Even from the single screen of text that provides the story (you also find scattered notes and letters throughout), the game takes some delight in its brutality: You play a butcher who has sent his apprentice to pick up meat from a market. The boy’s late, and it quickly becomes clear he’s been abducted. But your character isn’t motivated by empathy or concern for the boy’s well-being. “I didn’t give a damn who took him,” the text reads. “He was MY apprentice, MINE.”

Some games revel in pretty graphics and a fluid art style and general hipness, and they are almost as fun to watch as to play, given the vivid, stylish worlds they portray. “The Depths of Tolagal,” a new roguelike dungeon crawler game from Angry Toad Studios, is not one of these games. It is not hip. It is a rugged, difficult, intentionally jagged affair, and even though it stymied me repeatedly, I found myself drawn to its old-school challenges.


Then, your character — you get to name him, and I usually went with “GRONK” to reflect the fact that he is a hulking terror who wanders around hurting people — is dropped into a wilderness filled with enemies and treasure, and soon you come across the entrance to a dungeon. You descend further and further, and as you do so, the challenges get tougher — not just monsters but various traps and environmental obstacles.

This is a deeply tactical game. Since combat is turn-based, in all but the earliest and easiest encounters you need to be very careful not to squander your limited number of actions per turn. You usually have access to a ring that heals you, but it needs to be “charged” by dealing damage to an enemy. So it’s all about finding the right order of moves, while taking into account your adversaries’ speed, tendencies, and whether they have access to a ranged attack.


The challenge immediately ramps up, of course, when you have to deal with multiple enemies at a time. It helps when you find a bow to damage enemies from a distance, but things still take on an almost puzzle-like feel when you have to figure out how you’re possibly going to take out both a hulking troll closing fast to pummel you and a sorcerer hitting you with magic from a distance.

There are role-playing elements, but as in many roguelikes they’re pretty light. Yes, you gain levels, but this mostly just means choosing from a selection of randomly drawn “perks” (doubling your backpack size to carry more items, for example, or causing an explosion when an enemy hits you). There are also the usual weapons and gear to find, some of them enchanted with magic for extra oomph.

I could see a lot of people getting frustrated by “The Depths of Tolagal,” and not just for its difficulty. The user interface is not always intuitive (perhaps because the developer is drawing from the styles of older games), and the game does little to help players gain their initial footing.

“The Depths of Tolagal” does offer a lot of replay ability for those who dig this style of game, though. In addition to the story mode, there’s an “infinite mode” where everything is randomly generated and there is no story line to uncover. And I have to say I succumbed to its gruff charms — even if I had trouble cracking its challenging combat encounters.


Jesse Singal can be reached at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com.