The Drop is a roguelike, and the sequel to The Reconstruction. It is cute and funny and wonderful and you should absolutely go play it, even if you disliked The Reconstruction.
Category: Roguelike
Christmas Steam Games (2016)
It’s like Christmas in July! Here are thoughts on some of the games from 2016’s Christmas Steam sale.
Inside: To the Moon, Helen’s Mysterious Castle, LiEat, Betrayer, Sunless Sea.
Bonfire Demo
Bonfire, which I reviewed years ago, is finally getting an expansion into a full game. The demo is out if you want to try it.
Bonfire is a tactical roguelike RPG. I greatly enjoyed the original alpha, though unfortunately, I have to say I’m finding the new demo less fun so far. In The alpha, there were no lasting consequences for failing a quest, but now, you’re severely punished with the loss of extremely scarce long-term resources for letting even a single character get defeated. This exacerbates the problem the alpha already had of locking you into very repetitive defensive strategies if you want to survive.
I do like the other changes, however. The alpha felt like a tech demo, but this feels like a full RPG, and some of the new mechanics address my other big criticisms of the original. Hopefully the rough edges can be sanded off by the time of the full release.
Games for Racial Justice and Equality (Part 2)
Continuing where we left off. A much weaker showing this time, with a lot of games I couldn’t even finish.
Into the Breach and Star Renegades
Into the Breach and Star Renegades are two very different games from two completely different developers, but they have a number of things in common I thought worth analyzing.
The premise of both games is identical: Alien invaders are attacking, and you must defend humanity by traveling across timelines and passing on your knowledge and technology every time. Both games have no true ending: After the end of every run, win or lose, there is always another timeline under threat that you must jump to.
What’s interesting is that despite this similarity, their execution of story elements is diametrically opposite, and both left me unsatisfied in different ways.
Inscryption
Inscryption is a game by the makers of Pony Island, a game our esteemed illhousen previously reviewed. While I haven’t played Pony Island myself, Inscryption makes the exact blunders illhousen details in his review: the metatextual elements fall completely flat because it’s clear you’re playing a person playing a haunted video game, not actually playing a haunted video game yourself. In general, I found them tedious and uninteresting interruptions to the actual game. This is a shame, because the gameplay is actually very good.
Quick Reviews
An eclectic mix of games I’ve tried out recently but didn’t have enough to say for a full post.
Inside: The Swindle, Sundered, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair.
Quick Reviews 3
Inside: Rogue Legacy, Reventure, Chronicles of Teddy, Path of Giants.
Slay the Spire
Slay the Spire is a deckbuilder roguelike I decided to check out after hearing a lot of buzz about it. It’s a very beautiful game that is rendered unplayable by its overwhelming randomness.
Othercide
You may or may not remember that way back we reviewed a game called The Void, which would have been a very fascinating and atmospheric work of art if it wasn’t also blatant porn with a focus on watching women suffer. Othercide is very similar, minus the part where the non-porn bits are good.
Hades
Hades is a roguelike by Supergiant Games, the creators of Bastion and Pyre. It is very good and I enjoyed it immensely. You play as Zagreus, the son of Hades and Persephone, as he attempts to escape the Underworld to find his mother, who has left for the surface for unknown reasons.
Darkest Dungeon 2
Darkest Dungeon 2 is, obviously, the followup to Darkest Dungeon, which I previously reviewed. The developers deliberately wanted to take the sequel in a different direction instead of just making Darkest Dungeon again, which I support. Unfortunately, that direction was completely at odds with it being a roguelike.
Christmas Steam Games (2023)
It’s that time of year when I finally get around to talking about that time of year again!
Inside: Heart Star, Loop Hero, Return of the Obra Dinn
Quick Reviews
Inside: 9 Years of Shadows, Cookie Cutter, The Captain, Sunless Skies
Backpack Hero
This is a roguelike that makes a game out of inventory Tetris. Not only do you have limited inventory space, but items can affect each other based on their position within the backpack and relative to each other. For instance, helmets boost your defense for every row below them, and arrows gain attack power for every empty space to the right of them. I think this is a very neat idea, but unfortunately the actual game ended up rather half-baked.