Run from the Shadow

Run from the Shadow
Beta Project
Developer	Darren Grey
Theme	Guilt, Escapism
Influences	Broken Bottle, Shadow of the Colossus
Released	18th September 2011
Updated	18th September 2011
Licensing	GPL, Open source
P. Language	Lua, T-Engine
Platforms	Windows, Linux, OSX
Interface	ASCII, Keyboard, Mouse
Game Length	< 1 hour
Official site of Run from the Shadow

Run from the Shadow is a coffeebreak roguelike

Description

Run from the Shadow is a roguelike with themes of guilt and escapism. You play a guilt-wracked hero running through his mind, fleeing a shadow that chases relentlessly. It features the unique mechanic of the final boss spawning on level 1 after a certain number of turns. As you run away from it to deeper levels you get less turns before it appears again. Other, weaker enemies appear on the dungeon, and get harder as you progress. By beating these enemies and collecting items you will eventually become strong enough to face down the Shadow and win.

The game is heavily themed around guilt and bad memories, and how we escape from them in our daily lives. Monsters have names like "doubt goblin" and "judgemental rat", whilst equipment items have names like "sword of denial" and "shield of shifted blame". The Shadow that chases you and grows stronger as you grow stronger is an allegory of one's conscience, which must be suppressed to stay sane. The game's victory text is representative of how unpleasant this be.

The windows standalone link:

http://gruesomegames.com/games/shadow-win-1.0.zip

Those on OSX or Linux will have to download beta 34 of the T-Engine and put my module folder into the /game/modules/ directory. You can get the engine and the module folder on the following links:

http://te4.org/download

http://gruesomegames.com/games/shadow-mod-1.0.zip

There are still some minor bugs in the game which should (hopefully) be fixed soon.