First Impressions: Roguelikes

I hopped on the roguelike bandwagon recently because of some friends, specifically variations on the classic tile-based format (although I also put a fair amount of time into Slay the Spire alongside these). Pretty quickly I got sucked in by the short run length and critical thinking required to succeed, and having extremely quick combat that prioritizes positioning and item usage helped mitigate the tedium that other turn-based combat systems fall into. I still have a lot of time left to invest in these games to hit a proper clear though, so I didn’t want to dedicate full reviews to any of them.

Cave Noire

The rigid enemy patterns, standalone rooms, and lack of a hunger mechanic push this one into full-on combat puzzle territory. Outside of enemies that chase you or trigger when you’re in a particular range, most of the enemies have pre-defined loops that they move in, and once you get a few floors in, the environments will generally push you into uncomfortable moments where you have to time your navigation around them. A lot of these involve “grazing” the enemy in some way by exploiting the fact that you always move (and initiate combat) before an enemy does, so if you can set yourself up to move to a space next to wherever an enemy will move “simultaneously,” you can dash off on the next turn scot-free. If you need to bail out instead, there’s the usual teleport/spawn rock/cast blaze/turn invisible items, but you’re limited to an eight item inventory (including sword and shield), so you’ll generally have to save them for tracking enemies that you can’t manipulate to always move behind you. Once I got a feel for waiting my turn and watching the enemy patterns, I really started to enjoy it, although this rhythm makes the lack of elements like unidentified items all the more noticeable; it can get a bit flowchart-y. I also wish that they mixed-and-matched enemy types a bit more, as the randomization tends to not push that aspect outside of secondary enemies that can scarcely harm the player.

The progression also stands out here: four different quest styles with ten sequential difficulty levels each. Gathering gold and killing monsters is pretty by the numbers, but the other two held more interest for me. One has you collect a certain number of “orbs” (really more like grails?), and these take up your extremely limited inventory slots the further you get in, really pushing you to engage with the enemy patterns (for better or worse). The other has you look for keys to rescue fairies various floors; once you unlock the fairy’s cage, they’ll insta-kill everything in the room, letting you bumrush the cage if you choose. I don’t think these necessarily scale into more interesting decision-making, but they at least provide proper twists upon the more standard objectives. Still, while the normal roguelike structure already lends itself great to the pick-up-and-play handheld context, this pushes even further in that direction.

Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon

I had played Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness as a kid, but this was a much more raw Rogue derivative. Genre tropes were clear and well-represented: unidentified items (including cursed equipment), staves with limited spell usage, a hunger system, scrolls for all sorts of player and enemy effects, universal traps, running back the primary item… these become the main things to cling onto with dungeon generation that’s so barren. In the original Rogue’s mold, rooms are all randomly sized rectangles with hallways connecting them; in theory this gives a separate dynamic between avoiding getting flanked in hallways and playing with space in the rooms, but in practice it gave me a lot of opportunities to abuse entrances to funnel multiple enemies into a line. The first ten floors feel like free time to engorge upon the wealth of items the game throws at you and choose the best for your tight inventory. Monsters here rarely have the brute strength to beat you (assuming you didn’t get screwed over on equipment selection) and can’t affect you permanently outside of poison sapping your strength. Once you get past these, monsters start posing a more serious threat: removing hard-earned levels, stealing your entire gold stash, pelting you with arrows, and exploding if tapped too many times. However, your inventory always feels too full for comfort, so it feels pretty free to throw something nasty at anything making you uncomfortable knowing that you’ll be able to fill the slot within seconds.

I got into the early 20’s here before finally progressing the game enough to start storing items to take into the dungeon on each visit. A safe on floor 10 lets you retain all your gold upon death, and an “Outside” scroll will teleport you out of the dungeon with your whole kit intact, so mid-range gameplay seems to consist of hoarding items and leveling up your shop with gold before taking your best stuff and making the “real” run down to floor 26 where your ultimate prize is. It does a great job of keeping failed runs from feeling wasted, but with how generous the game already is with items, I’m not sure it provides any thought other than letting you steamroll the majority of the dungeon. Still, it’s an easy feature to ignore, and from what I’ve read the post-game dungeon jacks the difficulty up a fair bit (especially if you’re trying to get down to the absolute final floor).

Brogue

A faithful iteration on the classic, Brogue integrated me into ASCII visuals and hjkl directional movement without much resistance. The lack of a leveling system, highly variable equipment drops, and dangerous early enemies make this much more focused on disengagement than elimination. The complexity of interactions in these games appear most prominently when you’re finding creative ways to dispatch monsters or sneaking around them entirely, which gets help from procgen that creates rich environments full of environmental hazards and room disparities. Grass catches fire, doors contain poison gas, and water can save you from a pinch just as quickly as it throws your items into the current or traps you between hungry eels. When you’re in combat proper, the weapons have unique spatial effects (including occasional alternative actions) that intersect with the monsters and their variable movement patterns. All of these elements complicate how you move from floor to floor, and more often than not they’re excellent at making you scrape by with constant “wrong” decisions, wasting your resources or putting yourself in harm’s way more often than the other two titles above. Out of these three, this will likely have the most long-term purchase on my brain space, since there’s so much of the game I haven’t seen yet and so many tricks to get the most out of any build that gets thrown at you that I’ve yet to discover.