7DRL Contest 2011 Reviews

Here lie the reviews of the many entries in the 2011 7dRL Challenge!

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

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

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 some polish.

Ben Hemmendinger's 3D/2D Dungeon Crawl

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.

The diagonals y/u in the traditional keymapping have been shifted one slot over to u/i, which you'll hardly have time to get used to, but since combat losses have no permanent consequences, it's not a problem. wasd and its diagonal extensions (qezc, plus x) are available in combat, but will be uncomfortable on azerty.

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.