7DRL Contest 2011 Reviews

Reviews of 2011 7DRL Challenge Entries

Reviews by Eben Howard

Stygia by Perdurabo

Stygia opens with a well designed ASCII block title screen and proceeds to tell a dark introduction. We are informed that the surface of the world is a frozen wasteland who's sun is long gone. The only way to survive is now to move deeper into the Earth where heat can still be found.

I really like the heat mechanic which forces you to keep going deeper to escape the cold. Plentiful items with neat add-on abilities makes item grabbing quite fun.

Play Experience: The first time I tried this game, I was killed by an invisible kobold :( The second attempt went better, until a kobold that wasn't there walked so there was only one path could get hit from, moved towards one path, walked without hitting anything and kept getting hit... I really like the premise, and the FOV and mechanics seemed smooth. Hopefully a bug fix will come around and I'll try it again.

Update: Bugfix version 0.11 fixed the issues I previously had. This game is now quite awesome, I recommend trying it out!

Reviews by Joshua Day

Detribus by Ido Yehieli, Corey Martin, Oddmund Stromme

(Flash) (arrow keys)

Minimalist 1-bit aesthetics, a haunting chiptune soundtrack, and elegant lighting and animation give this game an ambience that is not to be missed. Still, it is more a puzzler than a roguelike. Four-way movement (like that in POWDER and the authors' own Cardinal Quest), ranged combat against melee-only enemies, and confined spaces with limited field of view will have you counting cells, egging your foes on to line up and be shot. The game is embedded right in their website, so it's easy to try.

Eben Howard's EmoSquid

(Java) (vi-keys w/ shift & alt)

It's a bit overwhelming at first glance, what with its 3D world visualised in planar cross-sections. The text was cramped and a little hard to read on my display, making it a challenge to figure out what was what; my poor color vision cannot have helped. j and k are reversed in the vi-key layout, and it takes some time for alt-to-dive and shift-to-ascend to become second nature. Once you get through all that (and it's not hard to do), you get to the real experiment.

The point here is the movement system, and it works well for what it's doing. It's not as free and intuitive as Earl Spork was last year, and it seems like the move from 8-neighbors to 26-neighbors mostly just makes room for small enemies to mob you. Once you discover how to out-manoeuvre your enemies so you're taking them on one by one and keep track of the expansive, largely open spaces you're swimming in, you do develop a certain sense of freedom. The music plays in, here, and it's a pity that the realities of hosting have kept Eben from distributing the whole collection as he intended it to be heard. The game needs to be optimised so the freedom of movement can be enjoyed, and map generation needs to take more advantage of depth.

The length and difficulty of the game make it a hard sell as a small roguelike, and it will certainly help to have the full tracklist (Eben offers it upon request -- I will acquire it and see what difference it makes.) It has a vast scope and needs considerable polish. Wait for the post-7DRL version.

Ben Hemmendinger's 3D/2D Dungeon Crawl

(ssh) (wasd or vi-keys)

If you played and loved first person crawlers before Wolfenstein spoiled players with unrestricted movement, this game will be like going home. The first thing you see when you turn around will be a door, lovingly rendered in ASCII. The tunnels you traverse are color-coded so you won't get mixed up (more than can be said of Bard's Tale), with a handy compass and minimap so you don't need to break out that long-neglected graph paper. Peek behind any other door and your party of four will engage a band of monsters -- again, lovely ASCII art for the warriors on both sides -- in combat on a small grid with relatively fast movement (like a space battle in Master of Orion) with the effect that tactical manoeuvring achieves what a menu selection would achieve, but with finer flavour. This is all there is just yet: The polish is extraordinary, but the scope is rather small. To play, simply ssh sevendrl@benhem.xen.prgmr.com with password 7drl, and party like it's 1982. It won't take you long, and you'll enjoy it.

If you want a better idea of where Ben is coming from with this, get this TI-99 emulator (2.8 mb), which comes packaged with Tunnels of Doom and runs fine under Wine.

Pawel Slusarzcyk's Piraten

(Windows/Wine) (numlocked numpad)

From time to time the newsgroup sees discussions on how we can make a good pirate-themed roguelike, and from time to time someone tries to make one. We have bits and pieces of the puzzle, but it's hard to make something genuinely good. Pawel's focus has been on integrating conventional roguelike combat for boarding parties with a naval map for plotting attacks. There's nothing particularly oceanic about the naval section (no winds, currents, or headings), and the player has complete initiative (no enemy ship will ever initiate combat), so this behaves like an elaborate menu. The game is fairly opaque about health and money. At a port landing, you are informed that you have spent "some money" to heal your crew; you are never told how much you spent or how much remains.

Boarding (ambiguously called "attack") takes place on a fixed map drawn to look like two ships with gang planks between them. It's actually fun, once you figure out how to keep track of who's on which side (color, apparently), and learn always to go help the ally with the worst odds (the AI, as should be expected, picks its battles at random.) I'd love to see the game, or a game like it, reworked so that a ship screen is the center of all player activities and can be zoomed to at any time. This is the direction that Privateer: Ascii Sector has taken. Broadsides are conspicuously missing.

Pawel acknowledged in his announcement that Piraten suffers from "many little issues, unclear mechanics, low gameplay," but it's a fun little toy in any case. Anyone who wants to make a pirate themed roguelike should give it a try.

Tim Morton's Magicko

(Java) (numlocked numpad or non-standard eight-way binding centered on P)

There are two constraints on the player in this game. One is that it takes a turn to charge a magick; second, the shape of the player's bolts, which are narrow next to the player but wider three cells out. It is counterintuitive (but clever) that while charging takes a turn, firing does not. Slowing enemies by wetting them and blasting them with cold seems to be the best tactic going in a game where useful player attacks are half as fast as enemy attacks, but where the player still only has a range of five (ice and arcane will travel further). There's a temptation to use grindy, stair-scumming style tactics, escaping up stairs to heal and charge magicks, and descending again to fight.

Players of other roguelikes are going to have some muscle memory to overcome. Shift is bound to area effect casting (ctrl casts spells in a direction and alt casts it at the player character) and operates as a keystroke, not a modifier. < > for stair-climbing and ? for help, therefore, are actually bound without shift. Players who prefer vi-keys will fumble with the new P-centered movement scheme (which has the virtue of being a one-handed binding, at least.)

The qwer/asdf binding for magic takes some getting used to for players unused to Magicka, and it would be nice to have a mnemonic display -- perhaps wlsc/laef (water, life, shield, cold / lightning, arcane, earth, fire), color coded, to remind the player which key associates with which magick. This coupled with other unfamiliar keybindings make for a steep learning curve in what is otherwise a simple game.

Other than water+cold=ice and water+fire=steam, only shield consistently mixes with other charges for interesting results (causing a cell to cause the effect of the spell, or, in the case of earth, to create an impenetrable wall). For a game about interactions, it would be nice to have more of them. It might also be nice to have enemies with more obvious vulnerabilities and distinctions -- a burning enemy, an earthen enemy, etc. -- so different fights would feel different from each other. There are skeletons, immune to arcane magic and freezing, in later levels. In seven days, it's hard to see how anyone could do much more from scratch.

It is seriously impressive for a seven day effort. This is one that we should hope to see extended -- with more enemies, interactions, and environments -- or mixed, like the magicks, with last year's Demonhunt, just to see what happens.

Jeff Lait's Vicious Orcs

(Windows/Wine, Linux)

Year after year, Jeff reminds us that if we want to do more in seven days, we need to start with more. To say that Vicious Orcs is influenced by Smart Kobold is putting it lightly; this is an extension of the same game with the same engine, just as Smart Kobold was an extension of Jacob's Matrix and Jacob's Matrix extended Letter Hunt, and Letter Hunt used code that predates it. This game is more polished than most major roguelikes. You can see your reflection in its shoes.

At a few hours in length, it is a chewier morsel than Smart Kobold was. It is also Jeff's most conventional game in years, notwithstanding that the geometry is still vaguely non-euclidean and the portals back to town are reminiscent of the twistiness of Jacob's Matrix (and of Portal, which influenced it). It is also nearly impossible to play to completion while trying to review other games. My dozen runs, no further than dungeon four, have made me excited to do so (at which time this review will be extended). You will want to play this game, but you can't come at it the way you come at most 7DRLs. You certainly can't afford to be careless, or stingy with your gold.

Nikolaos' Devil MIGHT Laugh

(Linux, Windows/Wine) (arrows, numlocked numpad)

This game is better than Nikolaos gives it credit for. The central conceit, that as you proceed you become more and more human and therefore more and more susceptible to damage, is reminiscent (in its own way) of Geoffrey White's 2010 7DRL A Quest Too Far. The maps are jumbled, the color scheme (with its stated predilection towards red) makes it hard to identify where things are -- the player character, several types of enemy, magma, some walls, and corpses, are just a few you'll be mixing up. There are a few control bugs, such as where 'l'ook responds only to arrow keys, but the game plays fine besides. One run was cut short when level nine failed to connect me with stairs up, which are scattered liberally about the levels for that very reason.

Where the game really shines is with the elements that seem most broken. As a damned soul you can, at great cost to your "soul" points, fight enemies with impunity. To preserve your soul, you will instead try to trick enemies into stepping into magma, which is easy because they don't seem to mind it. When you become corporeal, you no longer cross magma safely, and must arrange your trap more carefully. The trick there becomes old hat within a few levels, but the caverns become more open and magma becomes rare. You find yourself more often weaving between enemies, bearing their cheap potshots, right to the stairs.

There is great potential in a reliance on exploits that become impractical with time. Devil MIGHT Laugh stands as a fine amusement, an interesting learning curve, and a solid seven day effort. Its level generator need polish, but its central conceit works.

Kaw's Light

(Linux, Windows) (vi-keys)

This game does not shy away from lighting. Brogue led the charge by attaching lights to creatures, wall mounted torches, and even dungeon features like fungus (GnomeSquad, inspired by Brogue, does too), but is reluctant to cast unlit corners into utter blackness until late levels where a palpable darkness limits even the rogue's own light. Light, on the other hand, calls darkness dark. Getting illumination where you need it is an important play mechanic, and torches and tinder take precious inventory slots when you can only hold four items.

Messages are refreshingly transparent about exactly what roll yielded the damage dealt. (The game announces that a rat attacks with "[75.00%] [1d4]", for instance.) It would be nice to see this kind of openness more often.

Braziers and fireproof blankets hint at puzzle elements that did not make the cut. It feels, too, that the dungeon is meant to transform under the influence of light; only items seem to appear and disappear. Wandering in the darkness should be more dangerous, and perhaps more directly painful, than it is. The fov used to cast the light creates hard edges; some blending (based on the total visibility across a cell) would help, and is simple to implement. Walls should be illuminated more brightly, and from a greater distance, than floors; the opposite seems to hold. The player character does not cast a shadow, which is wonderfully atmospheric when done well. The lights in Light are its primary strength and, therefore, its primary avenue for growth.

The game is simple and clean and a pleasure to play. It also presents relatively few tactical challenges, and won't yet hold your interest past the initial curve; it feels like an overcorrection for last year's Harmless, which was excellent in every respect but underplayed because of its steep tactical difficulty. A post-7DRL Light will almost certainly be a great game; as a 7DRL, it feels like a tech demo. If you are looking for a roguelike with an aesthetic adventure bent, give it a spin.

Oohara Yuuma's Kusemono

(Linux) (vi-keys or numlocked numpad)

This is the recipe for a great 7DRL: Great code reuse and great attention to detail.

Rather than 'y'es and 'n'o for prompts, Oohara Yuuma uses 'o'k and 'c'ancel, avoiding the overlap with movement commands. For most commands ('Q' for quit, 'm' for map), repeating the original key will cancel, too. When choosing which potion to quaff, the choice can be entered as a digit so a numpad-wielding player can keep his hand in place. This kind of attention has been paid to all facets of the game. Like Jeff Lait, Yuuma has reused old code (his Last of Candle, which is itself an interesting game, was the starting point.)

The game is well (and thoroughly) documented. Not just the novelties, either -- you could give this documentation to a roguelike novice and expect it to be understood. It's a good thing it is well documented, because it takes some effort to figure out just what those novelties do. Here's a rundown: Instead of just hp, the player character has hp and "shield points". These shield points are regenerated by killing enemies. They are lost when the player takes damage, in lieue of hp, until they run out. They can be spent on magic. They are, therefore, a combination of hp, mp, and food; a perfect implementation of rgrd discussions on anti-grinding measures. You can only heal yourself by having fun.

Then there's sneaking. Modal sneaking is not new. Modal sneaking done well, is. When you sneak, you are particularly noticeable along certain lines (a queen's move, indicated in the interface by white dots on the map). Running gives you three moves a turn, but it does not give you three times as many turns: there are no weird synchronization problems. Your enemies can, in perfect health, run two steps a turn; you take three steps, they take two, you take three, in alternation. Maps are squarish and all corridors are wide so the player can always be mobbed. Considerable thought has gone into making sure that every component of play interlocks with the others.

Play this game.

Heroic Fisticuffs' GnomeSquad

(Python + PyGame)

Reviews by Tim Morton

Jeff Lait's Vicious Orcs

(Windows/Wine, Linux)

Having played a few runs into Vicious Orcs I have to say I'm very impressed with Jeff Lait's latest 7DRL entry. The portal system works well (and is pretty cool to boot), and the seamless transition between dungeons is very nice. The interface is well thought out, and this roguelike really feels like it has a lot of polish. The gameplay feels fresh, and there's enough action to keep people busy for quite a while.

I'd love to see more variety in the early stages with regards to enemies, as it feels like most of the interesting action doesn't come out until some way into the game, but this roguelike is fun, and very easy to pick up and play. Jeff appears to have put quite some effort in making this game more accessible to new players, which is great. I recommend anyone looking through this year's entries to give it a try.