level designs do give it a bigger feel.
2 - Adequate to jam.
Roguelikeness
3 - Traditional roguelike.
3 - Definitely a roguelike.
Very pretty roguelike of hunting down items across a variety of levels. Gameplay is nothing innovative, but overall it's very pleasant to play with its brightly coloured environments.
Nice, small game. It reminds me Brogue a bit - looks 'modern classical' and this graphics is really enjoyable, and proper using stuff and consumables is the key to succes. Overwall, rather polished (but some aspects are underdeveloped), beautiful but pretty generic roguelike.
Mad Maximillian's Codpiece
Completeness
2 - Seems to be reasonably complete and polished, if a little on the short side. Some minor bugs encountered with enemies spawning inside walls (although they did manage to get out, meaning the game was still winnable).
3 - When i played it first time it was a pain because author didn't included readme. So i've managed to find some combination, but all messages at right still was cryptic. But i don't think forgetting of readme deserves taking scores and author fixed it already. Otherwise game is complete and polished.
Aesthetics
3 - Nice clean ascii with good colour choices and layout. The way corpses are represented as rotated characters on a red background is fun.
2 - The game has minor problem - imho it would be better to place attacks descriptions ingame, maybe at right part of screen, so user won't need to consult with readme against each monster. All the rest is fine.
Fun
2 - The positional combat system is nice, but the fact that enemies have differing levels of resistances and that the intermediate options are chance-based makes the gameplay feel a little overcomplicated and occasionally unfair. A simplified, fully-deterministic system where different enemies simply had different attacks and immunities would probably work a better and be easier to understand. Difficulty seems to vary quite a lot depending on what enemy types spawn, especially on the later more restricted level layouts.
2 - Nice to play until won, and i'll be glad to play extended version with more levels and other features.
Innovation
2 - Similar positional-movement based systems have been done before (Hoplite being the most notable example), but this game does a good job of putting its own spin on things.
2 - Nice mechanic of swordplay. There are some roguelikes with atacks based on maneuvering, but this is still pretty uncommon idea and this game has yet another version of it, with monsters having more than one attack.
Scope
2 - A reasonable variety of different enemies and while there are only three levels, they do each have their own theme and layout generation.
2 - Scope is fine for a 7drl. Not much content, but has complete story and original mechanics.
Roguelikeness
2 - More of a turn-based arena combat game - doesn't really give you the flexibility and choice of a true roguelike.
3 - Definitely a roguelike.
MMC presents you with three combat arenas to clear separated by short segments of codpiece-flavoured narrative. Rather than bump-to-hit, the game uses a Hoplite-like positional-movement-based combat system though with a greater variety of moves. Each enemy type has different attacks and also different levels of vulnerability to the player's moves. This can be a fair amount to get your head around and as whether or not a given attack will kill an enemy is sometimes randomly decided it can get frustrating.
This is a short roguelike where player and monsters use motion patterns to attack, such as movind from diagonally adjacent to a cardinally adjacent tile, or from cardinally adjacent to a non-adjacent. Monsters can be vulnerable or immune to some patterns and use more than one pattern to attack themselves, so player have to carefully check his approach to kill and don't get hit. The game is very short though, so it's more of a mechanics demonstration (there is also some story involved, but i didn't really get codpieces part). The game would be better (and harder) if a player was forced to fight many enemies at once, but right now they are moving randomly most of the time, so it easy to fight with them one by one.
Metamorph
Completeness
2 - Seems to be reasonably complete, though there are some graphical glitches - at the size the window opens the characters wrap so that the HUD ends up mixed with the play area. Even at full-screen some areas are not refreshed correctly.
2 - Level generation seems underdeveloped, but core gameplay is there.
Aesthetics
2 - Aside from the aforementioned graphical glitches, the ASCII is relatively clean and straightforward. The control scheme feels a little clunky, with changing 'mode' taking a turn, but that is clearly a part of the gameplay.
2 -
Fun
2 - The concept is an interesting one and leads to some novel strategic thinking about how to approach each encounter while influencing the evolution of your opponent. Could do with a slightly broader range of abilities and options to add some more depth to the basic system, however.
2 - "Worth my time playing" because of the metamorphosis gimmick.
Innovation
3 - I've not seen anything like this done before.
3 - Unusual idea implemented with some depth.
Scope
2 - A fair amount of content, but would benefit from a bit more.
3 - Whether the adaptation is real or faked, the author managed something impressive.
Roguelikeness
3 - More of an arena boss-rush than a dungeon crawl, but still does just about enough to qualify in my opinion.
1 - Not something that meets my definition of roguelike, although it's on the puzzle/roguelike border.
Metamorph has you fighting a series of giant monsters, the twist being that the way you defeat each of those monsters determines how the next one will be generated. Rely too much on the slow-moving 'spell' projectiles, for example, and the enemies will begin to shift around to avoid them. It's an interesting idea that has been quite well implemented.
More puzzly than roguelike, this game is a series of open-arena matches against the same boss monster over and over - but on each new level that boss monster changes in response to what the player did on the previous level. Might need work for balance, but an awesome prototype of an idea.
Mythical Jetpack Journey
Completeness
2 - I guess there is an ending, based on what the creator says, but you will likely begin to starve and be murdered by ghosts long before you manage to get out. Sometimes it seems that enemies, even defeated ones get extra attacks in on you.
3 - The game seems complete to me and ran without any problems. It has graphics, animation, sound effects and music.
Aesthetics
3 - The food is all distinct and the game looks good. Not sure if these are original sprites or not, but the game looks good.
2 - The graphics are simple and functional, and the interface works well. A title screen shows each of the game components and explains a bit about how the game is played.I could not find a way to get back to the help screen once the game had started short of reloading, which I would have liked; before playing I did not really understand the help.
Fun
2 - Some fun can be wring out of each play of this game. Random spawning food and the dungeon loving to dead end while your precious hunger clock ticks down still manages to be fun. Combat happening diagonally, however, is not welcome.
2 - It's fun for a few minutes, which is all it takes to get to the boss. The procedural levels seem like they are constructed by putting pre-built rooms in a random maze configuration, so most of the time things feel very repetitive.
Innovation
2 - I like what the author was going for and it could be better accomplished by the hunger clock being a little less insane. This is not beatable.
2 - The movement mechanics are relatively novel. Most everything else is very simple.
Scope
2 - This entry fits in with the other 7DRLS. It has all the core mechanics down and just needs some refining to be a good game.
2 - Seems like a well-made game for a week's work.
Roguelikeness
3 - Very much so. Brutal difficulty, turn based,the hunger clock is the game's core focus, permadeath proc gen. All of this.
2 - It's a Roguelike-like, along the lines of "Binding of Isaac" or "Spelunky."
An incredibly potent wizard's curse has doomed you to starvation for stealing the amulet at the bottom of the dungeon. This is a cute game with a lot going for it, regrettably being beatable isn't one of those things. Prepare for a challenge with this one.
Mythical Jetpack Journey is a fun little action game. You move by pointing the mouse, holding the button to charge and then letting go to move that direction. It's a bit like billiards; you'll bounce off walls and "roll" to a stop. Spike traps and enemies that move back and forth on tracks add timing and aiming challenge, and the necessity to roll over energy pickups regularly to refuel adds some tension.The overall goal is to reach the end of two levels and then defeat the boss in an arena battle. Attacking enemies is done by toggling into an attack mode; this costs twice as much fuel per move but damages opponents on impact (instead of vice versa).
Some Dogs Go To Hell
Completeness
1 - + The game is playable, though there is no end state.- There are some serious bugs, including unhandled exceptions which CTD and waste all work you had done. Tip for players: when prompted to enter a command don't accidentally hit enter without entering a command. The game is in need of optimization, it takes almost a second to process each move.
2 - It's fairly complete. There is no end goal; just a sequence of levels that look the same to me.Pressing a modifier key like Shift causes a TTY message about an unknown key.
Aesthetics
2 - + The game has a decent UI laid out into panels which present a lot of information. My only complaint is that it uses a very small font which tires my old eyes out after a while. Color palette is OK, nothing horrible.- Control scheme is tedious and error prone. The two common tasks are "Attack" and "Bark". Both of these present a submenu of choices requiring input of a number and then Enter key. In the case of attack, you must then select a direction, and then finally a body part. It's too much and doesn't really pay off in the end.
2 - Levels are very chaotic; it's hard to get any sense of where you are. You can't see any difference between explored ground and unexplored space, either, so it's hard to see what's unexplored. (I think part of the problem here is that you have multiple senses, not just sight, and displaying the information is challenging.) The map scrolls rather than being confined to the window, too, so it's even more confusing.
Fun
2 - + socializing like a dog is fun for a while before the control issues turn it into tedium.- It seems there is no goal to the game besides don't die.- lag kills desire to explore.+ that said, the innovative parts make this worth playing for yourself!
2 - I love the dog names: Sunny Honey, Fresh Kill, Spring Breeze, for instance.Sniffing other dogs to make friends feels good. I'm not sure what it does, but it's fun to do.The combat system is really, really cumbersome. Here are the steps for attacking:1. Press 'a' to attack2. Press a number, then Enter, to choose attack type.3. Press a direction to indicate who you're attacking.4. Press a number, then Enter, to indicate which body part you're targeting.You have health meters for ten body parts, plus a blood-volume meter and a hunger meter.Combat is lethal. If you start bleeding you'll be dead in a few turns. Unfortunately it's hard to gain competence in it if you are avoiding combat as a matter of course, as the game help proposes. I have no idea what attacking various body parts means, or if I can spread out the damage to my own body parts, or if it's just a lot of extra complexity that does not give me interesting decisions to make.
Innovation
3 - + Smell-o-vision is great and is worth experiencing.+ building a pack is an interesting system that is worth experiencing.
2 - The scent display is very clever. Different types of smells are displayed with differently-colored clouds diffusing through the map; they mix together. You can press a button to get a list of the things you can smell broken down by name, which helps a lot in learning the game.
Scope
3 - Very ambitious for a 7DRL. A lot of work clearly went into this entry.
2 - It's very solid for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
3 - It's missing a few key ingredients but the game strikes high enough in the tactical /careful movement choices zone.
3 - Yes, it's a Roguelike!
Play as a dog, sniff other dogs, form a pack and try not to get killed by hell's minions. Fav: Smell-o-vision!Not so Fav: Clunky controls for doing common actions.
Some Dogs Go To Hell pits you and other friendly dogs against imps and other hellspawn in a chaotic underworld landscape. The game has an overly-detailed combat system which saps a lot of the fun out of it. That's made up for by a novel scent display system. Different types of scents are represented as diffusing clouds of different colors that mix when they overlap. Scent lets you detect things from farther away and without line of sight restrictions, so it's a very useful sense.
Timegame
Completeness
3 - Nice utilities for somebody who really wants to understand the time travel puzzles.
3 - Complete, bug-free and well-polished game.
Aesthetics
2 - Lowest-common-denominator roguelike map suffices for what's been implemented.
2 - Not impressive graphics, but everything is clear and readable. Controls are good, but luck of diagonal movement bothers me a bit.
Fun
1 - This is so much not what I'm looking for in a roguelike.
3 - I played hours and Timeline is still interesting, funny and enjoyable game. Main concept of Timeline is exciting, even if game going to become easy after few sessions.
Innovation
3 - Impressive; actual time travel is a tricky bit of programming to figure out.
3 - Fourth dimension, Temporal agent. Time paradox. Big words, great ideas. Of course Timegame isn't *so big*, but implementation of time traveling is brilliant. And yeah, it really affects gamplay.
Scope
1 - There's a puzzle here, but no sign that it's gone beyond a proof-of-concept.
2 - Adequate
Roguelikeness
1 - A puzzle game isn't necessarily a roguelike.
3 - 100% roguelike in roguelike
A puzzle-game which feels like the epitome of "Do It Again Stupid" gameplay, waiting for the player to get an "aha!" moment. This lacks anything I look for in a roguelike, except perhaps the nice in-media-res introductory text.
Really brilliant entry. Timegame became one of my favorite (coffebreak) roguelikes instantly. It is another small game which is all about neat gameplay twist... This time: time travels! You are temporal agent which must prevent self-destruction of base... You have to find keys, check safe and, last but not least, survive. Yeah, it is possible to... 'die', but this isn't best word. How it all looks in game? Base idea is simple. Every step of player character is recorded, same as his field of view. Player should plan (is possible to watch the entire sequence of moves) moves carefully, to avoid making paradox, running out of energy etc. In practice, player should avoid walking / appearing in past's field of view. And this mechanics works good as hell.
Adventure Marsh
Completeness
2 - Game is complete and playable, with no bugs. Balance is on the hard side. Not sure if it's got an end or is even meant to be won, might be score attack. I wasn't able to get good enough to find out.
3 - Game is complete, only single minor problem was found (sometimes when killing a chest menu isn't drawn and game freezes until you press enter)
Aesthetics
2 - Art is functional and nice. The UI and controls are OK, it will take about 5 minutes of play to figure out.
3 - Nice sprites, decent UI. Everything looks as good as commercial puzzle game.
Fun
2 - Strays too far from an rpg for my tastes, but is enjoyable for a little bit. Because the level is a 3x3 grid and the game doesn't give you many options, sometimes it feels hopeless.
2 - I'm not fond of a puzzle-type games, but this one is closer to a rogue then to a sokoban - tactics of dealing with monsters is very rogueliky, and managing a limited abilities is funny.
Innovation
2 - I like that each enemy has a death effect, and that there's a spell to prevent it from happening.
2 - This game differs from most puzzle-roguelike hybrids in that it has pretty complex rules, not just evident moving and bumping.
Scope
2 - About right for 7 days.
2 - Minimalism of idea is compensated with good implementation and interesting additional mechanics.
Roguelikeness
2 - Its a puzzle game with clear inspirations from roguelikes.
2 - Closer to a puzzle, but has enough roguelike features - not only formal things like combat or inventory, but also a roguelike "spirit".
A puzzle game on a very small 3x3 grid..Fav: Shapeshifting is cool.Not so fav: Too puzzley for me.
Surprisingly fun for a roguelike on 3x3 board. You play as a druid and must pass 10 levels. Each level is a 3x3 board with several monsters, one exit and sometimes one "chest". Player hp are very limited, so you must cleverly use all abilites to avoid getting hit as much as possible. Player have two forms - in a human form you can cast spells that damage multiple monsters, but you are out of mana very fast. In a beast form you have three melee abilities and slowly regenerate hp and mana with each hit. It may take several tries to fully understand strengths and weaknesses of both forms and to feel when switching between them is optimal. There are also additional items in a chess and death effects from monsters that adds tactical depth. Overall rules are clear and predictable after getting used to - i really likes that feel when at first you look at game and don't understand what is going on, then start to understand that there are rules, and after some time everything become evident. Together this makes a nice coffebreak game at least for a several wins. The game also presents points system for a dangerous activities like killing monsters in melee in human form, but these point doesn't matter much as the number you can get from a successful run is very random.
AutoFire
Completeness
2 - Worked, mostly bug free but there was never enough information to select whether a new weapon was actually going to be an improvement - not clear if this was intended or bug.
3 - The game seems fairly complete to me, albeit simple. There are no discrete levels or objectives; the only progression seems to be the acquisition of increasingly powerful weaponry. I would have liked some levels or objectives (kill 30 rats) to give me things to shoot for (figuratively).
Aesthetics
2 - Simple pixel art matches the game just fine.
2 - Overall it's a polished game, with graphics, music, sound effects, particle effects, and good UI explanation.My main complaint is that I'm not guaranteed that the game will respond to my key presses. Around half the time it ignores them, which really takes me out of the flow of the game. I'm guessing this is because it's playing an animation of my turn, but it needs to be able to interrupt this to keep me in the driver's seat.
Fun
1 - After a very few minutes it felt like I could drive blindly around this maze of buildings for hours, not in a lot of danger, but not ever "making progress" aside from seeing bigger numbers.
2 - It's interesting to get a handle on how to move without skidding. Building up some speed to run over enemies was fun.I never felt like I understood the level geography or if there was any strategy to how I moved around. A sea of monsters appeared out of the mist to be mown down.
Innovation
2 - Getting into skids a few times was fun, although I don't know how the author thinks it can be useful?
2 - The momentum model is interesting. It's more complicated than the old graph-paper race car game but has a similar result.
Scope
3 - Impressive.
2 - This is an impressive effort for a 7DRL; there's quite a bit here. Most of the variety is in enemy graphics and weapons, but clearly a lot of work has gone into the car movement model as well.
Roguelikeness
2 - Not in my book, although I can see the parallels.
3 - It's a turn-based game in a procedural wasteland. That's Roguelike in my book.
A driving shooting collecting-dropped-powerup games. Credible physics. Although it gets a lot of nostalgia points for feeling like a cross between the old arcade James Bond and an Apple II game I can't even remember the name of, it didn't feel very roguelike to me.
AutoFire's twist on the Roguelike formula is that you're driving a car with guns. (You're the only one driving.) Up against you are a wide assortment of rats, wolves, and bandits toting various types of guns which you can salvage and mount on the four sides of your deathmobile. Having to manage momentum and traction makes you less maneuverable, but you can also run over enemies if you're going fast enough.I played for an hour or so; I didn't find any long-term objective; hopefully I saw most of what was on offer.
Café Havoc
Completeness
2 -
3 - I think I might have seen an item spawn on top of a plant once? Otherwise, works rock solid.
3 - The game does a great job with the first few minutes; easing you into the environment, introducing you to the controls and your tasks.
Aesthetics
2 -
2 - Works well to build an inviting, pleasant and fairly goofy atmosphere from turn one. The UI is unfortunately feels a tiny little bit clumsy (I kept forgetting to either switch to 'g'ive mode or to wield the right item). Sometimes there'd be multiple people with the same icon near each other and I'd have a hard time figuring out which one was the one who wanted an item, even right after talking to them.
3 - I liked the look.Levels can be fairly nonsensical; you might have to go through two bathrooms on your way from the stairs to the dining rooms, for instance.
Fun
1 -
2 - Fun enough to keep trying until I survived through the game while trying to put at least some effort into my score.
2 - I was enthused about the sort of game it started out as; less so by the game it turned into.I did not work out much in the way of strategy for surviving.The cooks are supposed to heal you. I accidentally attacked one and discovered that he would both heal me and attack me in the same turn. Unfortunately he did more damage than he healed.
Innovation
1 - Trying for novelty, but it doesn't seem to have much of a point; we get half-a-dozen flavors of hack and slash but they're all the same under the hood. Not at all clear what there is to do during the day, either.
2 - Very much worth a 7DRL.
2 - I liked the chatting and giving items to people. The flavor text was entertaining.
Scope
2 -
2 - Few surprises in terms of scope here. You'll have seen most of the content a few dozen turns into the first night, but then if you play on maybe you'll also find badges, and then maybe you'll also find the stairs to the upper and lower floors.
2 - It seems like a good scope for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
2 -
3 - Very conventional especially in the night-time.
3 - It's a Roguelike.
Nice tutorial that walks through the controls but gives you no clue how to actually play the game, and discovering via dying just isn't enough fun.
In the daytime, find fancy food and drink around Café Havoc and serve them to your demanding customers. In the night, run and hope you can hide, because you can only take so many in a fight... a fight which, it turns out, is fought using the same food and drink, so you don't want to serve off *everything* you carry, unless you know you can make it to a hiding spot in time. After surviving for three days, or (far more likely, in my experience) after dying, you'll be scored on how many people you served in the day. Oddly enough the game never makes a judgment on whether you should try to maximize or minimize the number of people you kill in the night.
When Cafe Havoc begins it's your first day as a waiter. After talking to Jenkins, the chief steward, you're off wandering the rooms of the cafe, collecting drinks, desserts and other things (e.g. lutefisk) and delivering them to the patrons. So far at least it feels like a highly unusual non-violent Roguelike with some fun storytelling. When night falls the game changes into a second mode which is much more difficult and traditional (albeit silly). The ultimate goal is to do your job successfully for three days. I wasn't able to get through the first night.
Chronomaniac
Completeness
3 - Tried to make a nice UI, although it still suffers fundamental usability flaws.
2 - Everything works and you can win and lose and travel in time, but there are bugs. Sometimes the game gets stuck on scrolling the map farther and farther away from the player, making it impossible to continue and forcing a restart
3 - Game is complete, can be won and lost. It has an in game help screen. The balance seems ok, probably too easy. There's no combat but instead time pressure due to spreading lava, which spreads fairly slowly. then again you can time travel so....
Aesthetics
2 - Lowest-common-denominator roguelike map suffices for what's been implemented.
2 - Good enough minimal rogue interface, it's very clear what's what you're supposed to flip whom you're supposed to not meet and what you're supposed to avoid swimming in
3 - Controls work just fine. The font and color scheme is clean. The visual presentation of the character's path in the past is clear and makes perfect sense once seen.
Fun
1 - This is so much not what I'm looking for in a roguelike.
2 - It is fun for sure, but really easy once you figure it out, and that really harms replay value
3 - Definitely play this one. The time travel mechanic is clever. How it handles the paradox of seeing oneself makes for an interesting challenge.
Innovation
3 - Impressive; actual time travel is a tricky bit of programming to figure out.
3 - Very nicely executed time traveling concept, the way the timeline collapses to restore you to a previous incarnation is really neat
3 - Time travel and paradoxes, leaving temporal markers, all lovely fresh mechanisms. Great work!
Scope
2 - There's a puzzle here, kinda impressive, but not a game?
1 - I would like to rate it higher, but despite its nice gimmick it's a one gimmick pony worth ten minutes of solid fun but no more
2 - Scope seemed about right for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
1 - Puzzle game, nothing roguelike about it.
1 - It's not really a roguelike, it's a puzzle toy made with roguelike tools. Your only enemy is yourself!
2 - Needs more variety of play to be a true roguelike, once I figured out how to win the game it becomes trivial to do so. That said I think this game's version of time travel would be interesting in the context of Rogue itself.
Another "Do it again stupid!" time travel puzzle game - if I can't understand your game, I'm not going to enjoy it, and if there isn't something fun to do other than bang my head against the puzzle, I'm not going to play it.
Time shenanigans. Armed only with your trusty time machine watch, flip four levers at the same time using timeclones but be careful! You cannot allow any past version of yourself see a future version, since that creates a paradox and collapses the timeline back to the time of the past version which triggered it.
Really cool time travel mechanicsFav: "time itself bending to set things right"Not so Fav: i have no complaints about this game
Night Terrors
Completeness
2 - The only serious problem is lack of readme as ingame hints doesn't cover how the new thoughts appear. There is also a minor problem with hints - cursor has to be near center of tile to show correct information. The rest of game and ui is complete and bugless
3 - Once you understand the rules of the game, (the author is planning a tutorial soon) the game is very much winnable and unless you misstep, the game is completely winnable.
Aesthetics
2 - Well, aesthetics fits the theme. The font looks nightmarish for me, especially when playing at night.
3 - Enemies left purposely vague (they are nightmares), are nonetheless colored to match their roles and each comes with it's own distinct look and rule. It all looks good together.
Fun
1 - Not much fun to play once you know the rules. It was fun to hopelessly try to win while never knowing when another monster will appear at the next spot to you, but it's not a game property, it's lack of readme.
2 - Not much replayability once you know the rules. before that it can get frustrating, but in that pre complete, post rule learning phase, it's gold.
Innovation
2 - I haven't seen such mechanics, but they are not suitable for a roguelike, they are good for a puzzle. So while I think the game is pretty innovative, I can't give 3 for an innovations from wrong genre.
2 - Smoosh the things. Earn minutes toward a full night's sleep. Keeping nightmares around to earn more minutes was a cool little twist.
Scope
2 - Scope is good for a 7drl. Not much content, but idea is original
2 - I think everything reached for was attained (minus the tutorial, realized in post), even so it's a very small game.
Roguelikeness
2 - Close to roguelike in tactical moving part, but strategically saying it's not a roguelike, it's a puzzle
3 - Turn based, bump combat, start over if you get touched, strategic movement and fighting works for me!
This is a roguelike-puzzle hybrid. Player starts on a mostly empty board, with some walls, floor tiles and monsters. His goal is to repeatedly fill a board with new thoughts (that comes at random, but player can see next thought like in a tetris) keeping as much monsters as possible without colliding with them. Monsters have different behaviour - some does the same move as player, some move to the player when aligned, some destroy walls etc. I've managed to understand most of mechanics looking on a onscreen hints, except one thing - how to fill a board. Appearing of new thoughts seemed unpredictable but they always appeared at most unwanted position killing me. Luckily, developer in his twitter has a link to Roguelikers youtube video with developers comment in which appearing of thoughts is described. Thoughts appear when you move at the direction of clear tile. Now everything becomes much easier and i won the game.
A fun and quick little nightmare simulator. Each monster you squash adds to your minutes slept. Clear ascii art and varying enemy mechanics kept this small game fresh.
Snial Trial
Completeness
2 - Screen size is fixed and too large to fit on a laptop.
3 - The game is complete, no bugs found.
Aesthetics
3 - Great art, terribly appropriate music, simple roguelike graphics - 3D display is tricky but this is a good attempt.
2 - It quickly becoming very confusing. It's damn hard to understand what's around just by looking, and by using mouse it takes a lot of time. I don't know if it is possible to make it better, but as it is it's quite hard to play. Also S and @ look too similar when you are surrounded only by @ and S. Easy to miss sneaky snail.
Fun
2 -
2 - Fun at first, but ... 1000 snails to kill? Srsly? It quickly turns into a chore.
Innovation
2 - This was a neat twist on the usual mechanics.
2 - There were different experiments with 3rd dimension in roguelikes. I wouldn't say this one is super innovative, but quite novel. Originally flat arena that turns into 3d landscape as you fight...
Scope
2 -
2 - I think it's just about right for a 7drl. There is only 1 type of enemies and no items and skills, but 3d terrain might took some time to properly implement.
Roguelikeness
2 - Simple for a roguelike, too puzzly to be a full game, but a great exploration of a novel mechanic.
2 - There is some tactical and even strategic depth here. But in general the game is way too shallow and lacks variation.
You will not worry about identification, or itemization, or learning spells in Snial Trial: you will worry about climbing up on top of snails lest they climb on top of you. And you go slowly, keeping your armor in tip-top shape, and the snails will slowly accumulate, and accumulate, and you'll be working more and more frenetically, and then you'll discover that you hadn't stopped to repair your armor and a snail just crushed your left big toe. Oh no.
Kill snail on an arena? What could be easier?!? Even if they are giant snails, they are still slow, right? Well, yes, but ... The problem that they leave giant shells. And in no time arena turns into ridges and valleys made of giant snail shells. Snails are slow, but if snail attacks from above, it's still dangerous... Probably it's not that easy, yeah...
Spice Digger
Completeness
3 - Ready to publish, probably as a mobile app.
2 - I'm not sure this game ends. Moving from one level to the next works well, but my batter stopped being charged even though I met the criteria and I could only get so far.
Aesthetics
3 - Pretty colors, music, sprites. On-screen inputs as an alternative to using the keyboard.
3 - Has a cartoony look and minor animation that look good. The little intro sequence gives more story than a lot of these 7DRL entries have given me.
Fun
2 - I like this sort of move-optimizing puzzle game.
2 - The game isn't all too challenging, but it takes a little plotting to arrive at the goal with all the spice on the level while activating the prerequisite tiles to hopefully charge your battery.
Innovation
1 - Nothing particularly new here.
3 - The game has a modern feel, and adding something to the android tablet's somewhat pathetic roguelike roster gets a nod from me here.
Scope
2 - This is the sort of game I expect out of a game jam, in general.
2 - This game isn't terribly ambitious, but from what the author wrote it was also completed in about 10 hours and they accomplished all of their goals, so definitely more than what I would consider a tech demo.
Roguelikeness
1 - No significant roguelike features other than random levels and turn based grid movement.
2 - Turn based, no combat, dungeon crawling, permadeath. A bit more puzzle-y.
More a casual puzzle game than roguelike. Enjoyable in that context, though.
Spice Digger has you assuming the role of a spice grabbing, ghost dodging ruin exploring robot. As you clear floors you are supposed to have your battery recharged, but this didn't seem to happen every time and eventually you wear down and the game ends. This is the first game I've judged this year on the android and I feel it used the tablet interface well.
Thrust Vector Delta
Completeness
2 - The game is playable and no major bugs were encountered, but it is also fairly bare-bones. As the readme freely admits a lot of planned features were not implemented and aspects like the large areas of blank space in the UI make the game feel quite unfinished.
3 - The game is playable, can be lost and restarted(I was unable to win), and I encountered no major bugs.
Aesthetics
2 - The sprites are quite nice and the UI (such as it is) is quite clear. The preview overlay showing you your next move generally works well, though there are times when you can be destroyed by just clipping the edge of an asteroid which the preview fails to predict. The game could also do with some visual indication of your angular velocity, as this is very hard to keep track of (Perhaps displaying some kind of 'trail' of your last move would be useful).
2 - The visuals are fine enough although much of the screen was an empty grey. UI is functional and helps predict how the ship will move. Controls could be improved with some quality of life adjustments, a button to turn off all power would help.
Fun
3 - Even though the game is obviously unfinished and very minimal, it's actually one of the games I had the most fun playing with this year. It takes some time to get used to but once you are planning out your movements to navigate past the asteroids is pretty satisfying. Other than the lack of content the main problem with the game is how granular your control is - below a certain threshold thrusters have no impact whatsoever, which makes it tricky to fine-tune your movements. The game might actually be improved by ditching the grid altogether and allowing free movement, or at least by calculating moves in floating-point and then rounding them to the nearest cell subsequently in order to allow finer control.
2 - Moving the ship around is the primary challenge in this game. I appreciated this sim-like challenge in the context of a small game, but I'm not sure if I would in a larger game with bigger scope There is a target that must destroyed to win, however finding it was hampered with a lack of visual or UI cues.
Innovation
3 - Not only is this a pretty fresh idea, it also seems like an exciting one with a lot of potential. I'd dearly like to see a more developed version of the concept that includes combat and other systems to play with.
3 - Turn based with momentum is a nifty idea. I think it would be an interesting mechanic to use in other types of games, not necessarily as the basis for the whole game but maybe as temporary effects or modes.
Scope
1 - I like what's there, but what's there is largely just a movement system tech-demo.
2 - The scope of this game seems about right for 7 days.
Roguelikeness
2 - Doesn't really have a big enough feature-set at the moment to fully qualify, but the need to plan your moves out carefully in advance does give it a roguelike feel.
1 - Doesn't seem to be implementing any significant roguelike features besides randomizing the map. In it's current iteration, it's more turn-based asteroids than rogue.
Thrust Vector Delta is an intriguing spaceflight roguelike that plays a little like a turn-based, grid-based version of Asteroids. You pilot your ship by assigning power levels to various thrusters to accelerate and decelerate. It's tricky to get the hang of at first but once you do figure it out it becomes very rewarding. There isn't too much to do in the game at the moment besides navigating your way through the asteroid field trying to find a space-station, and doing that is largely a matter of luck - you either head in the right direction or you don't. However, the idea shows promise and I can imagine a future version of the game where the movement system is a bit more refined and combat is implemented being a lot of fun.
A QWOP of 7DRLs! In this game basic movement is the enemy.Fav: Turn based ship flight with conservation of momentum is a nifty idea.Not so Fav: Collision detection with asteroids a bit too unforgiving
Tiny Tale
Completeness
3 - The game is beatable if hard. Health is a major issue here.
2 - There some bugs with automoving, for example it can git a stairs and continue moving to the old point, but on the new level, right into yasd. But other then this game is good, I especially like the balance part.
Aesthetics
2 - Color and setting completely fit the theme. I didn't really enjoy the mouse movement much and it the pathfinding with it put me in a couple places I didn't like.
2 - Game is mostly fine, but control method is somewhat inconvenient for this game - you have to snipe small characters with mouse and there is even no way to skip turn.
Fun
2 - Challenging and definitely playable. It won't take you long if you devote some time to it.
2 - It's a fun game, easy to start and still tactical enough. Even randomness doesn't hurt much as game session is no more then 15 minutes.It lacks depth of a more serious RLs, but still worth trying.
Innovation
1 - Standard roguelike. Kinda pressed to find anything different here than normal, other than the somewhat annoying mouse controls.
2 - There are traditional roguelikes and there are roguelikelikes with nonmoving monsters. This game combines tactic from former and strategic decisions from latters.
Scope
2 - The features here fit in with what I expect from a 7DRL entry.
2 - Scope in enough for a 7drl - small idea done well.
Roguelikeness
3 - Pure roguelike here, turn based, permadeath, random layout.
3 - More roguelike than many roguelikes.
Tiny tale is a small scope or coffee break roguelike played entirely with the mouse in a small dungeon. You are after the classic amulet of yendor and have a small army of enemies between you and it.
Short roguelike played in browser. At first looks like yet another '@' on javascript with two types of monsters and single item, but it isn't. Yes, there are only three levels, six monsters and few types of items. But fun thing is that together they make a roguelike puzzle. Player's hp are very limited, so every monster and every missing hit is important. I haven't won after two hours of tries but seen an amulet once and could win if i had 5 more hp. Another thing is that monster can't pass doors, so gameplay resembles Desktop dungeon - player decide to which room go and get a damage to achieve maximal gain. The problem is that due to such minimalism game is very random - sometimes player just haven't choice, stairs can be in a last checked room, there can be two goblin warriors right at door etc. But tactic still matters most of the time, so i like the game.
Uncontrolled Doppleganger
Completeness
1 - Some of the special powers are buggy; it's also common to suddenly have twice your maximum number of hitpoints.
3 - Seems complete to me. I found this game very difficult; I managed to clear one floor (you have to kill everything on it) but that's as far as I got.
Aesthetics
2 -
2 - It has a spare, uncluttered look that I like, with a restrained color palette.Feedback on what is happening involves looking at four or five different corners of the screen in succession: look at the map to see if the monster is still there (teleports and other discontinuous motion happen regularly); check the log to see if anyone did any damage; check the visible-monster list to see how everyone's hit points are; check your skill cooldowns to see what is available. I think putting little health bars over the monsters could help; having the damage numbers appear near the monsters could also help; and merging the skill cooldown menu (lower right) with the skill targeting menu (upper right) would help. Showing the skills on NPCs in the status display might help the player learn what kinds of things each monster type can do. Bonus points would be to do some sort of simple animation to show who is injuring whom in the main map view.Sometimes there will be an enemy inside of a skill's plotted area of effect but the game won't let me target them. I'm wondering if that has something to do with the skills that teleport you?
Fun
1 - It's not very clear what agency I'm supposed to have here. It's rare that I have a choice of which enemy to fight next and enough knowledge to strategize about combat order; there aren't any other decisions to make in the game, are there?
2 - For me it was a bit too challenging; other people might have a better time.
Innovation
3 - Starts at "hack, slash, whatever" but adds a novel mechanic and takes it as far as it can go.
3 - It's pretty different to be able to play as all types of monsters, and the way in which you can build up and expend lives is interesting.
Scope
2 -
2 - This seems like a good accomplishment for a week.
Roguelikeness
2 - There could be a roguelike here but it seems the author is trying to create more of a fighting-puzzle game.
3 - Yes, it's a Roguelike!
You are what you eat. Or stab. Or slime. Or bash. Now an abomination, next a knight, or a jelly, or a priest - you are the uncontrolled doppelganger. Neat idea, good prototype; there could be a game to be found in this mechanic, although it's not there yet.
The twist in "Uncontrollable Doppelganger" (also called "Uncontrolled Doppelganger") is that when you defeat a monster, you become that monster (with hit points restored). Your past existences form a stack of lives; each time you're killed you become your previous form. If you have no previous form it's Game Over.Each monster type comes with three skills; they tend to have different areas of effect and different cooldowns. Some monsters can heal themselves; some can jump or teleport or charge; some can shoot fireballs or darts.There is an additional level of progression in that when you kill a creature of equal or greater level, you gain a level of power when you assume their form.
Dungeon Racer
Completeness
3 - It's functional, music works, the game runs, there are different tracks and no bugs that I could find
3 - It's a complete game, with good graphics and good music.
Aesthetics
1 - The ASCII look is fine, but the choice of controls is extremely puzzling, why would you need to use direction AND space to move to the beat. I think this might be interfering with the beat syncing somehow
3 - I like the look of the game, both with ASCII graphics and tile graphics.The instructions about how to play were not clear for me; it took several rounds of experimentation to figure out that you have to hold one or more direction buttons at all times, and then additionally press the Space bar on the beat.
Fun
2 - It's a nicely executed concept, even though I keep failing at racing it
2 - I had a really hard time matching the beat; the few times I was able to win it was by hammering the Space bar so fast that something would land on most beats, and get to the end before I lost too much health from penalties. For me it might work better if the game was looking at whether I was keeping time, not whether I was landing my key presses at the right phase point in the beat. You could use syncopation patterns to do special moves, maybe.With controllers and multiple players (an option that was available that I did not try) it might be a bit more fun. Against AI it is not terribly fun.
Innovation
2 - Well, it's different from most other stuff on this 7drl for sure
2 - This feels very much like a rhythm game crossed with a Wipeout-style racer. There are no laps, though, so there's not a ton of interaction between racers in my experience.
Scope
2 - Despite the variety of tracks, this is more a playable demo than a full scale game, but well within 7drl parameters
3 - It's a good accomplishment for the time frame.
Roguelikeness
1 - A roguelike it is not. It's action based and nothing is really procedurally generated in any way
1 - Not a Roguelike. Turn based? Kind of. It's a bit like "Crypt of the Necrodancer" in terms of needing to move on the beat. Procedural? No. It has only three pre-built tracks. Permadeath? No. Races are short and stand-alone so there isn't any progression or investment.
A sort of ASCII mario cart racing thing with a move to the beat system like in Necrodancer. There are some pickups which you're supposed to use against enemies and to boost yourself. First one past the finish line wins.
Race AIs or other players on pre-built tracks. You have to move on the beats of the music or lose health. Powerups littering the tracks restore health or provide ways to interfere with other racers.
Dungeons of cards
Completeness
2 - Seems complete and relatively polished, although it froze up after the second time I died each session and I had to shut down and restart manually. The cursed card item description shows up as 'DEBUG: ReduceAllSizes'.
2 - Everything runs and no visible bugs, but it doesn't feel very balanced and a lot of feedback is lacking. Enemies appear and disappear for no apparent reason.
Aesthetics
2 - The tileset and overall presentation is nice, but there is no real guidance on how to play the game included and with every monster on the screen popping up sometimes multiple overlapping messages which are only displayed briefly, it's extremely confusing trying to tell what is going on most of the time.
2 - The sprites won't blow you away but are good enough to distinguish between factions.
Fun
2 - The mechanics are very interesting and have a lot of potential, but need tuning to be truly enjoyable. There is too much going on to keep track of and the rapid cycling of cards in your hand make it difficult to plan ahead and approach fights tactically - it becomes largely a case of luck whether or not you get any good attack cards when you need them. Indeed, as enemies seem to be as strong as you are and fight each other anyway, the best tactic seems to be to avoid them completely and simply dash for the stairs down.
1 - I tried to like it, but in its current form it's just too random. You can't tune your deck and you don't feel in control enough to affect the battle significantly. Enemies randomly appear nearby and you don't get rewards for fighting them, so you're not motivated to fight unless they totally block your way to the stairs.
Innovation
2 - There have been several 7DRLs before which have attempted the same kind of thing, but it is still far from standard.
2 - The card twist is pretty neat and seems to have a lot of potential that could be explored further, especially if you had better ways to tune your deck
Scope
3 - A good variety of different cards and creature types, all of which are playable.
2 - It definitely shows the general idea and mechanics, but it's far from being a full project
Roguelikeness
3 - Yep.
2 - Many roguelike features, but no stats or traditional inventory or leveling. Completely card based, including skills
Every year there are a few 7DRLs that try - and usually fail - to integrate cards and deck-building mechanics into a Roguelike. This is overall one of the better attempts I've seen, but is still not entirely successful. The card mechanics mean that there is a little too much going on per turn to keep track of and the game feels highly random as a result. If the core concept can be simplified and honed, however, there is the potential for a very good game.
Card-based faction on faction battles. Draw cards when you walk, use them to defeat enemies. It's a nice twist but feels super random. You're at the mercy of the RNG, you can't run from enemies very effectively, especially since they tend to use blinking abilities, and your deck-tuning abilities are limited to none.
Fantastic Dungeons
Completeness
2 - There isn't a story or much variety of mechanics/strategies, but the multiple types of levels, upgrades, and monsters make this feel not-incomplete.
2 - The game plays well enough in in the browser and offers a fullscreen mode so you can see details. The healing system in the game is brutal, as I mentioned above and could use major balance. Plus the altars in game don't let you back out if you've touched them and count as spent, so you are pretty much dead if you bump into one and have coins but it wants diamonds so you jut don't get an upgrade.
Aesthetics
2 - I like 8-bit-style graphics, and the tileset of this game reminds me of a lot of vintage games.
3 - The game looks nice, and there is an easy to understand key in the top left noting wealth, health and the like.
Fun
2 - Figuring out how to escape the different monsters and which upgrades were most worthwhile was fun, as was seeing the different tilesets.
1 - I wanted to have more fun with it. I made a video of it, but I just couldn't get anywhere. I hope this author rakes this into consideration and either develops a system for this, or keeps it in mind for next year.
Innovation
1 - Nothing new here.
2 - I liked the sacrificing to the gods mechanic for new abilities which was the twist that differentiated this time. I also liked being a strong girl.
Scope
2 - Not a one-level demo, not a full game, somewhere in between.
2 - This game fits tidily in what I believe could be accomplished in seven days. Viewing the author's progress page it looks like they got everything they wanted done.
Roguelikeness
3 - Definitely a roguelike. Turn based, think-before-you-act, one life, character progression, monsters, dungeon delving, etc.
3 - Turn based tactical combat, 9 key movement, permadeath, procedural generation, no real item randomization, but it gets the point across.
A fun little browser-based roguelike with a few types of maze and room+hall levels, at least a few type of monsters, and a pay-for-upgrades mechanic.
Fantastic dungeons is a cute, and from what I found out very difficult little game with a goal of making your way to the 10th floor. One of the reasons I found this game rather difficult is that there is no natural healing and potion drops that heal 1 hp a pop are few and far between while enemies are populous.
Hook & Shield
Completeness
3 - Polished, only minor bugs, seems hard but fair.
2 - The game is more or less complete in it's own minimalistic fashion. But unfortunately there are some bugs here and there. Targeting is sometimes off by one tile and the game might stop respond to input.
Aesthetics
2 - Simple artwork with animations is nice. Sometimes hard to pick out the player though. Visual feedback on how an action came about is sometimes poor though, especially with position-swapping enemies. The interface is a bit fiddly to use.
2 - Lo-fi pixel art looks good. Monsters even have idle animation. But instead of monsters idle animation I would like to have more feedback when player takes damage. Right now often you don't notice and don't know what damaged you. Also controls might be touch-compatible, but on desktop computers it definitely could be better.
Fun
2 - This is perhaps a divisive game, with some people loving it and some people finding it frustrating. The game is hard, with every movement mattering, and enemies across the screen being dangerous in ways you don't always notice. With low hitpoints deaths can happen from the lightest lapse in concentration. On top of that actually positioning yourself to kill enemies can be slow and frustrating, whcih means you inevitably do lapse in concentration at times. The base mechanics are fun, but I think the enemies and environments need more work to really support them in a more enjoyable way.
2 - It's moderately fun, but bugs and 'sudden death' feature, where beholder swaps you into lava from quite big distance, spoils everything.
Innovation
2 - This is a small-level, tight mechanics game with interesting enemy abilities, somewhat akin to Hoplite or MicRogue. It has a few novel elements such as spiked walls and hooking enemies that prove interesting.
2 - This exact set of skills wasn't implemented before, so let's say 'there is something new'.
Scope
2 - It's a small game, but still has a good amount of gameplay and replayability. Just right for a 7DRL.
2 - Just about right for a solid 7drl I think.
Roguelikeness
3 - Lacks the usual exploration and resource management, and importantly doesn't allow free movement (you can only jump in circles). However it it turn-based, grid-based with a heavy emphasis on tactical combat, and with that still retains a strong roguelike character.
1 - There is full vision of the level, there is no character development, or items, or any other resource. It's on the same level of roguelikeness as chess. Nice tactical puzzle, but not a roguelike at all.
A small, puzzle-esque roguelike where you play in small levels with a small number of abilities, trying to position yourself carefully to hook and push enemies into lava and spikes. Fans of MicRogue, Hoplite and Auro should definitely check this out. Not the best example of this style of small, tactical roguelike, but still engaging and very challenging.
Minimalistic tactical puzzle. You don't have any means to deal direct damage. Push/pull enemies to the lava or to the spikes. That's all. And several enemies with different behavior.
Tomb of RNGesus
Completeness
2 - Found at least one apparent hang/crash bug (right-clicking outside the play area), and some control issues (diagonal movement is frustratingly inconsistent), but those can all be worked around and it otherwise plays fine.
2 - Seems be underdeveloped. I didn't notice serious bugs, but this game need to be more polished definitely.
Aesthetics
2 - Nicely chosen colors, reinforcing the apparent setting, but graphics were a bit small and apparently un-adjustable, making it hard to tell what was going on.
1 - Graphics is poor. Dungeon is made by solid blocks and everything is hues (...two hues) of one colour (yellow), UI looks harsh and raw. Tiles are bizarre and unclear, it is hard to interpret informations from icons.
Fun
1 - Great prototype of a particular gameplay mechanic, but my thought on playing it is that the mechanic is a dead end.
2 - Core mechanics in very interesting, but it works too randomly. It wouldn't be so bad, but in combination with large amount of enemies it is very annoying. Your live is keeped by RNG... Huh, maybe it is intentional?
Innovation
3 - Unusual idea leads to a somewhat different approach to bump-to-attack, although I don't know if it's really got legs.
2 - Fighting mechanics is rather innovative.
Scope
2 - Basic roguelike with one interesting mechanic explored.
2 - Simple dungeon crawler, fits to character of 7DRLC.
Roguelikeness
3 - As simple as a console roguelike, and yet with plenty of complexity and interest.
3 - Quite generic roguelike.
It's another roguelike, but there's this one weird mechanics trick: you know if you're going to hit or miss before you even make the attack - in fact, you know several actions ahead. It's not entirely clear to me how to make use of that, but there are some features in the game that let you play off of it.
The Tomb of RNGesus is rather generic roguelike with quite innovative and interesting fighting mechanics. Your attacks are *determined* by RNG as well as enemies attacks. Every attack can be standard hit, miss or critical hit. Player know sequence of 5 next attacks and he knows shorter attack sequences of every enemy soldier. It is original, and the coolest is that this mechanics forces carefully planning. Unfortunely, attack sequences are way too random and enemies is too large number to perform really tactical gameplay. Your life, your death... It's all about RNG. Maybe it is, due to the title, intentional? Anyway, it is not bad game, but good idea is wasted to lack of balance.
2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid RL
Completeness
2 - Too hard to understand to consider polished.
2 - The game is more or less complete, but somewhat minimalistic. Also balance it slightly off.
2 - It's complete but bare-bones. You would have a very hard time learning the game without referring to the manual.
Aesthetics
1 - Too hard to understand, period.
2 - The game loos OK. Functional enough, but nothing to be impressed by. Number of hitpoints instead of @ is nice find!
3 - Clean and simple; bold colors. It feels like it's a potential mobile game, with four-way movement and icon-based interface. The play field is an 11x11 grid, with an additional two columns on the left to represent inventory (item icons and the button to push to use it), and two columns on the right for spawn and experience meters.Given the highly abstract nature of the game, some animation to help illustrate what's going on would be very useful. For instance, when a monster's attack destroys an item or gives you an item animation would help highlight the transaction. As it is I generally don't notice that I've lost my weapon.
Fun
1 - Too puzzly and opaque to be enjoyable.
2 - I feel that either balance is broken, or I'm missing something. There is P enemy which changes items in your inventory into item that deals damage to you when used. Even if your color matches color of P. Sooner or later you end up with whole inventory filled with that junk. F early also equals to game over.
2 - It's a trip to play. I found it extremely challenging; I never managed to exit the first level. I found myself going back and forth between the manual and the game trying to remember what each of the symbols represented.Given that the interface is iconic and the entire vocabulary of the game is largely unique, I feel it would have benefited from a progression of levels that gradually add enemy, item, and terrain types, or present them in various combinations. As it is it's a lot to be hit over the head with.
Innovation
1 - There are probably some novelties, but they're way too hard to understand to appreciate.
2 - There are some interesting combinations of items and abilities of monsters, but not really genre breaking.
3 - It's a whole new ruleset; very different from any other Roguelikes I've played. It it dense in its use of space and the rules seem fairly well interconnected.
Scope
2 - Tries to implement a broad itemization / power set, although they seem totally arbitrary and abstract; procedural generation is, again, totally arbitrary, though, not representational at all.
2 - I think it's just enough for a 7drl.
2 - Seems like a good scope for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
2 - I want to call this a puzzle game, but it's clear the author intended to make a roguelike.
3 - Despite it's bizarre look, the game have all attributes of a roguelike.
3 - It's the deconstructed food of Roguelikes.
There's probably a roguelike in there, but it's so hard to figure out what's going on that I can't enjoy playing it. Everything is abstract symbols and meaningless capital letters.
I was confident that 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid is some drug :) But it turned out that it's some kind of herbicide. Which makes no sense, since plants can't move. But anyway, the game is somewhat trippy, yet somewhat fun. My main complain - there are some super nasty enemies that you simply cannot allow to hit you. But there is no way to deal damage remotely and 'the same color' feature doesn't work for special abilities. You don't take damage, but negative effect of attack is still there. Which seriously ruins the fun, since game might throw several enemies of that kind one after another. Also you might end up surrounded by walls with no means to do anything.
This game's named after a common herbicide; I'm not sure why. Do you remember your first exposure to D&D and the learning curve to understand armor, dice notation, and so forth? Learning to play this is like starting that whole process over again from square one.The interface is tiny and icon-based. The level fits in an 11x11 grid of characters. Two more columns on the left hold the inventory. Each row has an item symbol and a number 1-9 showing which button to press to use that item. (The "weapon" and "armor" items take up the other two rows; they aren't consumable per se.) Two columns on the right contain meters for when the next monster spawn is, and how much experience you've gained.Your health ranges from 0 (dead) to 9; the digit is your character. Enemies are represented by letters; they generally have two hit points so they are represented by capital letters and then lowercase letters. (There is one enemy type with three hit points.)You will need to read the external manual thoroughly to make sense of the game, and will have to refer back to it continually until you've familiarized yourself with the rules. A few examples: If you have armor, monsters whose color matches your armor cannot hit you. Certain terrain squares will change your color. There is an inventory item that fills empty inventory slots with copies of your other inventory items. There's a monster whose attack gives you an inventory item that, when used, subtracts a hit point. Another monster's attack destroys your first inventory item, which if it's your weapon means you can't attack monsters until you find another. Etc.
Ancient Legends
Completeness
1 - There is barely any game in here. And it might hang time to time, forcing you to restart C64 emulator and wait another 2 minutes while it loads. As far as I can tell there is no goal in the game.
3 - The game is playable, stable, and from what the creator says, beatable. It does need some balance tweaks on enemy appearance (Poison is a killer) but it's looking good on this front.
Aesthetics
2 - The game looks somewhat strange. It uses tiles, but they are not good enough to understand what they actually depict. Not horrible, but not good either.
2 - The graphics capture the Commodore in all it's glory. Had some trouble figuring out the controls in the emulator the creator suggested using.
Fun
1 - First - there is not enough game to be fun. Second - balance is horrible. You have to restart many many times in order to pass level 2. But after level 2, several levels are very easy.
2 - I like the pitch for the game, but it's another bump fest. The few reptilian I fought all had a different attack gimmick.
Innovation
1 - Nothing new here.
3 - New is a bit of a stretch, This game brings something old, and I like that the game titled "Ancient Legends" uses a system that is pretty much that.
Scope
2 - Barely enough for a 7drl.
2 - Nothing new here, but delivers a trusted formula. It does happen to be hard as hell.
Roguelikeness
2 - There are elements of a roguelike, but not enough variety and tactical options to be called true roguelike.
3 - Difficult, turn based, dungeon crawling, permadeath. Missing randomized items, but yep. It's a roguelike.
The only good point about this game is nostalgic feeling about Commadore 64. Unfortunately I have no any special feeling toward that platforms, so for me it's just prototypish game that takes a few minutes to load. There is trivial combat and horrible balance in the game, and that's all.
A commodore64 based dungeon crawler. Purpously retro and a fun little dip into thirtyish years ago. To play it you'll need an emulator, but it's worth it.
Andromeda Divided
Completeness
2 - The game is not quite complete. There's no end condition, which wouldn't be a huge deal except the game also doesn't seem to ramp up in difficulty enough to ensure death. So it creates a situation where it seems like you can go infinite (for reference I hit level 50ish on the characters in my longest run) without any resolution. I would have liked it if the game either scaled faster than the player or an actual ending after a certain # of floors.The other problem is hitting ESC is a useful key in game to perform several actions, but it will also exit you to the main menu without prompt. So if you ever hit ESC too many times accidentally you'll lose your run.
2 - There are minor problems, such as possibility to press 'm' even when all characters died or 'esc' that ends the game without asking. But the game itself is playable, somewhat balanced and relatively polished.
Aesthetics
3 - Charming visuals, a fitting tune to go with it, and good aesthetic polish like screen shake. There's not much more you can ask for, the presentation is great.
2 - Map looks nice, moving is smooth, controls are intuitive.
Fun
2 - It's fun for a quick romp just to see what's on offer, but it quickly becomes repetitive with no change in the moment to moment gameplay. Once you get used to how the levels are generated and how you can approach fights efficiently enough to not run out of consumables there's nothing left to see or do. I think the biggest failing on the fun factor is that having 3 characters feels superfluous which ends up a bit of a tease really. Since only one character attacks at a time the other two feel mostly like meatshields and the only squad tactic is to juggle who gets killing blows so you can get free healing from leveling up.If the characters in your squad at all felt different or unique I think the game's fun would have lasted a long longer than it did.
1 - Once you understand mechanics the game is pretty easy, there is no progression aside from increasing numbers of damage and hp.
Innovation
2 - Andromeda Divided mixes up a fair number of interesting ideas in terms of squad tactics and level generation, but without more gameplay impact coming from those ideas the game isn't really able to show any real inventiveness. So ultimately I think it's the start of a unique take on a Roguelike, but it needs more tuning and content to make those ideas come through better.
1 - The only innovative part is a combat system, but I don't think it is better then traditional way. Turns pass faster due to one attacker, but battles are pretty dull.
Scope
3 - Andromeda Divided sets itself up for a pretty ambitious scope. I think a lot of that scope has ended up in the level generation which is quite impressive. The levels are quite impressive and employ both generated key cards and unevenly distributed difficulty which makes progress through them feel... well like progress. Likewise the item generation is quite ambitious, but unfortunately it doesn't really have a varied impact on gameplay other than upping the damage your attacks do. The same even applies to the idea of having a squad of characters; it's an ambitious idea, but ultimately it doesn't really have a huge impact on gameplay in a way that makes the game feel really varied.
2 - Scope is enough for a 7drl. Not much mechanics, but game is overall polished - there are generated names of the weapons and other small things.
Roguelikeness
3 - This undoubtedly feels like a Roguelike. It has all the major components, and with the right prominence, that I expect from the genre. The only thing that makes it feel a tiny bit unlike a Roguelike is the lack of an end and ability to just continue on indefinitely.
1 - This is a dungeon crawler, but not a roguelike. Gameplay is closer to jrpg.
Andromeda Divided is a great looking dungeon crawl with a great soundtrack and special effects backing it up. You take control of first a single character, and later up to three and slug it out against enemies collecting new weapons and consumables as you go. The core gameplay loop is fun and is backed up by solid level generation, but there are some hiccups in gameplay unfortunately. There's no ending to the game and it is possible to continue indefinitely, but the content of the game doesn't last long enough to remaining interesting for that extended period of time. Collecting characters and items is really exciting, but soon you realize all it amounts to is HP & Damage that almost feels more like a single character. I would have loved to see even just a little more there in terms of gameplay variety and I think even a little bit done in that way could have greatly extended how long the game is fun for.Despite that Andromeda Divided is worth playing until you master its mechanics and it's quite enjoyable for that time. Just don't force yourself to continue slogging through the dungeon expecting something to change as you go deeper.
As a description says, we are playing as a mercenary fighting through space dungeons. Dungeons consists of square cells containing loot, monsters, doors or stairs. Once player come to a cell with monsters he fight with them in a jrpg-like turnbased manner or return to previous cell at any time. Combat system is strange - each turn only one character in player party attacks, then attacked monster strikes back. So while player can have up to 3 characters, only one does damage, while other are just meatshield (and a backup in case of main character death). There is a progression in xp and looted weapons, but no win condition and difficulty doesn't increase, so game can be played indefinitely. The way medkits are implemented makes losing pretty difficult, so the main cause of lose is accidentally pressing esc twice.
Camp Perdido
Completeness
3 - While the game is very short, there do not appear to be any significant bugs or missing features.
2 - It ran smoothly for me.
Aesthetics
2 - The game uses a decent tileset and some minor animations. It's not beautiful by any means but better looking than you're average ASCII 7DRL. The controls are quite annoying, requiring the use of the mouse exclusively when arrow keys make much more sense. The post-7DRL update improves the graphics and controls significantly, adding a wider variety of sprites and allowing the use of the arrow keys to move.
3 - It is easy to play; animation and camera are fluid. The interface is simple.
Fun
1 - The game is far too easy to be fun. Most enemies pose no threat whatsoever when approached with caution. The only enemy that legitimately poses a challenge only shows up in the second half of the game, and is more reliant on mechanical skill than tactics to deal with. Also, the fact that movement is limited by a timer makes exploring the level in between combat situations incredibly tedious. The post-7DRL update fixes the tedium of movement by making the timer only prevent attacking instead of moving, but this also further trivializes all combat by allowing the player to easily outrun all enemies.
2 - The game is good for a few minutes of fun. It gets monotonous but with only two levels to get through it doesn't overstay its welcome.
Innovation
2 - While the real-time elements of the game don't work as well as one might hope, the concept is interesting and somewhat innovative.
2 - The real-time form is interesting. There's a monster that rotates on a timer; if you are in the square he's facing you take damage. Monsters get bumped back when you hit them; you can take advantage of this to bump them into spikes.
Scope
1 - The game consists of two levels, each of which take around 3 or 4 minutes to complete, there are about 5 unique enemies, and the level generation is pretty basic. After the first playthrough there isn't much else to see. The post-7DRL update adds some new enemies and more levels, but the game is still relatively basic.
2 - It's about what I'd expect. It looks good and plays fairly well.
Roguelikeness
1 - Beyond just being real-time, combat in this game is more dependent on dexterous skill than tactical decision making.
3 - Apart from not being turn-based it is fairly typical.
Camp Perdido is a simplistic roguelike with realtime elements. Instead of the player and enemies moving in turn, the player and each enemy is limited by a move timer. Unfotunately this means that movement is very slow and tedious when the player isn't in combat, and it doesn't really make the combat interesting. The post-7DRL update fixes many of the problems with the game.
Camp Perdido is a cute, simple action Roguelike. Monsters move on timers. You can move as fast as your fingers will let you, but your attacks are on a cooldown timer. There are a handful of items to boost your abilities and a few different types of monsters. The art is cute and colorful and the movement is smooth.
Coming of Age
Completeness
2 - Basic game in place, runs fine.
2 - It runs fine and I didn't have any trouble with crashes.
Aesthetics
2 - Simple and direct.
2 - Looks nice; exactly like other libtcod tutorial-based projects I've played.The interface (again, like the other libtcod projects) is a little ideosyncratic; a couple of spells require the mouse for targeting, but otherwise the game is played entirely with the keyboard.
Fun
2 - Very standard base roguelike gameplay. Get repetitive after a while and lacks challenge.
1 - It's fairly monotonous. Combat damage is non-randomized so it's purely a matter of subtracting more hit points from monsters than they do from you. Once you've earned enough XP to level up you can increase your max hit points, or increase your base attack or defense numbers.Like another libtcod project I played, the monsters are not able to path around corners reliably, which allows you to disengage from them if you want.
Innovation
2 - Simple melee combat with a basic inventory
1 - Not that I noticed.
Scope
2 - Simple game, not much more than the base libtcod + python tutorial, but has put effort into different item types and a level up system.
2 - It's got a lot of stuff in it: scrolls, health potions, a couple of weapons, a shield, a few types of monsters.
Roguelikeness
3 - Basic roguelike in a traditional style.
3 - Yes, it's a Roguelike.
Not much more than the libtcod + python tutorial. But hopefully the dev has learned some important things for future development!
This appears to be the libtcod tutorial project. I haven't done the tutorial myself so I'm not sure if/where this deviates from its source, but I've reviewed one or two other games that clearly came from the same origin. I played down to level 14; I don't know if the game has an ending or not. It feels like a subset of the original Rogue. I ran into rocks, daggers, swords, shields, health potions, scrolls of lightning, confusion, and fireball; rats, orcs, and trolls; and the same stats and dungeon generator as the other libtcod projects I reviewed. Combat damage is not randomized at all, so the game feels like a war of attrition. At least when I played, resources were plentiful in comparison with the monsters, which I appreciated.I'm guessing the developer is new to programming and/or Roguelikes. If so: Congratulations on completing a project! It's not easy. There's also no shame in copying stuff. Don't let low marks get you down; I know my entry this year will get low marks for things too. Now that you have a working base you can experiment, and do another 7DRL next year.
Pixland
Completeness
3 - It seems to aim at a minimal feature set, but what it has it does pretty well.
3 - The game seemed relatively complete, so far as it went.
Aesthetics
1 - Far too opaque in the UI to be fun; I don't have the information I'd need to play intelligently, and am reduced to wandering at random.
2 - Aesthetically the game was mostly good. Its use of the continuous RGB space for coloring map elements means sometimes it can be hard to separate background from foreground. The hero goes through a gray phase in the mid-levels, for instance, where he's colored exactly like the floor dots.In addition, I'm guessing the enemies are colored according to their stats, which means the early low-stat enemies are all close to black, and it's impossible for the beginning player to distinguish their strengths or vulnerabilities.I did not understand the game's use of color in the walls. A wall that looked white to me might be described as being green, for instance.The map does not show unexplored areas very well, and it doesn't show the location of the exit portal once you discover it!
Fun
1 - Not for me; even if I had enough information to meaningfully play, this feels intended to be too puzzly.
2 - It feels like some interesting mechanics that need to be balanced into an interesting game.The levels are way too big. The hardest part of the game, after you understand it, is finding the exit to the next level.Why would I ever want to shift points from my stats to my reserves? I found that I just wanted to keep my stats maxed to the highest amount my level allowed. Perhaps a system that required shifting points between color stats might be more interesting?Mining walls to exchange colors seems cool, but there needs to be more reason to do it other than that monsters don't drop red.I'd have liked to have seen more extremely-colored enemies from the outset of the game. I'm guessing that the enemy stats on the early levels were low and that's why they all looked black?
Innovation
2 - This prototypes a novel mechanic, but doesn't prove the mechanic needs to be developed any further.
2 - This game's color system is fairly innovative. I'd like to see more carefully-designed use made of it.
Scope
1 - A random cave with bump-to-attack; although there's a potentially interesting model behind the combat mechanic, you can't see what's going on and so you can't appreciate it.
2 - Seems like a good scope for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
2 - A sketch of the beginning of a roguelike.
3 - Yes, Roguelike.
A puzzle game that looks like a roguelike but is really short on agency: life or death appears to be completely random in the early stages, and perhaps 1 in 10 starts even made it to second level.
Pixland has an unusual color-based system. The player's got an RGB color; the monsters have RGB colors; and the walls have RGB colors. The player and monster colors form the basis of a three-stat combat system. Additionally the player can mine the walls to exchange colors at various trade ratios.The first thing you'll discover on entering the game is that you can dig walls. Shortly after that you're dead. Digging a black wall costs RGB points for no reward, and most walls are black. So try hard not to accidentally bump into a wall!The second thing you'll discover is that you need to press Q, W, and E as many times as necessary to maximize your "active" RGB stats, by transferring points from your reserves. This will allow you to survive fights with the monsters. I didn't find any reason not to just keep my active stats topped up at all times.Beyond that, you wander gargantuan levels hunting for the exit. Killing monsters gives you red, green, or blue color points (almost never red, in my experience), as well as experience points. Leveling up allows you to increase your active stats, which lets you kill monsters more efficiently.I did not reach full white in my stats; I got to experience level 15 in an hour or more of playing, which let me be 75,75,75 (a dim gray).
Skater
Completeness
2 - Mostly complete, with a few annoying bugs and a great deal of usability work needed.
2 - It's hard to judge completness of this game. It looks like, say, 'complete early access version', it sound strange, I know. Skater seems be rather bug free and quite polished, but gameplay and game environment are poor, or just underdeveloped.
Aesthetics
2 -
2 - I have mixed feelings about Skater's aetetics. Some sprites are nice, some sprites are nasty. UI also isn't beautiful, same as title screen. But in general, everything is clear and readable.
Fun
1 - Even after watching the author's explanatory video I can't figure out combat except by triggering the balance-shattering cairns; the game for me is mostly running away from hordes of enemies while searching for a needle in a haystack.
2 - Movement system, which is supposed to reminds hockey slides etc. is quite original and really enjoyable. But game is a bit unbalanced and features other than movement seems be very raw.
Innovation
3 - Momentum is an unusual idea, particularly in a turn-based game, but feels like it could make sense; after watching the author's video it becomes clear what he intended, although the implementation seems a bit off, and it's not obvious to me that this would ever provide really solid gameplay - still worth exploring further.
2 - Yeah, movement system is quite original, but other gameplay features are pretty standard.
Scope
2 -
2 - I really considered '1' mark due to gameplay related things, but I appreciate hours of work on tiles and tests of movement system.
Roguelikeness
1 -
3 - Yup, SKater is roguelike.
A hack-and-slash fighting game with an interisting physics/momentum model; don't try to play without watching the author's video for an explanation of the mechanics.
Skater is very average game with unsual and interesting movement mechanics. Characters moves like on skating, so movement is 'circlish', or 'roundish', is impossible to perform about-face in one turn. Overwall, game seems be underdeveloped. Looks like developer subordinate everything to movement system and fancy graphics. And later he didn't have time to refine game and add other notable features.
Sporaculous
Completeness
2 - I'm guessing that this game is beatable, it's hard to tell since getting past a couple waves with your unintelligent turrets and death prone central mushroom is not an easy feat at all.
2 - It seems like a fairly complete game from what I was able to play. The help says "fend off all the waves to win" but I was not able to reach that point in my time with the game.It would be nice if the help were displayed before asking the player whether or not they are happy with the randomly-generated map.You can reveal the whole map before starting the game so I'm not sure why it is hidden initially.I ran into a bug where a couple of monsters never arrived at the fray, preventing that wave from completing. I roamed around a bit looking for them but could not spot them.
Aesthetics
3 - The graphics look nice. Bright, with good looking water and explosion effects. The game shines more here.
2 - The turret shots and their explosions look good. I like the terrain generator.It's hard to see the monsters amongst all the terrain types; over time you learn to pick them out.
Fun
1 - It's not easy to play this game, not due to the controls, but because it seems like the turrets are not smart, the big mushroom you are trying to protect suddenly dies in one turn for no reason, I was unable to shoot things with my own power and areas that look like mountains and would then be impassable just seem to provide cover for your foes and not slow them at all.
2 - This game was brutally opaque at the beginning. If you keep pushing at it you will start to see its hidden charms.I'm not sure how much the terrain affects which directions monsters will approach; there also does not seem to be any difference in types of terrain for your mana sourcing. I'd love to see a game like this that has more interplay between the terrain, the enemies and the network you're building. It all needs to be made much clearer to the player, though.I still don't understand why I fail when I fail. I'll see what looks like hit points remaining on the mushroom and the player and then suddenly it'll say "The forest is overrun: game over."
Innovation
2 - Wave fights are cool. We've seen a couple more of them this year. This game used what it had, and was an interesting little tower defense with a fungal twist.
2 - It's a somewhat unusual idea for a Roguelike, and it is interesting.
Scope
2 - This is the kind of product I would expect from a 7DRL. It does shine in some regards, and I wish it was fairer to its own rules, because then it would be more fun.
2 - Pretty good scope for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
1 - This is a tower defense game. Just being turn based and having ASCII art don't make something a roguelike.
3 - Personally I think it falls well within the definition of a Roguelike.
Sporaculous is a slightly confusing tower defense game hiding in a roguelike skin. You are to protect a magic mushroom with poorly defined magical power from some of the rougher elements of the alphabet. Odds don't look too good for you.
This is an interesting game but it is really hard to get into. After the map generation screen, press the ? key; that's the only explanation and help I've found.It is similar to tower defense games. There's a central mushroom that has to be defended at all costs. You get a handful of turrets to place. Turrets defend the mushroom as well as expand the area of "owned" ground, which determines the mana (i.e. fire rate). So you have to balance turret placement to get good lines of fire and support between the turrets, while trying to spread them out as much as possible so as to maximize mana regeneration.Plant some turrets, fight off a wave, get some more turrets to plant, over and over. You as the player can move around and fight off monsters as well, and if you die it's game over.
Star Squadron Commander
Completeness
2 - The game looks polished and movement feels good. Kind of confused about why my ships don't always fire, but the enemy ships seem to.
3 - It's very polished. You can pick from a variety of game modifications to make it easier for your side, and you can have both sides be AI and just watch, if you want.
Aesthetics
2 - It's easy to differentiate between the models of ship, and clicking on them gives you a very clear look at your move range, but not always your attack range. Combat sound works well.
3 - It's quite functional, with good graphics, sound effects, and it performs well. There is good tooltip feedback explaining what the units do. There's a snazzy title logo.My only complaint is that the main title font is blurry and there's too much space between the letters.
Fun
1 - This game is hard. Not that I usually have a problem with that, but since this game is kind of off genre, it wasn't what I wanted to play and that kind of soured things for me. If you are looking for a space combat chess style strategy game, try this one out.
2 - At the moment the game feels rather random as to whether I will win or the enemy will win. Due to the widely varying mobility of the units it is hard to make use of them as combined arms against the enemy. Maybe with further play I would learn strategies to tip the scales in my favor; I don't know.
Innovation
2 - Game has a good design for being made in seven days. Everything it wants to do it does, and I encountered no bugs while playing.
2 - The combat system has a pleasing shape to it, with the rock/paper/scissors vulnerabilities. This has been done in games like the Fire Emblem series.
Scope
2 - The author got what they wanted done, not sure if it mutated from the original idea, but it may be in the wrong competition, since it's more of a strategy game.
2 - This seems like quite a good scope for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
1 - Like the author says, this isn't a rogue like, this is a strategy game, not a roguelike.
2 - It's a Roguelike-like; it borrows a lot of the characteristics but it's really a strategy game.
Star Squadron Commander, much as it's name suggests, has you commanding a small fleet of ships in space. With a rock paper scissors mechanic B beats A C beats B and A beats C (Light medium and heavy ships.) The computer AI is pretty good at beating you and if you have fog of war on they can pop out and get you out of nowhere.
Star Squadron Commander is a turn-based, grid-based space combat strategy game against an AI. Both players command a force of a dozen units or so with the goal of wiping out the opposing force. It is turn-based, has a "random" board, but really isn't a Roguelike.Your force consists of fighters, frigates, and cruisers. They have a rock/paper/scissors set of vulnerabilities; fighters are best against cruisers, cruisers against frigates, and frigates against fighters. There are some differences between the ships to make things a little bit asymmetric: hit points, attack range and mobility. You also are given different quantities of each unit type.Ships pick targets in range and fire on them automatically. The board is randomly generated but it's very simple: a sprinkling of impassable asteroid squares and some nebula squares that inhibit visibility.
12Down
Completeness
2 - Getting weapons off bosses after the first two seems to not work, and some features are a little bit less transparent than you'd wish (not just the boss bonuses where it can be really hard to guess what you're actually going to get based on the description - which I assume is intentional - but also things like exactly what your stats do or how much your very limited number of health potions will heal you for)
2 - The game crashed twice (once after several attacks with poisoned sword, once after first step on a dogs level), both were pretty frustrating.
Aesthetics
1 - Basic roguelike look. Each level is populated with at most three types of monsters, with a fairly odd selection (apparently frogs are higher level enemies than elephants). There's some humor in the monsters' kill messages and the boss bonus choices, but it sort of doesn't really work.
2 - Menus and gameover\\win screen have no borders and looks unpolished, but other UI is fine.
Fun
2 - Bats (level 2) and hawks (level 8) were difficulty spikes for me. Without them, the game would have been too easy to bother with. With them... well, the bats do feel like they spike difficulty up a bit *too* high, they discouraged me from trying another game after winning one.
2 - Most of gameplay is pretty boring, but exploring which rewards are good and which aren't is pretty fun
Innovation
1 - The monsters have more movement patterns than just charging at the PC, and there's some interesting options in what you can get off bosses, but by and large the intent here clearly was to get a basic, solid game down.
1 - Idea with random playchanging rewards isn't new, neither is not giving information about it.
Scope
2 - Seems very simple at first, but the game does open up a bit with different monster AIs and ability drops off bosses as you descend.
2 - First level looks like a techdemo, but there are more features on later levels, so a scope is good enough for a 7drl
Roguelikeness
3 - A modern-style roguelike design in the sense of dropping the feature pair of health regeneration over time and food, but very much exactly what you'd expect from a roguelike anyway.
3 - 100% roguelike
Very straightforward but actually quite competent roguelike adventure where you descend through 12 floors. Each floor introduces a new monster type and has a boss that gives you a choice of three bonuses upon death. Healing and stat increases occur upon level-up, meaning that it seems to be optimal at least early on to clear each floor of monsters for XP before carrying on toward tougher enemies.
In this game player must kill monsters on 12 levels to win. Every level has its own monsters (with a small group of monsters from previous level). In theory, not all monsters must be killed, as exit to the next level appears after killing 10 of them, but as monsters on the next level become stronger, skipping weak monsters make not much sense. There is no items or shooting, so at first sight, gameplay is boring - monsters have a lot of hp and go directly to player, so you must lure them to passages then hold arrow key till they are dead. On some levels monsters are slightly more villenous, but general tactic remains the same. The fun part is developing a character. You get some bonuses with XP, they increase your stats. Another important source of power are rewards from level bosses - after killing of them you can choose one of 3 bonuses, but exact nature of them is not shown. Instead there is a flavour text that give only small hint about reward). Some choices are clearly better than other and some are totally overpowered. The funniest was a second level - i have found ONLY one combination that allowed me to win it: take +3***, then -3***+9*** from levelup, and *** from a first boss(i decided to omit spoilers). I've tried about dozen of combinations, but only this one always wins and other always failed for me. Later on some bonuses become overpowered while some other (presumaby) crashes the game, so while there is still a fun of exploring what rewards does, exhaustive search of combinations wasn't needed. Overall game isn't very balanced or technically superior, but is fun to try until won.
Arcana Command
Completeness
2 - General buggy and unbalanced, but at times it runs just fine. Lacks polish.
1 - This has serious bugs. Half of the skills (all sigils) crash the game when used. My most successful run (i was in several days from the final mission) crashed when i pressed "bind" then changed my mind and pressed another skill.
Aesthetics
2 - Poor font choice is bad on the eyes, and there's often a lack of feedback with what is happening in battle.
2 - Overall UI is OK, but can be better, especially in HQ part.
Fun
2 - I find it tedious, though I could imagine the theory-crafting being interesting, thinking about how different squad setups could work.
3 - The game is really great. It is fun to play even with present bugs. I really hope author will update it or even make a serious project from this 7drl.
Innovation
1 - This brings nothing new to the slew of other squad based roguelikes out there.
2 - There are some ascii squad tactic games, but i haven't seen one based on new xcom.
Scope
2 - Was aiming high with all the abilities in there, but doesn't have the gameplay to make that scope interesting.
3 - The scope is good for a 7drl. I am giving 3 for a number of skills and research areas and for the fact how new features (enemy titans and wizards, interrogation) appear when you think you have seen all.
Roguelikeness
2 - Turn-based, random, but with action point moves across a squad.
1 - It is definitely NOT a roguelike, it is a squad basic tactics with ASCII graphics.
A squad based roguelike with different classes and abilities. You can experiment with various builds and combinations. You have action points each round and various enemies to defeat. Overall interesting, but feels quite unpolished. Like many squad based roguelikes it suffers from pacing issues, having to enter in every commend for every character in a tortuously slow process.
This game is a XCOM(the modern one) + ASCII + Inquisition. Player hire and train characters of four classes to fight with daemons invading our realm. Each character has three skills that can be replaced with training. All classes have their area of use, though i think knights are slightly underpowered. There is only one type of missions - killing all demons on a map, but at some point you will have to capture demons that give some variety to the missions. At first game is pretty easy, you just kill demons in packs and gain a lot of money, but then more dangerous demons starts appearing and sometimes mission can be lost on a second turn. Generated map does provide some cover but long-range units (rangers) shoots most effectively only when they spend full turn on it, and so are pretty vulnerable even though sages can protect them with spells. This makes game process pretty tactical, sometimes you must hide and try to get in melee, sometimes you overwatch, while enemies are going into melee, sometimes everything goes so bad so you must run and try to survive and sometimes thing are better and you must manage your resources to capture some strong enemy.
Dice Dungeon.
Completeness
3 - Game runs well and I encountered no bugs or problems. There's nothing really here to provide game breaking balance issues so it feels solid overall.
2 - It's clearly more of a prototype than complete game. But there is enough to understand the idea.
Aesthetics
3 - Visually appealing with a nice tune. Overall pretty charming graphics that are also visually clear and easy to parse. My only complaint is the parallax on the floor texture makes it look a little bit like the game world is floating above the background, but it's barely noticeable.
3 - Nice sprites, suitable sounds and music, responsive controls. There is not really much to pick at.
Fun
2 - Really fun to run through once, but once you have there's not much reason to go back. The mechanics come through well and it does a good job of presenting a puzzle that really makes you slow down and think a bit. I enjoyed figuring out how the quirks and mechanics of combining the dice and making paths through the world, but the level's length stretches those mechanics a bit too far to really remain interesting throughout. There's also never that much in the way of outright danger; mostly you feel a sense of dread that you've ruined your chances at clearing the level.
1 - It's partly too easy, partly too boring. Digging thru dice walls is boring part.
Innovation
2 - It's more of a twist on certain puzzle games than the Roguelike genre, but it does make for an interesting jumping off point that feels like it's own unique thing.
1 - There were dice themed roguelikes before, and this one is not the best of ideas. It doesn't really add much to the gameplay.
Scope
2 - A modest scope, the game has brought the elements together nicely but it's just not reaching particular far in scope. The content that's there is nice, but it doesn't really deeply explore the central mechanic.
2 - Ok for a 7drl.
Roguelikeness
1 - Overall the game doesn't feel too much like a roguelike. It shares the same movement style you'd expect from the roguelike, but that's about where it ends. The game play is more like a puzzle game and the death mechanic isn't a constant threat as much as a deterrent for specific moves and plans.
1 - It's more of a puzzle than a roguelike. There are no items, no skills, no stats. In it's current state it's not even enough for a -likelike.
Dice Dungeon is a charming one floor puzzler where you must combine dice to make passages so you can collect coins and reach the exit. The visuals and sound set up a great atmosphere for a quick experience that ends up feeling like a nice puzzle that will make you stop and think. I really enjoyed getting a chance to play with the dice mechanic, but I do wish the game offered just a little bit more so the idea was expanded further. Even for its short length the game is really begging for a few more mechanics to put a twist on the formula.
This game is more of a puzzle than roguelike. Dices around can be pushed and equal ones merged, to form higher number dice. There are evil jack-in-the-box-es around, but they are so slow, that it's piece of cake to kill them.
Don't Go Out The Airlock!
Completeness
2 - Game seems to lack a true win condition (it loops endlessly), and is often generated in an impossible state as far as I can tell. Mechanics are either obscure are not fully implemented. Lots of polish on the visual side though.
2 - It looks like rather complete game at the first glance, but it is sort of illusion. Gameplay is terribly half-baked and unbalanced. I didn't find any bugs thought.
Aesthetics
3 - Very pretty game, graphics are clear, interface is nice.
2 - UI is simple but aesthetical. Game nice graphics made by tiles which are widely used this year.
Fun
2 - It's amusing getting blown out to space, but also frustrating when often it just seems impossible. It also gets repetitive fairly quickly.
1 - I'm not sure about it. Game is not balance and gameplay is a bit weird and lack of instructions doesn't help. I figured out how to play but game isn't funny anyway.
Innovation
2 - Being sucked out to space is a novel mechanic, as is the use of depressurisation as a hunger clock.
2 - Roguelike aestethics mixed with sort of "platformer game's spirit". Quite interesting idea.
Scope
2 - Very small game.
1 - Very small scope, even for 7DRL. It's more about, I don't know, 24HRL?
Roguelikeness
2 - Turn-based, grid-based, randomised with permadeath, but lacking the usual interactions or tactical decisions you would expect in a traditional roguelike.
2 - Game uses roguelike aestethics and bases but I wouldn't call it 'roguelike'.
You're on a spaceship trying to reach the escape pod, but the expanding depressurisation makes moving difficult. You can thrust and vent air to propel forward, but it can be challenging. The turn-based physics of this are fun, and the game is pretty, but it's also very short. Some extra detail/mechanics in a bigger ship could have made this really great.
Nice graphics, quite interensting idea, terrible execution. Dont Go Out The Airlock is very small roguelike about escaping space ship which is about to crumble and explode. Nice graphics and UI, but weird gameplay, lack of instructions and lack of balance makes this game annoying and boring.
Fehlfunktion
Completeness
2 - Looking over the creator's twitter, it looks like a lot of features are implemented, and I was able to get at some of them in game before being beat to death by enraged mutants.
2 - The game feels more-or-less complete but very unpolished.If you are trying to click on a monster that happens to be standing on an item you'll sometimes pick up the item instead of attacking the monster. Likewise for monsters standing in doorways.You cannot drag a new item to your equip slot and have it exchange with the currently-equipped item. You have to first drag the current item out of the equip slot, at which point your inventory rearranges itself so the new item is no longer in the same place. There's no feedback if you try to load the wrong ammo into a weapon; it just does nothing. There are two equip slots but it seems like things (pipes, crowbars, guns) can only be placed in the right one.I don't understand what hacking the AI means in game terms. I don't understand what to do with the upgrade modules I pick up.
Aesthetics
2 - The game looks nice and moves well for what it has. The characters move smoothly and the inventory system more or less works whenever you try to use it. What I can only assume is the AI sending you messages through game is a nice touch.
1 - The game gets high marks for its ambient soundtrack, which adds an atmosphere of dread. It also has full-screen glitch effects, which I found nauseatingly effective.The procedural level generator is an unusual one; it's a lot of rooms packed tightly together. I like the layout; the game just needs more density of interesting things in the rooms.The interface could use more work. Damage effects seem to be black squares that obscure things, for instance. The enemies have explicit health bars, while the hero has a vaguer text indication, so it's hard to know where you stand. Maybe that was intentional.The tile graphics have some odd misalignments in them. Some of the things like the terminals are represented by colored squares, while the rest has bitmap graphics.
Fun
1 - The controls are off, and not sure if I ever got the "mouse swipe to keep attacking" to work. Clicking on objects while trying to fight and being put in a menu and dying sucks.
1 - I did not enjoy this game; I'm sorry. I could not figure out how to survive. After a few battles with a pipe or a crowbar (the only weapons I found) I'd be nearly dead so I would spend my use of a terminal on healing instead of upgrades. Then I'd run into another monster and he'd kill me.
Innovation
2 - This game is real time when you move and stops when you stop. The controlling is finicky and odd, but you can tell that there was some thought here.
2 - The real-time with pausing is something people are playing with right now (Superhot, Supercold).
Scope
2 - Not super polished, but clean looking and playable. Looks good for a 7DRL.
2 - This game's clearly had a lot of work put into it.
Roguelikeness
3 - Sorta turn based, random gen, permadeath. rather hard, randomized pickup location. Hits enough RL qualifiers for me. here.
3 - It's got procedural levels and permadeath, and it isn't a twitch game despite being real-time.
Fehlfunktion which sounds like a garbled fail function to me and that makes sense in a story way, and only barely in a gameplay way. You are a lost and solitary survivor in some kind of station or facility having to fight off swarms of mutants and cyborgs in order to thwart an AI you are told is evil.
Fehlfunktion is inspired by System Shock and its ilk. You awaken, feeling ill, with few of your memories intact. An all-seeing AI taunts you as you hunt for supplies, fight off other guys, and hack terminals to affect the AI or install cyber-upgrades in yourself.Game time passes only while you are moving or performing an action. Moving is animated; actions use progress meters to show the passage of time. This feels natural for most things but can feel sluggish for simple things like picking up items off the floor.I found the game very difficult; I never got farther than about 188 seconds of game time in many play sessions.
Hanafuda Kenshi
Completeness
1 - Game is playable. There is no way to restart after gameover, game must be closed and reopened. In my final run I felt like i was close to winning, but a game breaking bug occurred and I was not able to select any cards.
2 - The core mechanics are mostly stable and work as intended, but there is a major bug where the game stops responding once you get past the first few rooms. There's plenty of room for polish, too.
Aesthetics
2 - Control scheme is simple and works. Visual style is fine, enemy sprites are easy to parse.
2 - The sprites are good, but the empty white snow areas could use a bit of texture. Controls are good, although sometimes the rotated cards would revert before I wanted them to.
Fun
2 - I'm not usually a fan of random movement mechanics like this, but it worked well enough that I played for quite a while. I finally stopped because of a game breaking bug. But hey, I was having fun!
2 - If you can get over the initial bump on the learning curve, puzzling your way out of a tricky situation is a lot of fun. I'm glad I played it.
Innovation
2 - Random movement choices has been done before, the real innovation here is that they are paths that can be rotate to your liking.
3 - The main mechanic is very innovative, and the rest of the gameplay supports it.
Scope
2 - About the right scope for seven days.
2 - About right for a 7DRL. I'd like to see this game's mechanics taken farther in the future.
Roguelikeness
1 - More of a puzzle game than a roguelike. I could see the cards being carried over into a roguelike game, as a type of consumable item.
2 - I get a puzzle-game feel from this one, almost chesslike at times.
A combat puzzle, worth checking out, but not quite complete.Fav: Eastern theme is niceNot so fav: It's a bit hard to count grid spaces sometimes. Not sure if it was the floor tiles or my eyes playing tricks.
In Hanafuda Kenshi, you play a samurai fighting hordes of enemies. Your movement is entirely controlled by your selection of Hanafuda-inspired cards with movement patterns on them, and you attack while moving. The challenge is fun, once you get the hang of the movement rules. This one is worth a try; with a bit more polish this could be a great puzzle game.
NetRogue
Completeness
2 - The game seems mostly complete and doesn't seem to be missing any features, but there is a significant bug that causes the game to crash. On my best run the game suddenly closed without any sort of error message in the middle of combat, and I wasn't able to reopen the game until I restarted my computer.
1 - The animation, controls, and balance are all extremely rough.After you die there's no way to respawn other than closing and relaunching the game client.
Aesthetics
2 - The graphics are simple but nice to look at. The controls, however, could use improvement. When autopiloting the game sometimes seems to ignore my input, rendering me unable to stop moving when I want to. The game also seems to run very slowly at times.
1 - Pressing a key to move causes the character to move a square in the indicated direction, then move back to their original square, then move once again to the destination. Holding a key to move causes this back-and-forth to happen repeatedly. It's very hard to look at.The fire spell looks like it's supposed to be creating a beam, but the beam does not always aim at the square you're clicking with the mouse. Sometimes you have to click on an adjacent square to get the beam to go through the square you want.When you've earned enough XP you get to choose whether to upgrade your melee or spellcasting powers. Clicking on the UI element to upgrade will also fire your spell at the same time.
Fun
3 - While it starts slow, the game gets very interesting in the later levels. The resource management is well designed and the leveling system requires the player to make interesting decisions and does a good job of rewarding careful play.
1 - The balance is extremely off in this game. One the one hand, frequently you spawn next to a monster and die, or you cannot find any spell powers or weapons in the vicinity. On the other hand, once you have a spell and one or two levels of upgrade you can shoot monsters from outside their activation range; they will sit and take it until they die, rendering the entire game trivial.There is no feedback I can see about what your stats are or how much XP you've earned or need to get to the next level.
Innovation
3 - The core mechanic of the game, avoiding projectiles in a turn-based environment, is something that I have never seen used the way this game uses it. The idea is not only unique, but well implemented.
1 - Essentially the game is attempting to do something like Diablo.
Scope
2 - The game isn't massive but it does have a decent variety of enemies and items. Each enemy is truly unique, with distinct attack patterns.
2 - It looks like the game has networking, which is a challenge.
Roguelikeness
3 - The game isn't generic by any means, and of course the focus on avoiding finite-speed projectiles is very unusual for the genre, but it is no doubt a roguelike.
2 - This is inspired by Rogue, similar to Diablo.
A roguelike in which you play as a space ship dodging the projectiles fired by other spaceships. Thanks to the fact that the game shows you where the projectiles are headed, a nice variety of enemy patterns, and a well-balanced resource management system this game turns out to be pretty fun and definitely worth playing.
This game bills itself as a cooperative/competitive online Roguelike; unfortunately it's not nearly finished enough to be fun.
RAID: Rogue AI Dungeon
Completeness
3 - The game is playable and even has an extensive tutorial.
2 - All is working, but the requirement to pass first levels again and again is pretty annoying.
Aesthetics
2 - It looks fine. The code field isn't dumb, and will help catch errors.
2 - Basic UI is fine, but battlefield is pretty minimalistic - it's impossible to say whether the tile is passable from first sight, it is difficult to see whether monster shooting to you or not and who of them are in radius of your abilities. Even log window is missing and player is supposed to use a browser errors log for game messages. On the other hand, visual aesthetics is clearly not important at all in this type of games.
Fun
1 - "More work?" - Unnamed Human Peasant. This kind of game will appeal to some.
2 - It's fun, but not a sort of fun you expect from roguelike, more like a fun from making a 7drl, lol.
Innovation
1 - People have been making bots to play rogue for a long time. Check out Rog-O-Matic (1981)
2 - The idea isn't unique, there are some such games, but not so many that I can call them "common". I definitely haven't seen such games among 7drls.
Scope
3 - Very ambitious for 7 days.
2 - Authors say that the api and prototype was done before 7days, and only game mechanics\\UI\\balance was done in 7drl interval.
Roguelikeness
1 - You a programming a bot in dungeon crawler. The dungeon crawler part itself isn't very roguelike itself.
2 - Well, this isn't a real roguelike, but a programming challenge with a roguelike task. So I can't say "it's not a roguelike".
Programmable bot driven dungeon crawl.Fav: Extensive tutorial.Not so Fav: Games that use coding a bot as the primary goal feel like work to me.
This is a game for a programmers only. Luckily, I am a programmer and many of the roguelike players too. In the game, you must write a JavaScript function that controls player so he can reach from one corner of screen to opposite. You can use three different attacks (melee, ranged and magical) to kill several types of monsters, heal yourself, check a tiles and units around you and move in 8 directions. Early levels are pretty dull, so even A* would be a huge overkill here, simple moving to an exit and snippets copied from tutorial about "if you can hit with magic, do it" are enough to pass first 5 levels. Well, later on levels gets harder and perhaps better tactical AI or at least magic instead of melee could have helped against jackals pack right at start. But testing it would be a pain because you must pass all the levels from first after each failure and it takes about 15 minutes at maximum speed. And if we speak about pathfinding, i don't think i'm in a mood to recreate an a*\\wave algorithm in javascript for now. But i'll try to do it later.
Rise of Kramora
Completeness
3 - Seems solid, stable, reasonably polished
3 - One crash, but otherwise robust, and seems to have done everything the author intended.
Aesthetics
2 - Graphically very nice. Controls ain't great, but are part of the restriction of making the game for a watch (I tested on Android, mind). Slow transitions and animations can spoil the flow of the game.
2 - Simple side-scrolling bitmap graphics with a bit of animation, entirely appropriate.
Fun
2 - Gameplay is fairly bland, with little in the way of choices. There's a lot of randomness in spell behaviour and item finds that can make things frustrating.
1 -
Innovation
1 - Neat that it's made for a watch, but gameplay-wise there's nothing new.
2 - Unusual, I guess it was worth exploring? Not familiar enough with watch game to know if this has been done before.
Scope
2 - There is a decent amount of item types and enemies, though not a lot of content overall.
2 - Although this would be disappointingly sparse on a real computer, I can believe that putting it together for the watch took a week if it was a new programming environment.
Roguelikeness
2 - Lacks procedural environments or tactical positioning. I wouldn't say it has much of choices to be made either. Barely scrapes a 2 for use of permadeath and random content.
1 - Nope. Has a few of the trappings of a roguelike, but not much of the spirit.
This is a neat attempt at a random battle game that can be played on a smart watch using only three buttons. Graphically it's nice, and it's fairly easy to play. But the gameplay is really shallow, and for a watch game with so little real content it is stretched out far too long (should have been 10 floors max). Would have been nice to see a bit more clarity in the mechanics and some more interesting decisions to make in battle and in finding items.
A roguelike on a watch - or at least as close as we can come. One button for movement (well, two if you could go up stairs from the current hallway), four buttons for combat, a few items to pick up...
Thoodiam
Completeness
2 - Overall I think this is a complete game package. It runs well and has complete implementation in terms of win.loss condition, a nicely generated dungeon, and combat.That said there's a few problems in the balance that I think come about partially from content not being complete. It seems like a lot of the difficulty of the game revolves the risk that monsters will one shot your player, something that is quite common because monster difficulty swings a lot based on the weapon they're equipped (even more than the monster type itself). I think that balance issue puts a little strain on an otherwise good experience.
2 - Seems solid. Some display bugs when enemies are chasing you around corners, and odd behaviour due to enemies acting before the player. Overall stable but not polished.
Aesthetics
2 - Visually everything is pretty clear and is pretty standard Roguelike fare. I think the yellow could have maybe been toned down a little bit so it's not as high contrast, but otherwise everything looks alright.I would have liked some more UI clarity as well. A few of the numbers are left without context on the character sheet and while I appreciate the detail, the combat rounds are tough to parse for relevant information.
1 - Poor. I don't mind simple ASCII, but monochrome yellow is an eyesore. No support for numpad movement, and the inventory is very fiddly to use, especially equipment swapping. The message log is overly cluttered with every variable in operation.
Fun
2 - Thoodiam is pretty fun, until it abruptly isn't. The core roguelike experience comes through well and there's a lot of fun and interesting things to try out even with the limited mechanics (my favorite is throwing daggers).The problem that cuts away the fun though is how random the enemy damage is based on the weapon they are wielding. A goblin with a dagger will deal no damage, a goblin with a battle axe will one shot you even in the heaviest of armor. Even within the same enemy + weapon the variance on damage is really high which can still cause dramatic spikes of instantly lethal damage.
2 - Decent enough. There's some interesting decisions in how to equip oneself. Gameplay is basic but challenging.
Innovation
1 - This is a pretty straight Roguelike implementation. I liked the idea of the Stress mechanic and thought that was a neat touch and solution to hitpoint regeneration in combat.
1 - Very standard stuff, even down to the much-used d20 system.
Scope
2 - There's a pretty good amount of detail here. The ability to dual wield, wield weapons that can be both 1 and 2 handed, and throw weapons are all interesting details that really add to the game and make you want to try again.I also really appreciated the dungeon length, I think 5 levels was just the right number of levels for the amount of mechanics and content on display. Enough to properly explore the game, but not long enough to drag on or become repetitive.
2 - Very simple roguelike, but still has some substance.
Roguelikeness
3 - It's certainly a Roguelike in the most traditional sense. There's not much to say about that, everything you'd expect from the genre is here.
3 - Standard roguelike fare.
Thoodiam is a classic roguelike through and through and a pretty good start of one at that. It has the core roguelike experience in there to hold your interest over its limited length. Even with the limited item selection it feels like there's quite a few ways to approach the dungeon's monsters and your strategy for equipping items. The one notable downside is the combat doesn't feel balanced and fair in this release so the game has the tendency to abruptly end with a lucky dice roll scoring a 1 hit kill on your avatar.
Looks like someone's first attempt at a roguelike. It's not a bad result, with equipment, rigorous combat mechanics, throwing weapons and a few enemies, but it's not too exciting or original either.
Dungeon Bard Ascii
Completeness
2 -
2 - Seems be complete game, I didn't encounter strange bugs or weird glitches, but there is lack of balance and lack of polishing.
Aesthetics
3 - Mad props for incorporating original sung music, even if I wasn't able to leverage it to make any progress in the game.
2 - Sounds / music are nice, but graphics is crude and minimalistic.
Fun
1 -
2 - Enjoyable, but only for short sessions.
Innovation
2 - Interesting idea, but would take huge amounts of playtesting, alternative approaches that get around the hard block of insoluble riddles, progressive hints... *Something*. The problems with riddles are pretty well discussed in game design textbooks, for one.
2 - Mixing adventure-ish elements like solving riddles, word games etc. are not unique. but still uncommon.
Scope
1 -
2 - I'm not sure, game seems be very small and non-complex, but it's hard to judge how much is the riddles and how deep and/or unique they are.
Roguelikeness
1 -
2 - Roguelike aestethics, roguelike spirit, rather not roguelike gameplay.
The problem with riddles in games is that they rely on an "Aha!" moment; they're very, very hard to balance well. Unfortunately the gameplay in Dungeon Bard ASCII is: run away from monsters to the riddle - solve the riddle or die - next level, and I don't find the (innovative?!) riddles soluble. They're a hard block.
Nice small game, but quite unbalanced. Riddles at first glance looks very nice, but they relies on 'revelations', like "I don't know anything... wait, wait, I know! Was this that simple?!" so these riddles are a bit tiring / annoying in the long run. Especially if monsters are very dangerous and best way to handle them is just run - it looks like intended thing, thought. Rather high overwall score, but... Average game, for sure. Without major weaknesses, it's right. but also without major strengts
Temple of Anguish
Completeness
2 - Its playable, no crashes, but there are a few bugs. The window size was too small by one line, causing a scroll bar to appear and needing to scroll up to see the message line. Help file calls out the wrong keybindings for some commands: equip is actually 'r', pickup is actually 'g'. The character can tunnel through walls, which is either a bug or a feature, not sure which as its not mentioned in the help. The version number says v0.4.1 so is it actually finished?
2 - It does have advancement, and it's winnable, but weapons can't be wielded and the balance needs work. (The hunger clock feels much too fast, and one can eat 4 pumpkins before being sated. One can also wear pumpkins.)
Aesthetics
2 - The game looks fine. Some keybinds are puzzling. Eating is bound to 'u'? Maybe it means use. Also it does the thing where you have two different keys for armor and weapons, which is probably unnecessary. A single equip command would suffice.
2 - It looks great, but a few problems make a score of 3 impossible here: The window size is fixed, but a scrollbar appears and often causes messages to be hidden. Also, some of the commands in the help file seem to be incorrect (try 'g' instead of ',' to pick up items). The music is great, though.
Fun
1 - A bit bare boned for my tastes. Combat is the basic bump affair. Balance is on the easy side, the PC levels up quickly and its not hard to outpace the enemies in strength. There's a hunger clock that ticks very fast, but it is made moot by an abundance of food.
2 - Leveling up attack/HP/etc and trying to get to the bottom floor, sure.
Innovation
1 - Standard.
1 - Wall digging was the only surprise here.
Scope
2 - It's about what I would expect for seven days.
2 - It's 7DRL sized.
Roguelikeness
2 - Hits some of the major features, but feels like more of a rogue-lite due to how bare bones the game is, and it's current balancing.
3 - No question about that.
No frills combat focused roguelike.Fav: The multicolored victory text. Very cheery. Also you can wear pumpkins as armor.Not so fav: Had to exit and reboot application to try again. Prefer a start over option!
This is a roguelike that has potential if it keeps improving. The Temple of Anguish floors are large, and you can dig through the walls and find food items while fighting monsters. You can level up your attributes, which you'll need because most of the enemies seem to appear on any given floor. There's a final boss, but the story connection to the Infinity Sect isn't clear yet.
supercold
Completeness
3 - Umm, all that is present is done, gameplay is working, there is even a sort of balance.
3 - This game delivered what it promised, and even has several different modes, all randomized, to keep the play going.
Aesthetics
2 - Showing a hitting bullets as red is a brilliant idea. The rest is rough but fine for a prototype.
2 - Crisp ASCII graphics, pickup text doesn't mesh so well. Lots of blue and some red and white otherwise.
Fun
2 - I really like this kind of semirealtime, and playable bullethell in it is fun.
2 - Novel ASCII adaptation of an otherwise 3D game. Challenging until you get the hang of it, then the fun rolls in.
Innovation
1 - There is not much new, as the name supposes it copied main mechanic from a game with opposite name.
2 - Timestop bullet dodging is fun. Other than that it's kill the guys and don't die.
Scope
1 - No progression, no win condition. It is a techdemo of game mechanic on a set of fixed and generated levels.
2 - Not having played the game it's based off of, it otherwise fulfills the top down roguelite shooter goal.
Roguelikeness
1 - In current state it has nothing to do with roguelikes. On the other hand - this mechanic is imho very roguelikish, so only lack of actual game prevents it from being a roguelikelike
1 - If you get shot you are dead and have to start over. It's fun, but ASCII does not a roguelike make.
This is a topdown shooter prototype, where time is continuous, but is passing only when player moves. Player and enemies have 1 hp, so the player must dodge every bullet that enemies fired. Luckily trajectories of bullets are shown, and those that are going to collide player are highlighted in red. There is no winning condition, so when enemies are killed you just press esc and select another level (there are several fixed scenarios and randomly generated ones with three levels of difficulty). I really hope author will expand it to a more complete project as the mechanic is pretty promising.
A rogue shooter where things stop of you stop and go if you go. Several different modes of play keep you going for a bit. Based on the game Superhot. Not terribly roguelike.
American Ball Hog or Landon's Last Run
Completeness
1 - Several features are not implemented (magic, money), but remnants still left in the game. There is an upgrade button left in the game, which I have to feel is a mistake because you can click on it to get upgrades as much as you want. Features like the “yellow card” you are supposed to get for fouls never appeared to show up. In fact, I sometimes systematically cleared a level of enemies by pushing them into pits with no consequence. Occasionally, the random arrangement of pits will cause levels to be unwinnable.
1 - There's quite a lot of buttons that are visible in the UI but not hooked up to anything. I'm not sure whether brutes turning completely black (and turning zombies around them black as well) is intended behavior or a bug. Reading the announcement post, the author seems to have planned for a fair bit more features than he had time for.
Aesthetics
1 - The mouse controls are sufficient, but the abilities are totally bewildering. After clicking on an ability button (none of which are labeled), you go through a process of being shown highlighted tiles and clicking on them repeatedly. The ball ends up somewhere and it all feels like magic.The graphics consist of a grab bag of assets from other things, including a marine from DOOM. They neither fit together well nor serve to explain the game to the player (e.g. who are my teammates?)
2 - It's a bit messy to look at, though reading the announcement post at least explains the interface. Predicting what happens in situations involving multiple monsters acting in a tight space is surprisingly difficult.
Fun
2 - It's a bit of fun. It could be more fun if the abilities were explained better and the game was more balanced. The first two stages are super easy and by stage 5 or 6 it seems all but impossible.
1 - I didn't get a lot out of it, unfortunately. The good part is that the game does get quite challenging quite fast.
Innovation
2 - I've never seen football in a roguelike. Have you? You could swap out the ball for something else (an NPC you have to protect) and many of the positioning abilities would still be somewhat original.
2 - Some kind of mechanics involving pushing a token around could make a really cool addition to a larger roguelike.
Scope
2 - Most of the game is really simple, but there are several abilities implemented, so I'd say average scope.
2 - Ordinary for a 7DRL. This game absolutely didn't need *more* features to be a good 7DRL, but making sure that what was there worked, and worked in a clear way, would have gone a long way.
Roguelikeness
2 - Surprisingly, it checks most of the boxes. A far stretch from true roguelike of course.
3 - 7DRLs often are a bit more akin to procedural tactics puzzles than more old-school roguelikes, and this one certainly doesn't buck that trend. Still, it's instantly recognizable as a roguelike in the ways that I think actually matter.
In 'American Ball Hog or Landon's Last Run', the name of game is football (or soccer if you're like me). It's football with pits, referees running around randomly, and zombies for opponents. The goal of each level is simply to get the ball onto an exit tile and avoid letting it go out of bounds or into a pit. It's easy to lose control of the ball, but luckily you tend to move faster than the enemies. There are abilities like kicking and dribbling and they are indeed very useful. Unfortunately, several abilities were left unimplemented and the rest can be quite hard to understand. Perhaps it's because I'm not a huge football fan myself. There are a slew of football inside jokes in the game, which went right over my head. This game needs a bit of work, but the idea has a lot of potential, seriously. It makes me want to write a sports roguelike. We see here that the result can involve lots of tactical decision making and with a little more polish could be really fun.
Bring a football (the kind that you actually move with your feet and that's shaped pretty much like a ball, unlike what some sports named "football" involve) rightward across a field filled with monstrous enemies. You contend with holes in the field, zombies that just move once every two turns and, later on, brutes that move only cardinally but can kick the ball farther, as well as referees who will give you the red card if you get a bit too rowdy pushing opponents around.
Doomed Looters
Completeness
3 - Seems to be relatively complete and bug-free. The high-score table didn't seem to be fully implemented, though.
3 - The game is complete, balanced, controls are smooth, no serious bugs encountered.
Aesthetics
2 - Graphics are reasonably clean and easy to read, though the detailed background tileset doesn't really match the far simpler foreground sprites. The background music is god-awful: a five-second bit of drum beat that loops over and over and over again. It does allow you to turn this off at the main menu, on the plus side.
2 - There are minor problems - it's difficult to see monsters behind the door and lootbags sometimes are hard to spot, but otherwise game looks pretty good.
Fun
1 - It's not an absolute chore to play, but it gets dull quite fast. There's not much in the way of tactical gameplay - just wander around and mash the attack button when something gets close. Even the magical powers some of the classes possess are fairly lacklustre. It gets very frustrating when you find the level exit before you find the key and have to backtrack through the cleared level looking for what you missed. Besides different sprites and (possibly) different stats, all enemies act basically the same.
1 - It's a pretty basic hack&slash. There is no equipment or variety of skills, so there are better games to play.
Innovation
1 - Nothing that hasn't been done a thousand times before.
1 - Well, there are some ideas like using keys vs opening by force. But that's not enough.
Scope
2 - Four different playable classes is nice, and there is quite a number of different enemy types, even though the differences between them seem to be largely cosmetic.
2 - Scope is good for a 7days game.
Roguelikeness
2 - Real-time rather than turn-based, but clearly with some influence from roguelikes.
1 - Random generation of levels is not enough for calling a game roguelike.
Doomed Looters is a fairly well put-together but ultimately quite simplistic action-roguelike. Could provide the basis of a solid game, but needs a bit more to it to make its gameplay interesting.
This is a hack&slash in an endless dungeon, with only goals are getting to deepest level and gathering most gold. There are several types of monsters which differs in hp and damage, healing potions, gold, keys, and door to next level. I'm sure that there was some idea about keys - but all doors and chests can be broken with single hit of sword, so I've failed to understand why silver keys are needed at all. Most of the time player just go to the passage, wait if any monster run to him, kills him, enter the room, go to four corners for another pack of gold, repeat until out of hp. Sometimes rooms are generated in such pattern that monsters form a very large pack before meeting the player - this adds some fun, but there is not much player can do with it - so he either heroically swipe all monsters with several hits or (in case of rogue\\wizard) use skill or just die.
Iron Honx
Completeness
2 - I had problem starting the game. It was crashing until I turned on win7 compatibility mode. And stone potion feels bugged. But other than that the game is short and simple, but complete and winnable.
2 - Iron Honx supplies you the barest of narrative (It's outside the game entirely), but the game is beatable.
Aesthetics
2 - The game looks ... strange. It's hard to believe that it's a dungeon. Too bright, too sterile.
1 - Not much is explained. Enemies explode, not sure if I'm eating my fingers to turn things to stone. Could be way more complete.
Fun
1 - Way too trivial to be fun.
2 - The game's challenge is luring enemes into each other's gas clouds and trying to survive yourself.
Innovation
1 - Nothing new here.
1 - Potions are spells, I had a ton by the end of the game, and very few uses for them.
Scope
2 - On the lower end of 2. It's just a little bit more than @ moving around an empty map.
2 - Bottom of the two here. Bare bones, once more.
Roguelikeness
2 - Not complex enough to be called true roguelike.
3 - Turn based and super easy to die. procedural generation
Readme doesn't explain a thing, so I have no idea what's going on in this game. You are, probably, a wizard. In some dungeon with things that explode into clouds of poison. There are potions of stone and potions of teleport scattered around each level. And that's all. Potion of stone summons some stones around you. There is a chance to kill an enemy by summoning stone on top of it (or probably there is bug with this spell). And it looks like you can sacrifice up to 3 fingers to turn nearby enemy to stone. Potion of teleportation teleports you around. And that's all. Potions are so plentiful, that it's quite easy to win the game without sacrificing fingers.
Iron Honx is light on story, or description, but it is a game, and it is beatable! You are a wizard able to destroy your fingers and you can find and access two spells.
Leaves Underfoot
Completeness
3 - If nothing else Leaves Underfoot feels quite polished. There were no noticeable bugs when I was playing and all of the interactions and elements fit together to present a smooth experience to the user.
1 - The game runs, but it's so barebone that it can't be really called complete. Yes technically you can loose and win, but it's so trivial to win and you can loose only on purpose.
Aesthetics
3 - The aesthetics are wonderful. Everything from the color palette to the great doom style health meter work together make a few unique looking game. Visually everything is great and very memorable; exactly what you want from a game.
2 - Nice choice of colors, nice pixel art. But dialog on each attach? Seriously? And often it's not clear what terrain is passable and what not.
Fun
2 - There's really not much gameplay to have on offer, the game is very short and fighting the monsters is incredibly bare bones (though with a nice touch of flavor text). Fortunately the game also is aware of this and is appropriately paced in length so the end result ends up still being OK. There's nothing really compelling from the gameplay, but you should expect to complete the game around the time that you feel 'over' the cute visuals and combat text.
1 - There is no game to be fun.
Innovation
1 - Innovation wise Leaves Underfoot doesn't really tread any new ground. You explore the world looking for the cupcake and occasionally hack away at some monsters on the way.
1 - No innovations here.
Scope
2 - It's a modest scope, the game generates a nice little map and rooms are generated with different style patterns, but that's the majority of what's on display. The combat is there but is so simple that it mostly serves as a way to get some fun flavor text rather than present a real challenge. Even with such barebones mechanics it is at least a complete gameplay experience with the polish being there to help carry the experience a bit.
2 - I'll give 2 only for graphics in general and variety of terrain features in particular. But it's damn weak 2.
Roguelikeness
2 - It's standard roguelike fare here, but with the mechanics so pared down it does really feel like it quite covers all of the bases. It's a solid start, but without more danger and something more mechanically it doesn't quite capture the roguelike experience. Your motivation is way more about exploration and taking in the visuals than the gameplay itself.
1 - Even in it's prototypish state it look more like an adventure than a roguelike. And in general there are too few distinguishable features to really try to classify it.
Leaves Underfoot is a charming little roguelike and it's quite lovely to look at. The scope of the game and the gameplay elements are extremely limited, but what's there all tie together nicely. I'd love to see the gameplay expanded into something more fully featured and interesting as the little world that's on display is lovely to explore, at least until you realize there's not really much to find or do.
There is barely any game here. More of technodemo.
Rogue with Purple Heart
Completeness
2 - There are some problems in game, most of them are listed in it's readme. I think I might add suspiciously looking FOV - damn partisan snipers shoots while being hidden by trees and rocks, while opposite thing is impossible. I understand that it fits game theme, but the implementation looks more like a bug than like a feature
1 - I assume the map is supposed to generate so you can complete the levels. I eventually made it off a screen I was trying to leave by walking through a wall. Entire areas re-load when you leave and come back.
Aesthetics
2 - Standard libtcod app, but pretty polished. There is even a choice of font in game options. Controls are pretty simple too
2 - The game loos better than the initial screenshots showed. That's pretty much what this game has going for it.
Fun
1 - Going throw random jungles isn't very interesting and in most of hp is usually lost due to invisible sniper or machinegunner killing you from behind trees, while you trying to find passage or at least enemy. Maybe I'm missing some tactics though, because I've failed to won the game even in "nonhardcore" mode.
1 - Combat sucks. Having to move primarily with diagonals isn't fun and I don't think winning is possible.
Innovation
1 - There are many mechanics in game, and it is possible that some of them are innovative, but the game doesn't give an information about e.g. how stealth works, maybe it just reduce sight radius of enemies. So resulting gameplat isn't great or innovative
2 - The classes are very detailed and the setting is one that doesn't get touched on much.
Scope
2 - Scope is ok for a 7drl
1 - Barely any of the planned features got implemented.
Roguelikeness
3 - This is a roguelike
3 - If this can be called a game it falls under roguelike. It's a poor example, but it has bump combat, turn based, permadeath and the maps in game are constantly re-procedurally generating.
This is a game about american marine running throw Vietnam jungles from left side of map to the right in a search of rescue. There is perhaps a win condition, but I've failed to get so far - not only simple partisans are lurking in the jungles, but also snipers and other serious enemies. You can play as one of the several classes - machinegunner has best weapon but is pretty slow, sniper has... well, even better weapon but short of ammo, scout is stealthy, etc. But all classes have some problems - some of them has ranged weapon so weak that it's easier to kill with knife, machinegunner is so slow that player has to press keys twice longer to move (because short keystrokes are ignored, lol), and while playing as sniper you can see that ammo are in fact unlimited - you can always recharge getting total ammo count to negative values. The game has it's style, but is pretty rough - generated levels are very random, there is no running, stepping to the wall skips turn, invisible enemies are shooting you all the time. That ruins the fun from playing for me
A roguelike set in the Vietnam War. You crawl through a jungle exchanging fire with enemies. You I don't think that this game is complete.
The Hunger
Completeness
2 - Needs a lot of balancing.
2 - The game is technically complete, but so unbalanced that it can't be really called 100% complete even for basic idea.
2 - Being unable to re-size the game and not being able to see how much energy I have aside, the game is beatable.
Aesthetics
2 - The tiles look great. Combat mechanics are a bit too unclear.
3 - Nice animated pixel art, smooth field of view borders. Animations are fast enough to not slow the game down. It's looks nice, controls are responsive.
1 - Err. Not a strong suit. The muddy 3d graphics, while ambitious do not look great. If this is your first project, I encourage you to keep at it, and possibly pursue a different color scheme. Not being able to see all the instructions did not help the controls any.
Fun
1 - Seemed fun at first, but balance issues and the terrible maze levels killed it quick.
1 - Unfortunately the game is utterly unbalanced. And mechanics of combat is counterintuitive and interferes with the hunger clock. Attacking first doesn't help here! Even if you kill the enemy, you will still take damage. And what's worse - you cannot escape from attacking enemy! Once an enemy is next to you, your the only choice is to fight. Food distribution also just horrible. You can have almost empty first floor, and you can have plenty of food around each corner.
2 - I'll give this one a pass. It wasn't unplayable, and bashing around was a good time, the same bug that didn't let me see didn't let me fully enjoy the game.
Innovation
2 - Nothing too special here.
1 - In it's current form I can't even put 2 here. Food clock? Food with special effects? It's classics!
2 - Utilizing 3d should be acknowledged. Uninspired enemies like the cube, spike fields or whatever the heck the boss was didn't impress.
Scope
2 - Fine for a 7drl.
2 - Just about right for a 7drl.
1 - This game is in dire need of polish if you plan to develop it further.
Roguelikeness
2 - A bit low on tactics.
2 - No-brainer choice of effects on food, narrow corridors only maze level, inability to run away from adjacent enemy. All this kills choices, which are important for a true roguelike game.
1 - This is an action game. There is somewhat of a hunger clock, represented by energy and you have to re-start when you fail, but that isn't enough to elevate it to roguelite even.
The Hunger is a nice looking game with a fun premise (a really fast food clock and food that gives boosts) but it's almost ruined by it's very high difficulty (there are 26 levels, I think I got to around fifth or so), terrible maze levels (all the dead ends make finding enough food completely random) and unclear combat.
This is one of games that sounds cool on paper, but actual implementation is quite boring. You have to eat food to keep up with super fast metabolism? Food have special effects? Hell yeah! Special effects are "+1 max hp"+dmg
Mythical Jetpack Journey is an odd game. For me it was a game of uncertainty, since I could not re-size the window in my browser to see the entire screen. This meant I had no idea how much fuel I had left and I had to play a guessing game. It's kind of a odd duck compared to some of the games I've reviewed so far. More of an action game than a roguelike.
Aim - Shoot - Repeat
Completeness
2 - Basic but bug-free.
2 - The game runs fine, but feels more like prototype than a game. Also fov is bugged, and it seems that the game might miscount enemies.
Aesthetics
2 - Simple controls and visuals work well. I like that it all plays on numpad.
2 - Lightning looks nice. But other than that... Escape that closes the game without confirmation? Rly?
Fun
1 - Gets repetitive fast. The basic mechanic is nice enough, but there's so little variety.
1 - The game is too easy. There is no challenge. And the most boring part is when a few enemies left and you have to walk over quite big arena searching for them.
Innovation
1 - Very simple mechanics seen in the likes of DoomRL before.
1 - Nothing new.
Scope
1 - Kind of a tech demo, achieves some basics.
2 - Barely enough for 7drl.
Roguelikeness
3 - Basic but clearly roguelike in nature.
2 - There is barely enough content and features to call it a game, and definitely not enough for true roguelike.
A nice little game of shooting enemies and exploding barrels. Fairly basic and repetitive though. Would have benefited from multiple levels and a bit more enemy and terrain variety to flesh out the game.
Prototype of a game about ranged combat. With very little content, unfortunately.
Glub: The Underwater Roguelike
Completeness
2 - Rough but very playable.
1 - There seem to be a few bugs and input quirks that make the game somewhat irritating to play, and there were several times when that the game flat out crashed during gameplay.
Aesthetics
2 -
1 - The game uses a rather unappealing tileset, that perhaps with some more variation and a better color-scheme could look rather good, but in it's current state its not much to look at.
Fun
1 - A good toy; not enough payoff yet, but maybe worth further development.
1 - The momentum-based movement system seems pretty interesting, but alas without any other worthwhile mechanics to support it the game falls flat.
Innovation
2 - Very much a different take on the usual mechanics. The novelties it's trying to introduce are a little hard to parse.
2 - This is a game that tries out a bunch of new mechanics, but none of them result in a particularly engaging experience. The movement system has potential, but the crafting system seems out of place.
Scope
2 -
2 - There seem to be a decent variety of enemies as you dive deeper towards the bottom of the map, although most of the enemies are rather uninteresting vartiaons, and spawn in such haphazard swarms that tactical decision making is impossible.
Roguelikeness
2 -
2 - The game has some features of a roguelike, like being turn-based, but the lack of permanent death bars it from actually being one.
Promising start to a side-view underwater roguelike; the opacity of crafting and advancement and the apparent paucity of the loot you're looking for leave it a little underdirected. The regular report of the number of treasures and enemies remaining is a nice touch.
Glub is a roguelike with an underwater theme that tries out a bunch of unique mechanics, but not all of them work out that well.
Systems Initialized 7DRL
Completeness
2 - Just a couple of hours of work on internal consistency (detect when the player has actually slain the big villain, make the descriptions of the special items match their names and the TRONish setting, get aiming to work) would have helped it feel more complete.
2 - It's relatively polished and easy to play. The main problem I had is that the targeted spells (sorry, programs) require the use of the mouse to indicate where to aim, but I could only see the mouse cursor when it was over a legal map position. This required a lot of waving around until I hit the allowed region, since the rest of the game doesn't need the mouse.
Aesthetics
1 -
3 - Clean and simple. I had very few problems picking it up.
Fun
1 -
1 - It seemed fairly light on ideas, and the combat was pure attrition.
Innovation
1 -
1 - It seemed to me to be largely a Tron skin on a traditional Roguelike dungeon crawl. There is a fireball spell, a heal spell, and a confusion spell. I only ever encountered one weapon and one defensive item. The dungeon looks like a standard rooms and corridors affair. I think there are three types of monsters, and they can't path anywhere except straight at the player.
Scope
1 -
2 - It's a complete Roguelike.
Roguelikeness
2 -
3 - It's a simple, traditional Roguelike.
A thin coat of hacker/cyberpunk/TRON paint applied over the libtcod tutorial; fixed a few bugs, introduced a few new ones.
While solidly implemented, this is essentially a Tron-esque reskin of a very basic Roguelike.
Fogward
Completeness
2 - Runs well. Doesn't seem like the game can be finished.
2 - Not sure if this one ends, but there are pickups that work and an in game currency system where you can buy more pieces.
2 - Could use a little more documentation / tutorial and an end goal.
Aesthetics
2 - Basic look that gets all of the information across.
2 - Simple, but good.
2 - Entirely usable 2d graphics.
Fun
1 - The mechanics are there but without a goal or any real difficulty the doesn't feel entertaining at all.
1 - Figure out that you can kill the "B" enemies and the game becomes a bit more strategic. And simple. I never felt too threatened.
1 - Too puzzly for me.
Innovation
2 - The limited movement mechanic could be further refined by limiting the number of steps in a single direction could be taken at once. Would feel less like a simple puzzle game that way.
2 - Not sure if this is based off any other established game, but it works well, and I might play an actual board game variant with friends if that was available.
1 - Different, but I'm not sure anything here is particularly new.
Scope
2 - A feature complete 7 day roguelike
2 - It's polished and the game plays well. The art clearly represents what's happening in game, and there is a nice song accompanying the game.
2 -
Roguelikeness
1 - Very much a puzzle game with few roguelike mechanics. There is potential for more with additional refining.
1 - Fogward is a puzzle game.
1 - This strikes me as a puzzle game; other than the (multiple!) main characters being an '@' I can't give it points for roguelikeness.
The lack of goals or difficulty quickly gets old. There is little feedback for the player to continue going through the motions other than get more gold if you want to. There isn't any difference that I can see from one level to the next. The idea is nice but needs some more work.
Fogward is a puzzle game. Yes it has @ signs representing the movable pieces and it is turn based, but it is a puzzle and not a roguelike nonetheless. That being said, once you understand the mechanics you can probably play it forever.
Move your '@' pieces across a field full of teleporters, spawners, gold, and a few other power-ups as 'B' enemies try to stop you.
Cash Castle
Completeness
2 -
1 - You can collect cash, which is the main scoring mechanism, but the other items don't do anything apparent, and sometimes the game crashes when you talk to mobs.
Aesthetics
1 -
2 - Title screen music is nice. Z/X/arrow controls aren't bad.
Fun
1 -
1 - Without sufficient feedback for what you're doing, everything feels arbitrary.
Innovation
1 -
2 - It seems like there's a faction system partially in place, and most of the game is trying to reach the cash before the mobs do.
Scope
1 -
2 - The mobs are pretty good at finding the cash, at least.
Roguelikeness
2 -
3 - Turn-based, grid-based, with combat and exploration. It's strange but I think it's a roguelike.
An 8-bit roguelike for a nonexistent console, full of lo-fi pixel art, a few sound effects, and not much explanation. You walk around, find "cash" and occasionally other items, and are told after fights that the people you fought with don't like you any more.
Cash Castle is a game for the PICO-8 console that runs in the browser. You play for a high score in the amount of cash collected. It has potential, but currently has a few missing features. My high score is 9 cash.
Hordelike
Completeness
2 - Reasonably complete I think, with some stability issues.
2 - It's a working game. The only bug found was the game crashing when you approached the bottom edge of the map, an action you are naturally inclined to do to fight the enemies that spawn there. The total lack of instructions and confusing UI make me think polish was lacking.
Aesthetics
2 - Clean enough, could use a character on the floor tiles that are not in range too, it's a bit hard to estimate distances.
2 - Black and white could be a cool stylistic choice and it looks clean enough, but the lack of color causes real problems. To show where attack patterns overlap, the game displays a semicolon instead of a period. But, besides memorization, you never know when you're overlapping the enemy itself! The UI could probably do with some more color to distinguish it from the game and to highlight various important information. The controls are okay, but having a cap on speed doesn't feel great.
Fun
1 - Not very. The game is very repetitive and not too exciting.
1 - I didn't have much fun with this one. It needs much better game feel to be a fun action game.
Innovation
1 - A top down arena shooter, nothing very novel here.
2 - The attack pattern system of the enemies and procedural guns is unique.
Scope
2 - Reasonable scope for a 7drl.
2 - The various items, weapons, and enemies demonstrate about an average scope.
Roguelikeness
1 - It's a top down shooter with little procedural stuff, not even a map as there is none. Yeah, it has permadeath but that's about it.
1 - Not really. It has permadeath and procedural items, but enemies arrive in the same predictable line and there is no procedural environment to speak of.
A real time top-down shooter with very repetitive action. The enemies walk towards you in a line and it seems to all come down to who has the better range. The fact that moving causes range to drop (it recovers when standing still) means there's little tactical movement, just go anywhere and kill the enemies when they get in range. If they have more or as much range as you, you take damage, otherwise you're fine. Not very exiting or very fun. Game also crashes sometimes if the player steps on the bottom row.
Hordelike is a an overhead "action" shooter. Action in quotes because the game is grid based and your character has a glacial speed limit. In general the game plays very slowly and the map is probably too big. For instance, if you sit idly in the middle of the map, it takes literally 30 seconds for enemies to make it across the map to come kill you. Different enemies and equippable guns have different attack patterns, which is probably the most interesting thing about the game. Hordelike is trying to straddle the roguelike and action genres, but unfortunately pulls in the worst of both since it lacks the speed of a good action game and the tactics of a good roguelike.
Rogmind
Completeness
1 - It's hard to really say how complete the game is as it was very hard to play, but documentation is critical to such a game and there was almost none. Also the screen went completely yellow several times during the review and only reloading fixed it (and reset progress).
1 - The game seriously lacks documentation. And looks very bugged.
Aesthetics
1 - There is too much stuff on the screen for my tastes, and controlling the golem was hard due to lack of documentation. Inputting code and running it took a bit too much mouse-clicking, too.
2 - It looks ok. Nice use of unicode characters to create different plants.
Fun
1 - Again, not knowing what to do or even what could be done made the game hard to enjoy.
1 - Hard to tell. I couldn't achieve any meaningful behavior from the golem.
Innovation
3 - The concept, while not unque is still fresh, and the world seemed fun and fresh too, with the mouseholes and mice and all, so 3.
2 - There were attempts to make a roguelike with script controlled character. Not with your own new language, but still.
Scope
2 - Good enough.
2 - Is it hard to make new programming language in a week? Yes and no. If you try to use any existing library/framework - easy. If you do everything from the scratch, than it quite a task. It's hard to estimate amount of work that was done.
Roguelikeness
2 - More of puzzle game, but still, gave me enough of a roguelike vibe.
1 - Unfortunately as it is the game have nothing to do with roguelikes.
A very nice and somewhat novel concept, this one. However, it is a programming game with no documentation to speak of. Now, some people might find such a concept fun, but I wasn't enjoying myself, and after spending 45 minutes and only once seeing the stairs down (I think it was the stairs down), but being unable to reach them before the screen went all yellow, forcing a restart, I just have to say that if I had proper documentation this might be an enjoyable game (might not be the one for me, but certainly some people would love it), but as it is it's not fun at all. The low score for aesthetics is because lack of documentation makes controlling the golem really, really hard.
As far as I can see, author took his previous 7drl entry, tweaked it, removed direct control of the character and added some kind of scripting language that controls golem (character). Unfortunately author decided to not provide any meaningful documentation on the language. And implementation seems to be rather bugged. I couldn't achieve any predictable behavior from golem, no matter what changes to the program I did. Sometimes source code of the program was changing on it's own... I have no idea what's going on.
BYGR
Completeness
2 - Enemies AI is broken, teleporting ability seems not balanced too.
1 - I mentioned that the controls don't work properly and there is really no plot.
Aesthetics
2 - Controls are slightly sluggish and unresponsible, but this is common problem for javascript.
1 - Confusing a first look and super simple when you figure out what's going on. Not a lot going on here.
Fun
1 - Enemies behave like they are both blind and extremely coward. So killing them make me feel guilty.
2 - Even with the controls not functioning properly (having to mouse around till the enemy is highlighted) the game was playable. I must have beat like fifteen levels.
Innovation
1 - There are plenty of tactical squad games. This game have some interesting features - asynchronous recharge of abilities and cryptic stats, but this is not enough.
2 - Your "squad" of shapes with different roles. New abilities are unlocked as you progress, bombs eventually trivializing most foes.
Scope
2 - Scope is enough for a 7 days game.
2 - Simple and complete. Pretty standard for a 7DRL. It's playable with effort.
Roguelikeness
1 - Not a roguelike at all. Even permadeath is not present.
1 - More of a tactics game. I had a unit die and they were just back the next map. It us turn based, but that's about it.
This is a squad tactical game, where player commands four abstract looking characters against 3d geometrical bodies. Maps are about half a screen and have some obstracles, player must kill monsters on map, then upgrade stats of his heroes, then repeat. Looks like there is no penalty for a death - just no xp gain for a lost battle. After getting some xp all characters become overpowered: Mage can teleport to unit, shoot with fireball and then teleport to some safe place, all at one turn, without any risk. "Archer" can kill all units solo because melee monsters are running from him, not to him. Only most desperate try to approach him, but he oneshot them anyway. Priest and warrior are less powerful, but they get a bombs for masskilling enemies. There is no visible progression or end of game - just more and more enemies on a map. The main problem of game is AI - monsters attacks only if they are close to you. Otherwise they are stumbling randomly, or try run away from randed attacking characters with predictable result. So even if at first party was generated in the middle of enemies and only archer or wizard survived first turns, they can eventually wipe out all enemies without a risk.
A squad based geometric shape killer. The controls don't work properly so you have to mouse around to see if your attacks will hit your target. Still fun despite this. Not sure if it ends at all.
Euclid's Peril
Completeness
2 - Basic core loop works.
2 - Well, the game runs and do not contain bugs, but there so little game, that it's hard to call it 'complete'.
Aesthetics
1 - Lots of noisy pixel art that detracts from the game: walkable tiles are varying colors, and it's not clear why. Worldgen is simplistic.
2 - 8bit pixel art and some chip tunes. But floor tiles could be more like floor tiles. Enemies are ... I don't even know what they are. Also, I guess it's part of controls, when you loose, the message says 'press anything', but for some reason enter, space, cltr, alt, shift are not considered 'anything',
Fun
1 - Reenacting an approximation of 1980s console games isn't my cup of tea.
1 - While there is some tactics, the game generates 'impossible to avoid' situations way too often. This really spoils the fun.
Innovation
1 - Hack and slash through random abstract levels.
1 - Nothing new here.
Scope
1 - Felt like a tech demo, presumably because the author handicapped themselves by targeting a notional console.
2 - If not take technical part into consideration, it's almost 1.
Roguelikeness
2 - Vaguely roguelike-like; if there was something more the author intended I didn't see it.
2 - There are some elements of a roguelike, but it's not even closely deep enough to be called true roguelike.
Another very, very simple game targeted for a fictional 8-bit console. Possibly an interesting bit of programming gymnastics, but not even nostalgia makes it interesting as a *game*.
I guess main challenge in completion of this game was imposed by choice of the development platform - pico-8. Yeah, there are some retro vibes in this game, but unfortunately except for retro-vibes there is barely anything else. Levels are just totally randomly scattered walls and enemies. You might enter level and find yourself trapped next to a strong enemy.
Exploring The Bleak
Completeness
1 - 'M' brings up a menu, but none of the buttons do anything.
2 - Playable, not sure if winnable. Not very balanced gameplay wise. Pressing m brings up a non-functional menu which appears to be for one of the authors other projects (some left over framework stuff?). At game over the player must reload the web page to start over. When descending down stairs, the view fails to refresh until the player takes a step, that step is often into into the waiting jaws of a monster.
Aesthetics
3 - Very nice, smooth browser implementation of a core roguelike rendering loop, good color choices.
2 - Visually nice, mostly nice palette choices. Had trouble reading text against some of the background colors. The game gives a nice description and matching color and tileset for each floor it generates. Controls work fine, 8 way movement plus rest, mapped well to the mouse even. Missing any form of help though, so the player must puzzle all this out on their own.
Fun
1 - No instructions, no UI, nothing to do but randomly fight until I die (4 of 5 combats lead to death)?
1 - Too basic and unbalanced. You can bump to attack and that's it. Monsters come on various letters, but there's no hint or clue as to their power. Sometimes get one shot on the very first floor by monsters that are spawned right next to the player. PC gains levels, but it doesn't feel like it gives any advantage as they will still be one shotted by some random letter. There's no look command so you never know what the letters map to.
Innovation
1 - Couldn't find anything beyond hack and slash.
1 - I think a lot of work went into backend and aesthetics, the game ends up feeling like a tech demo. It's nice, but doesn't manage to push any boundaries.
Scope
1 - Feels half-done?
1 - Pretty basic.
Roguelikeness
2 - It's at least *trying* to be the start of a classic roguelike?
2 - It's like Rogue in a sense, but imagine the player stripped of all items and equipment and surrounded by monsters.
This looks like a very-nicely-rendered start of a roguelike project. You can move around some randomly-generated environments and get killed by big red letters without knowing what they are or why. After leveling up, some monsters will die in one hit, but others can still kill you in two blows, for no discernible reason.
A minimal roguelike with melee combat (a bump em up).Fav: nice descriptions of each floorNot so Fav: Seemed like more of a tech demo than a complete game.
Mortuus insula
Completeness
1 - Movement keypresses are mostly double-counted, plus no diagonal attacks or movement for the player but monsters get diagonal attacks? This makes the first few levels (before you grind your way to invulnerability) a challenge, but not in a good way.
2 - The game is winnable, but it feels more like prototype, than complete game. Couple minor bugs here and there.
Aesthetics
2 - Attractive tiles, nice minimap, but substandard UI.
2 - Sprites are nice, but without field of view and any kind of lightning it looks too bright and sterile. What's horrible are control! Press and hold to continuously move it good in general, but if delay between press and second move is like 200ms, you often move twice when you want to move one tile. Since monsters can attack diagonally and you cannot, you often take unnecessary hits while trying to align with it.
Fun
1 - Wandering randomly around a large item looking for three tiny objects?
1 - Too trivial and somewhat tedious to be fun.
Innovation
1 - "Hack, slash, whatever.”
1 - Nothing new here
Scope
2 - A nice start
2 - On the lower end of 2.
Roguelikeness
1 - This *could* grow up to be a roguelike, but it's not there yet.
2 - It could be a base for a true roguelike, but as it is, it's too simple.
The game is strongly reminiscent of a tiled RPG on a middle-aged console, but is only the very start of a roguelike. Combat is too easy, but the goal of the game (finding three artifacts) is too hard (or too boring), since you're wandering a huge island at random until you find it. The victory screen is a plea for donations, which left a sour taste.
Simplistic game where you kill monsters (3 types), gain experience, gain levels, collect and drink potions to regain health, while searching for 3 artifacts.
Rogue Alpha
Completeness
2 - Bug free, but not especially polished. Some pickups didn't seem to do anything, not even a message in the log. Death is handled by restarting the game with no message.
1 - It's not even enough to call it 'prototype'. Way too simple.
Aesthetics
2 - A very clean ASCII look. The black backgrounds on monsters makes it even clearer, but less appealing visually. Almost no color. I was fine with the controls.
1 - Grey space and bright white on black monsters and player. Looks quite bland. Very strange field of view, where you see portion of space only when you close in and can end up next to a monster. You have to switch between dash and burst often, and cycle with thru useless in most cases blast is cumbersome. Specific keys for abilities would be better. Absence of feedback when picking some power ups also not quite good.
Fun
2 - A low 2. I actually had a decent amount of fun for a while because of the abilities and because the game is so straightforward. However, once you've played the first level you've seen all there is to see. The game continues on for 20+ levels of you fighting the same "Monster".
1 - Way too simple, way too random. You can have 3 weapon dmg up on first level, and have no problem for couple levels, or 1 weapon dmg up for 3 levels and die, because you simply cannot deal enough damage to monster before it closes in, and the way field of view works makes it even more random.
Innovation
1 - Not at all.
1 - Nothing new or even interesting here.
Scope
1 - Quite low, since there is only one enemy type. There are 3 abilities, but only one seemed necessary.
2 - Very low 2. There is a little more than @ walking around the screen, and barely enough even to call it a game.
Roguelikeness
2 - It has almost everything you expect except for complexity. Having a single enemy type and an infinite use ranged ability removes most of the tactical choice. The game also features some bizarre fog of war, which was fine. I was more disappointed that the staircase was always in the bottom right corner of the map.
2 - Too simplistic tactical combat, but not enough choices and absence of any kind of resource management do not allow to call it full fledged roguelike.
Rogue Alpha claims to be "Rogue with simplified gameplay." Well, that's pretty accurate but be warned about what simplified means. A single monster type called "Monster". Samey dungeon levels with not much going on besides automatic pickups. I played through 20 levels of this before getting careless. Having more than 5 levels seems like a prank. Thing is the foundation for a great game is here. There controls and looks and gameplay are actually decent, it's just way too simple.
Very simplistic rogulike. Way too simplistic, probably. One type of enemies, 3 types of power ups. Strange field of view.
Abhorrent Swordmelting
Completeness
1 - Didn't feel finished.
2 - It runs fine. No obvious bugs but not incredibly polished either.
Aesthetics
1 - There's some chiptune music, but I found both that and the sound effects grating.
2 - Provides a choice of 4 tilesets (I recommend choosing (d) because some of the others made it hard to tell what was what, and (d) has a nice retro feel.) Controlled entirely with arrow keys.
Fun
1 -
1 - Most of the challenge is in knowing which tiles kill you when you walk over them, and then noticing them before you step on them.
Innovation
1 -
1 - The most innovative thing here is a pseudo-portal transition from one floor to the next.
Scope
1 - If there was any gameplay here, the UI didn't convey it to me.
1 - There's very little gameplay, but the retro tilesets are nice.
Roguelikeness
2 -
3 - Turn-based and on a grid. There's nothing here that would disqualify this game from roguelikeness.
I couldn't find any gameplay other than walking back and forth, uncontrollably triggering transitions between environments, and occasionally dying if I clicked on the wrong thing.
If you're a big fan of retro tilesets, you might want to try this one for the retro atmosphere. Otherwise, you should know that Abhorrent Swordmelting mostly consists of walking from one goal to the next while avoiding enemies and deadly pits.
ZEALOT
Completeness
2 - It feels woefully unfinished, especially in the sound department. Gets a passing grade for not crashing, being relatively bug free, and being playable. I don't think there is a win condition, but there is definitely a game over.
2 - The game seems stable enough; it is very simple.
Aesthetics
2 - Awesome lo-fi look and feel. Would be even better with sound and some cheesy midi metal.
1 - The look is lo-fi, which is fine by me, but there is no indication of when you are taking damage, or how much damage can take before failing. The story indicates that you're trying to hold off the monsters for the duration of a ritual, but there is no indication of how long remains on that, either. Given that you're told how long you survived when you die, I suspect there may not be an end-game. If there is, I'm sorry I didn't make it to that.
Fun
1 - Shooting stuff is only fun for a little while.
2 - It's fun for a few minutes; it's a pure action game, though.
Innovation
1 -
1 - Not really doing anything new that I picked up on.
Scope
1 -
2 - Seems like a typical scope for a 7DRL.
Roguelikeness
1 - FPS arcade game.
1 - It's a Roguelike in the same way that Robotron or Quake are Roguelikes.
A 3 day roguelike with no roguelike features.Fav: Reminds me of Catacombs 3d, you run shooting bolts from your hands.Not so Fav: Unlike Catacombs 3d, you just circle strafe around an island infinitely.
Zealot is a first-person shooter that drops you onto a plateau and times how long you can stay on the platform and survive an endlessly spawning supply of monsters that move toward or shoot at you. If this sounds like "Devil Daggers" then you are correct; it's an imitation of that game. It's lacking sound or the interesting kinds of enemies or weapon modes that that game has, though.My best time was 75 seconds, which I accomplished by falling partway down off the cliff, which seemed to limit monsters' access to me.
100 Campfires
Completeness
1 - I have no idea if the game is winnable or not, it's an absolute chore to play it. After loosing you have to refresh the game, because you can't control your character. All in all it doesn't feel like a complete game at all.
2 - It runs in broswer, It crashed when I tried to re-size, sometimes the enemies got to hit me a few times off turn for no reason.
Aesthetics
1 - The game looks quite ugly and controls are even worse. There is no delay between repeated presses. You have to quickly tap the key to make some action once. If you press the key normally, rotation or quaff will be performed several times. But not the move. Because there is 1 second delay between moves!!! And the trees are quite far away from each other.
1 - This is not a pretty game. The enemy design is interesting, but the world, trees and main character are bland.
Fun
1 - Not fun at all
1 - Controls are clunky and laggy and that's all you have. I could barely make 16 campfires let alone 100. Way too slow.
Innovation
1 - There is too little game to actually say anything about it.
2 - Triggering night to survive harder opponents would be fun if the opponents varied in number or type.
Scope
1 - I don't know about technical part of this game, probably it took a lot of time, but by using any existing roguelike library the gameplay mechanics of this game could be repeated in couple hours or less.
2 - You could fight, build fires and chop trees. The game delivered all that it promised.
Roguelikeness
1 - I don't know what was this game supposed to be about. But what was done have nothing to do with roguelikes.
2 - I guess you could die, if you weren't flooded with potions or got careless. Combat was supposed to be turn based and tactical.
I love survival games. And after reading description I was somewhat excited. But unfortunately the game is so horrible that my expectations were crashed to bits. Here is the game: cut 3 trees, kill wooden creatures that might appear after each tree, hope that they will drop potion on death, make campfire, kill night creature, repeat. Drink potion as needed. Add horrible controls, 1 second delay on each move and very scarce trees.
Slowly wander around bumping trees, treants and shadows. Sometimes you lose turns so enemies get extra attacks. The speed of the game takes the fun out. It's glacial.
BatStick: The Saga - First Tale
Completeness
1 - Obviously unfinished and very buggy. Open tiles sometimes block your movement, left-clicking teleports you to a new level, often inside a wall. Should not have been marked as finished.
Aesthetics
2 - The simplistic graphical style is clean and quite nice (although the bats look a bit like bums), however the fact that there is no repeat on the input keys and the levels are quite large makes moving around an exercise in RSI acquisition.
Fun
1 - There is no real game here. The bats move randomly and so far as I can tell do not even attack you.
Innovation
1 - No.
Scope
1 - Nothing to it.
Roguelikeness
2 - Not really enough content to fully qualify, though it was clearly aiming in the right direction.
A failure marked as finished. The game contains no stick and is most certainly not a saga. Could provide a technical basis for a decent game in future but at present that's all it is.
Before Dawn
Completeness
1 -
2 - The game is playable and I encountered no game breaking bugs. It has in game help, which is always appreciated. I'm not sure the game can be won or lost.. Deaths seem to not reset the player to the beginning of the game, so it might be meaningless.
Aesthetics
1 - Lighting fails completely, UI is insufficient... The author apparently spent money on assets but they don't show well.
2 - The game is visually fine. The controls work well. Lighting is limited to only a few feet around the character, giving the game a claustrophobic feel. It is missing sound effects.
Fun
1 -
1 - Sadly I did not have a good time with this. The enemies present an uninteresting challenge for a game of this type, coupled with lack of feedback, visual or audible when they attack. The lack of sound, combined with the very limited light radius hurts situation awareness greatly in a way I didn't enjoy. The gameplay basically just devolves to trying to find the exit while stumbling around in the dark.
Innovation
1 - The *pitch* sounds like a wonderful idea for a roguelike.
1 - Doesn't bring anything new to the table sadly. We've seen first person gameplay attempted numerous times over the years in 7DRL, and the game doesn't actually build on or leverage the different gameplay format in a way that enhances any key roguelike features.
Scope
1 - Feels like a first project exploring Unreal Engine assets and levels, the sort of thing to do a month *before* the 7DRL so that one can plan and execute a reasonable scope.
3 - I think the developer took on an ambitious challenge here. Trying to make an interesting roguelike out of a first person shooter is not an easy nut to crack. I think this is a worthwhile endeavor to take, but it's going to take more than implementing basic shooter mechanics with random maps.
Roguelikeness
1 - I don't see any roguelikeness here. At all. What was the author's intent?
1 - Game does not implement any key roguelike features, It has some randomization of the map but that's about it. As noted before, the game is an FPS with some randomized item and obstacle placement.
This game description had me excited, but what I got is a buggy, incomplete 3rd person shooter - an Unreal Engine mod.
A minimal first person shooter with random item and obstacle placement.Fav: It's a quick play.Not so Fav: Lack of sound really hinders the gameplay.
Kill of Goblins
Completeness
1 - There's a game here, though there's really no purpose, no fail state, and no victory condition as far as I can see. The game is incredibly buggy and totally lacking polish. No outright crashes, but the main attack (a fireball) doesn't work half the time. It doesn't appear to work in hallways and sometimes it seems to be working momentarily but stops before it gets to the selected destination. Monsters and items are sometimes stuck in walls and the enemy AI is just about as bad as it gets. There's a few other small things like having to click "New" and then load the new game you just made before you can play it.
Aesthetics
2 - The sprites are nice. There's music and sound effects. There's cool spell effects and fog of war. It's a very lively looking game! I feel like I'm stepping into a rave party whenever I go into a dungeon. However, there's also several graphical hiccups (vertical and horizontal tearing). Some of the text is very hard to read. As far as controls, they are OK, but your characters moves like molasses and often gets pinned against a wall by an enemy. An action game needs to have really good "game feel" and this one doesn't.
Fun
1 - An action game about shooting and dodging spells? Sounds great, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I can't enjoy a game when the main mechanic doesn't work half the time.
Innovation
1 - I don't think so.
Scope
2 - Several hand made dungeon levels and an "overworld." Tons of items, though almost all of them are basically health potions.
Roguelikeness
1 - Roguelike is about more than going into dungeons and killing monsters. This game is real time, so it'd already be struggling to get a high score here. To make matters much worse, there's no procedural generation. There's no permadeath. In fact, there's no way to lose the game! Dying causes you to lose money, but money is so unimportant (I have to kill 9 monsters to get enough money to buy an item that heals 1% HP) that it doesn't matter.
"Kill of Goblins" is action dungeon crawler about shooting and dodging spells. The spells look cool, but they are unfortunately very buggy. And the bugs don't stop there. Monsters struggle to get around corners and powerups don't usually work. There's not much point to the game. After killing all the enemies in the final dungeon level (all dungeons are available from the overworld at all times), I couldn't find anything else to do. I can see that the developer put in lots of work on the game, but perhaps the effort was not spent in all the right places. My suggestion is to start with a smaller scope and to make something really fun before moving onto graphics, sound, and flavor text.
Mosi-oa-Tunya
Completeness
2 - It works, and doesn't crash. Not sure if you can win, but you can lose and restart. Passing grade!
Aesthetics
2 - Nice super lo-fi look. The music is ridiculous. I laughed. Nowhere did I find help or instructions, so I just mashed keyboard until the game responded: Z and X paddle the boat.
Fun
1 - It's fun for a little bit. As a basic arcade game it would need some score-keeping or something to keep a person playing.
Innovation
1 - Not even a roguelike so...
Scope
1 - Very small feature set.
Roguelikeness
1 - Nope.
It's an arcade game about rowing up river to avoid falling down the falls.Fav: Ridiculous music choice, love it.Not so Fav: It's not even close to being a roguelike, lol.
Push ON
Completeness
1 - Buggy and incomplete, which the developer admits to. I appreciate the honesty! In one of the common bugs, the enemies inexplicably zoom to the bottom left corner of the map and a few turns later the whole thing freezes. Some levels are impossible to complete, not only due to enemy configuration but also because there is no clear path sometimes. No HUD, so you never know what level you're on.
Aesthetics
2 - The best part is that the controls are dead simple. That's nice. The lag in between turns is quite frustrating though. The game is 3D, but looks a bit garish.
Fun
1 - There's potential here for a fun, albeit simple gameplay with the pushing mechanic. However, it doesn't work as expected. Enemies sometimes push you sideways instead of back. Sometimes you get knocked back after pushing an enemy. I can't figure out a logical reason for any of these behavior, so it ends up just being annoying.
Innovation
1 - Pushing enemies into water/lava has been done to death.
Scope
1 - Pretty small scope.
Roguelikeness
2 - Turn based, grid based, random maps, permadeath. It's sort of roguelike.
Push ON has a premise which you've seen before, but which sounds promising. Push enemies into lava... despite the enemies being able to safely move through lava themselves. With the small maps, it almost has an 868-HACK or Hoplite feel. But the pushing mechanic has very strange behavior, so that turns out to not be very much fun. To top it off, the game is prone to freeze. Push ON has potential, despite being simple, but needs to be less buggy before it can be realized.
S-expr Killer
Completeness
2 - No crashes and the game is playable from start to finish, but I would have really appreciated a little more effort into the game's balance and the features on hand.
2 - Yes, the games runs, it can be won. But it's so trivial, that it can't be really called complete.
Aesthetics
1 - The rougelike aesthetics aren't bad and it's pretty clear what's what on the screen but there is a problem with the controls. The game is using close-but-not-quite VI keys (i.e hjkluinm instead of hjklyubn) which a bit disoriented. The problem is made a little worse because of the game's focus on movement and the fact that hitting the wrong key will still advance a turn.There's also a bit of glitchiness in the display, but that actually feeds into the theme a bit so it's not really a problem.
1 - Terminal is constantly flickering, hjkl as the only input option. Just horrible.
Fun
1 - There's not really too much with that one. The core idea could easily be fun and interesting, but so far it's mostly just about moving around the map collecting parenthesis before advancing on to the next level. The way the enemy AI works and its damage compared to your HP the enemy is more of a minor threat than a credible one and you can typically just run through the rooms in the shortest path distance and still have plenty of HP to spare.
1 - Too trivial to be fun
Innovation
1 - I think the idea could easily become something innovative and I like the idea of being chased in a roguelike, but again with what's currently implemented it doesn't quite hit that mark so the end result doesn't feel particularly innovative yet. The right stuff is there in the game, it just needs a bit of iteration first.
1 - If you strip down 'functional programming' setting, all you have to do in this game is find two artifacts on the level and go to the next one. And single unkillable enemy. I don't think it adds something new to the genre.
Scope
1 - Of course getting anything done in a 7DRL is an accomplishment itself, but overall the scope here is pretty modest. Most of the work involved seems to have been getting the core low level basics working: level generation, player movement, player hp, enemy pathfinding, and the game's start & end conditions.
1 - Not enough stuff even for an average 7drl.
Roguelikeness
3 - What the game certainly is though is a roguelike. There may not be much content on display yet, but it definitely feels like a traditional Roguelike.
1 - There is no combat and too few things to do in general to call it even roguelikelike.
S-expr Killer is a nicely themed roguelike in which you descend through levels finding parenthesis to unlock the exit to the next level. It's modest in scope with only a single enemy that pesters your progress through the dungeon. The game certainly needs more work an iteration to really flesh out a fun core concept, but I like the general direction the game is headed and would love to see a more evolved version that builds on the general idea.
Very basic game, the main idea of which could be understood by very few people in the world I think...
Synergy Rogue
Completeness
1 - Was very buggy for me; not sure I ever got it working or a valid connection to a server.
1 - The game doesn't really provide the player with any indication of how the game works other than the most basic of controls, leaving out very important information like how to different enemy types behave.The UI is buggy, it is necessary to zoom the window out in order to prevent the screen from moving when using the arrow keys to move. Also, in order being a new game after dying, you have to refresh the page.
Aesthetics
1 -
1 - The game uses a generic tileset over a plain white background and a very inconvenient method of displaying enemy health. The controls are also inconvenient and can preform
Fun
1 -
1 - Aside from the previously mentioned problems, the gameplay doesn't provide much worthwhile entertainment. The game uses a simple ability-recharge system in which most of the time is spent using basic attacks waiting for the more interesting abilities to recharge.
Innovation
2 - The multiplayer is trying to be innovative, but too buggy to really evaluate.
2 - The game attempts to do something uncommon and experimental in being multiplayer, however the actual gameplay is very generic and uninteresting.
Scope
1 -
1 - The gameplay is very simplistic, with 4 characters with 3 unique abilities each and a few different types of enemy.
Roguelikeness
1 -
3 - While the game is not particularly fun or interesting, it is a very traditional take on the roguelike genre in a multiplayer setting.
An attempt at a multiplayer hack-and-slash, "real-time turn-based" with one turn every two seconds or so. Quite buggy, with control problems (e.g. pressing down arrow to move your character down also scrolls the screen so you can't see your character), opaque UI, and not much roguelikeness.
An attempt at a multiplayer roguelike with a fixed timestep. The gameplay is unfortunately very simplistic.
Alligator Survival
Completeness
1 - No real game here.
1 - Clearly incomplete.
Aesthetics
2 - The game does look quite nice enough, I really like the green commas for ground, they give off more of a marsh feeling than periods would, but they're not the punctuation soup some games use (and I loathe).
1 - Bluntly speaking it looks awful. Green on white? Really? Absence of field of view memory and totally random nature of map makes it really hard to see if you explored it all or not.
Fun
1 - Not a real game, hard to be fun.
1 - No game no fun.
Innovation
1 - There is not much here to be innovative.
1 - No game, no innovations.
Scope
1 - Minimal scope.
1 - Not enough even for 7drl.
Roguelikeness
2 - It is hard, turn-based and kind of tactical. The levels, such as they are, are procedural.
1 - There is no game, so it's hard to tell if it's roguelike or not.
There is very little game to Alligator Survival. As far as I could figure there is no win condition, you can certainly run away from the alligators, but nothing comes out of it and as there is no score system running away feels quite pointless. The pointless feeling and lack of depth do not make for a very enjoyable experience.
You can't really call this 'The Game'. It's not even prototype. It's more of a technodemo.
Violation: Escape
Completeness
1 - Doesn't seem finished. The game contains numerous crash bugs, including an instant one when pressing '?', which as the first thing the game tells you to do does not leave a good first impression. Crashes also seem to happen randomly when walking about and when buying a ticket to the next district, which made it impossible to progress.
Aesthetics
1 - Because of the crash bug when going to the help I had to figure out the controls by trial and error. Graphics are standard ASCII, without much effort put into making them look nice. If there was a look command I couldn't find it, so it was difficult to tell what all the symbols meant. Splats of 'C's with white backgrounds occasionally appeared - I have no idea what they were supposed to be. The default message text seems to be a debug message.
Fun
1 - There doesn't seem to be an awful lot to the game besides dodging the police and wandering about to find the right type of building. You can hack cash points to get credits and use them to buy fake IDs and train tickets, but there doesn't seem to be anything resembling gameplay.
Innovation
1 - The concept of playing an escaping android is interesting, but the game is so barely-there that there is nothing truly original being done with it.
Scope
1 - Barely anything to it.
Roguelikeness
2 - Resembles one superficially, though is so lacking in gameplay features that it can't really be said to count.
Violation: Escape has an intriguing set-up with you playing a fugitive android who has murdered your owner. Unfortunately, the game doesn't seem complete enough in any meaningful sense for that idea to have been explored fully and the constant crash bugs make this - in its current state - almost unplayable.
Amalgam
Completeness
1 - Clearly incomplete.
Aesthetics
1 - There is no fov, trivial level generator. Nothing to look at.
Fun
1 - No game, no fun.
Innovation
1 - No game, no innovations. Even if these are portals, not stairs, there is no any difference.
Scope
1 - Not even enough for a tech demo.
Roguelikeness
1 - Nope.
There is nothing to review since there is no game. Empty map with a few things that are apparently portals, you step thru a portal a few times and ... that's all. There is no even readme file that somehow explains what's going on. There is no even executable to download, you have to build 'the game' yourself. For some reason author mentioned only linux and os x as target platforms, but libtcod is used and it's cross platform. I've build it on win32-mingw without much trouble, even though it wasn't worth it.
Void Dungeon
Completeness
1 - Very bugged techno demo.
Aesthetics
1 - Mouse only controls with huge delay between turns in presence of monsters really kills it. And there are too few things to look at to properly estimate the aesthetics.
Fun
1 - No game, no fun.
Innovation
1 - Nope
Scope
1 - Not enough even for 7drl.
Roguelikeness
1 - There is no game, so it's hard to tell if it rogue-like or not.
There is no game, only bugged techno demo.
YAZG
Completeness
1 - You have 3 weapons but no ammo and can't seem to get any. The map has one type of monster and one piece of furniture.
Aesthetics
1 - The player sprite changes at different angles, and the zombies and player are weirdly scaled relative to the map tiles.
Fun
1 - No real game here yet.
Innovation
1 - Nothing to see here.
Scope
1 - 30 seconds shows you the whole game.
Roguelikeness
1 - The game has few features, and even fewer of them are roguelike.
Not much to see here yet. Run around a procedurally generated building(?) and avoid the zombies.