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chuckroCommon themes: Exploration, random generation of areas, certainty of death.
Zombie Party - A wave-style shoot-em-up where oodles of monsters attack and you need to try to shoot and dodge them all to survive. When you die, you get to keep your gold to exchange for power-ups in later runs, and there are a zillion wacky guns and characters to find and unlock. And it has a dungeon-crawling mode that specifically emphasizes the roguelike experience. I had some fun doing a bunch of runs with this. (It also appears to have a robust multiplayer system, though I didn’t get to try that out.)
Dungeon Souls - A top-down action-roguelike. Bring a hero into the randomly-generated dungeon, unlock seals that spawn oodles of monsters, kill them and rush to the next level. There are a grand assortment of special power-ups to find, and you can collect materials and recipes to upgrade your heroes for later runs. Except I never managed to find any of the recipes, so pretty much all of my runs were short, luck-based and doomed. I like this in concept, but the execution lost my interest because I didn’t feel like I could actually make progress.
SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition - A text-based, ASCII-graphics roguelike. Do you have nostalgia for adventure games that were built using QBASIC? Because that’s what this is capitalizing on. Battles are complicated collections of combos. There are numerous systems for making/buying/finding new (randomly-generated) equipment but you don’t have a real inventory. You can gain accord with various factions, take over a tavern, fight in the Colosseum or just follow the plot. I found this fun for an hour of nostalgia, but not exciting enough to play through all of.
Rogue State - A country-building simulator, where the take the role of “Glorious Leader” in a (fictional) country that has just overthrown a dictator. You need to balance political relations, build infrastructure, arrange trading agreements, and maintain loyalty with various factions. Oh, and not get assassinated or overthrown by your jealous brother. Not actually that great if you have specific political sensibilities you want to maintain (I poured money into schools and avoided nationalistic talk in speeches, but the population kept turning fundamentalist and the liberals hated me anyway.) If you want to get your banana republic dictator on and are willing to be appropriately terrible in the process, this might be the game for you.
Castle Torgeath: Descent into Darkness - A first-person action/rpg dungeon exploration game, with real-time combat and iffy controls. You need to manage the brightness of your torch, a hunger meter, and your health. I give them credit for implementing a half-decent minimap and status effects that cause interface screws; but they’re clearly more interested in making a “explore the horrifying dark dungeon” experience than the sort of rpg experience I look for.
DinoSystem - This is pretty terrible—it’s a clunky, top-down survival simulation that’s still “in development”. The concept of gathering materials and avoiding dinosaurs is moderately interesting, but this is a style of game that I don’t really like, and they aren’t even doing it well.
This also included DungeonUp and Overture, but I already had those.
Overall: There was nothing in here that I was interested in doing a “full playthrough” of, but most of these were fun to try out and do a few runs on.
Zombie Party - A wave-style shoot-em-up where oodles of monsters attack and you need to try to shoot and dodge them all to survive. When you die, you get to keep your gold to exchange for power-ups in later runs, and there are a zillion wacky guns and characters to find and unlock. And it has a dungeon-crawling mode that specifically emphasizes the roguelike experience. I had some fun doing a bunch of runs with this. (It also appears to have a robust multiplayer system, though I didn’t get to try that out.)
Dungeon Souls - A top-down action-roguelike. Bring a hero into the randomly-generated dungeon, unlock seals that spawn oodles of monsters, kill them and rush to the next level. There are a grand assortment of special power-ups to find, and you can collect materials and recipes to upgrade your heroes for later runs. Except I never managed to find any of the recipes, so pretty much all of my runs were short, luck-based and doomed. I like this in concept, but the execution lost my interest because I didn’t feel like I could actually make progress.
SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition - A text-based, ASCII-graphics roguelike. Do you have nostalgia for adventure games that were built using QBASIC? Because that’s what this is capitalizing on. Battles are complicated collections of combos. There are numerous systems for making/buying/finding new (randomly-generated) equipment but you don’t have a real inventory. You can gain accord with various factions, take over a tavern, fight in the Colosseum or just follow the plot. I found this fun for an hour of nostalgia, but not exciting enough to play through all of.
Rogue State - A country-building simulator, where the take the role of “Glorious Leader” in a (fictional) country that has just overthrown a dictator. You need to balance political relations, build infrastructure, arrange trading agreements, and maintain loyalty with various factions. Oh, and not get assassinated or overthrown by your jealous brother. Not actually that great if you have specific political sensibilities you want to maintain (I poured money into schools and avoided nationalistic talk in speeches, but the population kept turning fundamentalist and the liberals hated me anyway.) If you want to get your banana republic dictator on and are willing to be appropriately terrible in the process, this might be the game for you.
Castle Torgeath: Descent into Darkness - A first-person action/rpg dungeon exploration game, with real-time combat and iffy controls. You need to manage the brightness of your torch, a hunger meter, and your health. I give them credit for implementing a half-decent minimap and status effects that cause interface screws; but they’re clearly more interested in making a “explore the horrifying dark dungeon” experience than the sort of rpg experience I look for.
DinoSystem - This is pretty terrible—it’s a clunky, top-down survival simulation that’s still “in development”. The concept of gathering materials and avoiding dinosaurs is moderately interesting, but this is a style of game that I don’t really like, and they aren’t even doing it well.
This also included DungeonUp and Overture, but I already had those.
Overall: There was nothing in here that I was interested in doing a “full playthrough” of, but most of these were fun to try out and do a few runs on.
