| paleface [sys=PC; cat=Roguelike; reg=PAL] |
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Pixel art roguelike from Steam, by @saturn9178 on YouTube.
Pumping up my Armor stat seemed to kind of break the game--after a bit of that I was impervious to damage from most enemies in the game.
There ARE a couple other character classes to unlock but eh well not sure how much point there is to that really given the armor thing.
Can't use the d-pad on the controller--unless you remap it in Steam Input--which seems like a considerable oversight: the game uses discrete 4-way movement but seems to want to make you move only via analog stick.
Content seems pretty limited. The music and pixel art that are there are awesome though.
Installing the full version marked the demo ("prologue") as reinstalled--and it wouldn't uninstall; I removed it from my account. Same thing with the full version though--it wouldn't uninstall! It only uninstalled once I exited and restarted Steam, then tried uninstalling it again.
I reported the background going white when hiding in a bush on the game's Steam forum. |
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| | | The developer made a mod for me to test on Armor balance, something about you won't get Armor up option from cauldrons after you've done that three times.
I think though I'd then just be faced with a more grindy process of getting through the levels. ; ) There's no resting to restore health and no going back up stairs, so your healing is limited to a fixed number of available potions and apples; either you're going to have enough, or you won't. The only real variable in combat is whether or not you screw up your movement and move in front of an enemy who then gets a free strike at you. Otherwise there's opting between melee and ranged but ranged projectiles are limited as well. Eh anyway there isn't that much else to do--aside from grinding money to unlock the other two classes, maybe those are cool, I dunno--and I don't find myself really wanting to go through the levels again, randomly rearranged though they may be. |
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| | | I suppose one thing that's missing a bit here is the sense of exploration; in Angband for instance levels can really be different each time in terms of size, layout, threat level, monster types, treasure, room types, corridors, etc; in DfAT, it's basically a grid of rooms, connecting to each other by single short corridors--like Rogue I suppose, but Rogue's room sizes seemed to have more variety and to matter more; they also had different light levels, for instance--and the treasure was more randomized.
There's nowhere meaningful to retreat to in DfAT past the nearest room entrance--aside from the stairway down, if you reached it (often it's locked off until the level is pretty much cleared anyway), or the nunnery I suppose, but again your healing there is limited because it costs money and money is limited. |
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| | | I suppose this is a useful lesson in having a roguelike that's TOO limited to be interesting in the long term. Rogue is pretty limited but within the limited assets you can get wildly different results based on how random it is. DfAT doesn't seem very random. I found Rogue's randomness frustrating in the end but it was at least interesting enough to keep me plugging away at it for a bit.
Also Rogue's base stat math isn't as crude and limited as DfAT's, I don't think. In any case, it had a much better sense of rough ballpark balance and challenge. DfAT clearly didn't receive much playtesting from anyone aside from the author, otherwise things like the Armor stat imbalance and the white screen in bushes would have been found before the game was released, and also the game wouldn't have this sense of giving you a lot of useless items. It's very limited not just in content but in terms of its formulas.
DfAT's author has said they plan to add more free mods as additional content, but currently at least there's no randomization of mods. I suppose a mod could add randomization to the rest of the content including other mods, in theory? |
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