Reviews

Force of Nature

Completeness

3 - There are minor problems with autorun (on my monitor it runs to the cell that is next to clicked), and absense of shift\\autorepeat increases keyboard wear, but these problems are barely noticeable. 3 - The game has seven levels that are beatable. I encountered no bugs and never got stuck either on terrain or by poor map generation. 3 - Very polished! I really appreciated the help screen.

Aesthetics

3 - UI, art, controls, everything is great. It's like tome4, but with stylish art instead of shaders chaos and made in Unity instead of lua. 3 - Self made "cartoony" graphics, a partially animated environment and varied enemies keep the game fresh if a touch simple looking. 3 - The game looks and plays great. It has animation and nice graphics with good use of color.

Fun

3 - It is impossible to stop playing 2 - This is one of the top games I've played from the competition this year. I came back and played this one for fun later. 2 - I really enjoyed playing this one although I never made it past level 2.The initial difficulty was highly unpredictable. Sometimes I would get wiped out within the first couple of rooms; other times I'd have an easy time throughout the first level. There always seemed to be a huge difficulty spike on arrival in the second level, though; I never made it more than a few rooms on the second level.It's not clear how the speed and strength stats figure into the game. The speed stat is much larger than the strength stat, but I never got a sense of their relative worth or what they did.

Innovation

2 - Well, basic mechanic is somewhat close to te4 Stone Warden class, but without cooldowns mess. Levelling mechanics is used in some other games, but together all parts make very playable combination. 2 - Level up, gain powers, bump combat with a little extra thrown in by the snaking, snaring roots. Fire is a big issue. 2 - Drawing your healing from healing the level is a really neat mechanic. It's a little at odds with the theme, I think. You continue to heal the level even after you're at full health, which seems like it would be desirable from a thematic perspective but if you're anticipating more combat you don't want to use up the available healing. I am a huge sucker for "checklist" gameplay where you do all the things, and I took the time to completely heal a level several times. It's kind of boring to do with the current structure of the game, though (resting repeatedly).

Scope

3 - The scope is good for a full-blown roguelike, I can't believe a mere human was able to create it in just 7 days. 2 - The game did everything that was set out for within a neat little 7DRL time limit. It's a little short, but 7DRL. 3 - I'm very impressed at the amount of stuff here. All the graphics, animation, skills, powerups, and enemies!

Roguelikeness

3 - Definitely a roguelike 3 - It can be brutal at times and unforgiving if you overextend and don't play to your strengths. Skilling up poorly is also punished. Bump combat, permadeath, procedural generation, turn based. This fits the bill. 3 - It's Roguelike!

This game at first resembles tome4. Same variety of skills, same responsible and smooth motion, many additional mechanics that makes dozens of digits appear after each turn. But the basical mechanic is cardinally different - there are no cooldowns, no stupid mmorpglike looking on bottom line - all abilities are passive. The player plays as an angry walking tree, killing many kinds of trolls and their machinery and descending over 7 levels. After several tries I've never was able to pass a second level, so i already wanted to say that balance is broken and second level absurdingly hard, but then... I've found the main feature of the game ()and eventually won) - melee is not your main weapon, your main weapon are roots. They hit enemies that are close to you enough, and there is additional skill to hit them even more when they goes out of roots. This makes all battles combination of kiting and pillardancing. Yes, you should kite even ranged atacking monsters (and most of dangerous monsters of game are ranged attacking and have greater radius then your roots). So much fun. There is also a lot more - fires and water, interesting rest mechanics, but review is supposed to be short so i'm stopping here. Go play it yourself. You are an angry tree fighting fire loving trolls in your forest. Seven total levels (I got to six on my best run) that add new enemies each level. The tree has a lot of abilities you gain by consuming troll corpses. In Force of Nature you play an angry, ambulatory tree (like Tolkien's Ents). Trolls are burning your forest down; you have to defeat them and heal the forest. Each turn you have a chance of healing one visible square of the forest. This heals you as well. If there's no visible damaged forest then you don't heal, although in practice I did not run into this as a limitation.Force of Nature feels like a complete game; it has stats to build up and a skill set to develop. Defeating enemies can leave powerups that boost your stats, or corpses which can be absorbed to gain talent points to spend on skill development. The corpses only last a few turns, though, so you have to decide whether you can afford to stand there for a few turns and absorb it in the middle of combat.

Cambium

Completeness

3 - Seems to have done everything the author aimed to do. Lore dumps on every examination don't tell you anything about gameplay but do give the impression of a huge world behind the scenes. 3 - The game is complete, no bugs found, and very polished. 3 - It's very polished. I got as far as level 7 in about an hour and half of play before dying.

Aesthetics

2 - 3 - The game looks great, for an ascii game. Umlauts on 'king' version of enemies is a nice touch. The only complain - black walls. And minor nitpicking - it would be nice to have single key that allows you to shoot at nearest enemy. 'f', 'enter', 'f', 'enter' quickly becomes a chore. 3 - The game has atmosphere in spades. Every item and enemy has a paragraph of descriptive prose about it. There are "cutscene" screens of text at certain points. The jungle levels have paths connecting the buildings and vines that can be hacked down. The look is great; it's very reminiscent of the IBM PC's 80-column color text mode. There are cool ASCII animation effects for some things like ranged weapons, special monsters and item effects. The menu interface for help and inventory is easy to use.

Fun

2 - I could see myself spending a lot more time here if the author added more content and a little more transparency. 2 - The game forces you to grind/explore everything, which is tedious. As well as fights with chieftains. It's not difficult, it's just takes quite some time. 3 - I had a great time playing the game.There were some things that struck me as unfinished or not quite thought out:It says "You pick up # items" when I think it really means "You now have # items."You seem to be able to auto-aim your ranged weapons at invisible monsters.Chests seem mostly to be empty which means a lot of disappointment. I'd have preferred fewer chests on the level that always contained some loot.Ranged weapons have no ammunition and no penalty for close-quarters use; I'm not entirely sure what the role of melee weapons is.Weapons have a rating from A-C which represents where they fall on the speed/power trade spectrum, but they also have unchanging percentages listed; I'm not sure what those represented. There are loads of different weapons and armor in the game, but there was no description of whether they differed from each other in any way other than their A-C rating. If they really are equivalent then it seems simply confusing to have the cosmetic variety.

Innovation

2 - A little bit more than "hack-slash-whatever” although the innovations are too opaque to really appreciate: you can see the slowdown from wearing heavy armor but not enough is revealed to really appreciate the protective effect or see the tradeoffs in weapon choices. 1 - Weapons with different speeds and armors that affect speed is not new. 2 - It's not hugely innovative, just very playable.

Scope

3 - Lore bubbling up through the cracks and growing amidst the brambles... 3 - The game is huge! For a 7drl. Lot's of enemies, weapons and devices, each with detailed description. Two different non trivial level generation algorithms. Very impressive. 3 - This is more than I'd expect to be able to do in a week, let alone the four days the author said they spent.

Roguelikeness

3 - Not just lore; but there's apparently a lot of gameplay-relevant content that I barely scratched the surface of. 3 - True roguelike. 3 - Very Roguelike.

Feels like the first prototype of the next Qudlike. Vibrantly-conveyed setting, interesting combat tradeoffs and looting mechanics - although they're far too opaque to make me happy. This game is good. And only couple design decisions separate it from great game. First - experience from killing forces you to grind. You want to kill everything. And not only for experience, but for a slim chance to get device from the corpse. That was second. And third - not game design, but visual design, why on earth solid walls are pitch black? They are totally not different from unexplored space. And given their formless shape I was constantly moving to explore what I was thinking unexplored space only to find out a wall. Weapons, armors and devices have lengthy descriptions with fragments of a story, but have no stats. There are 3 speed classes, but, at least from my experience, net result is more or less the same. Light armor gives you speed, but protects less. In heavy armor you are slow, but well protected. But total amount of damage takes is more or less the same. Cambium is a slick post-apocalyptic Roguelike. You start out in the savage jungle, poking amongst the half-eaten remnants of buildings for the stairs that will lead you down to the Cambium, some sort of ancient structure that contains the MacGuffin.The combat system is based on the idea of weapons and armor offering a speed/power tradeoff. Powerful weapons or heavy armor mean the monsters get to take more turns relative to you.

Long dark dark night

Completeness

3 - It all works, and the in-game tutorial is a great bit of polish. 3 - The game is playable, probably winnable, and even has a tutorial mode. I encountered no major bugs. 2 - It's stable and I didn't have any trouble running it. Mainly I felt the game was too difficult and lacked progression (possibly I did not see the progression due to the difficulty).

Aesthetics

2 - Unfortunately power lines vs signal lines get confused. 3 - This game uses lighting effectively for both creating a tense mood but also as an important facet of the gameplay. One small UI complaint I have was that the game forces player to press Enter key at certain times, but failed to bind the Enter key on the Num-pad (game uses diagonals), which is where the movement keys are. Not a deal breaker though, this is a visually interesting game with a simple control scheme that works! 3 - Lots of neat touches! The control scheme is streamlined. There are colored lighting effects, including a flashlight the player carries around. Doors open when you get within a couple steps of them, just like on Star Trek. (They also open when ghosts flit by on the other side, which is really cool!) There are pipes and wires running everywhere, and they run between actual devices in the ship: reactors, lights, switches, indicators, and so forth. You can see the whole ship layout dimly from the outset, which makes sense for someone operating in a known environment.

Fun

2 - Was interesting enough to play several times, but I never felt like I quite got the hang of it well enough to have a chance of completing. (The documentation in the post-7DRL helped over my original pass through the 7DRL tutorial without doing any reading.) 3 - The first couple plays were hard, as there is a lot going on, but with a few tries and experience the game reveals itself and is quite fun. The ghosts dissipate when the lights shine on them, but its not immediate, and there's a good bit of uncertainty in when they actually will disappear. Additionally the ghosts spawn in darkness. This combination makes darkened rooms very tense and I was always relieved to find lit rooms. 2 - Interesting ideas; just needs more balance and progression work.It's hard for a beginning player to know when it's better to wait for rescue and when it's better to repair things.The game would have benefited from having a progression of ship sizes and difficulties. As it is there is the tutorial level, which has one reactor to fix and no ghosts, and the full-blown massive ship with stuff failing all over the place.There's not a sense of overall strategy in terms of how you move about the ship or pick which order to fix things. Some sort of whole-ship schematic might be good, and if you had the ability to reshunt things in order to create defensible powered areas that might add some strategy.

Innovation

3 - Nice ideas I haven't seen before, well-explored. 3 - The non-combat combat with the ghosts is an excellent innovation. It adds a nice mix of uncertainty while giving the player enough agency to not feel completely at a loss. 3 - The game brings together several unusual ideas that all support the theme: following wires to broken devices; the flashlight; the ghosts that are afraid of the flashlight; the automatic doors. Lighting is tied in with the power grid you're trying to fix.

Scope

2 - Reasonable 7DRL scope: one or two core mechanics explored really well. 3 - Scope is higher than expected. The game has quite a few moving parts which work well together. Impressive. 2 - Feels pretty good for a 7DRL.

Roguelikeness

2 - Somewhere between a puzzle and a "proper" roguelike. 3 - The game has enough roguelike features to justify. You might be tempted to hide out in a well lit area, but there is a time pressure to keep moving and fixing parts of the ship. The level gen provides a fair variety of play, although each play will begin to feel the same once all the workings of the game are discovered. Encounters with enemies are tense affairs, requiring the player to think and move carefully. 3 - Yes, Roguelike!

One engineer against the dark doesn't sound so bad. But there are ghosts in the dark. And *lots* of things broken that are keeping the light sources from working. Fxing them without getting killed is a challenging, tricky puzzle. Tense game about warding off ghosts using light.Fav: the directional light tied to the player's facing is awesome; the method to defeat the ghosts is brilliantNot so Fav: The game shuts down when you lose "Ghosts" have boarded your starship (a hollowed-out asteroid) while it was in faster-than-light mode and are causing system malfunctions. Awakened from cryosleep and armed only with a flashlight you have to trace the wires to the faults and fix them.I played the 7DRL+ version; did not successfully finish a level. The game has interesting ideas but I'd like it if it worked its way up from small starships to larger ones so I could successfully finish a few.

The Mind Eater

Completeness

3 - All the little details of the world make the game feel polished. Mostly bug free, but there is a bug that occurs while using a certain ability. For no explicable reason, when using that ability I get teleported to the nearest doorway. 2 - I had one crash after a long period of play, but otherwise seems stable. There's a full game loop in place and the gameplay seems nicely balanced. Loses out on not being packaged well for the player and not having much documentation. 2 - Maybe a bug (should cows really be able to jump over the mind eater?), maybe a bit opaque to figure out... but not bad!

Aesthetics

3 - A very nice looking ASCII game. There are a good number of controls, but they're straightforward. 3 - Simple ASCII graphics support the gameplay very well - lots of sensible symbol and colour choices. Controls aren't always intuitive, but are simple enough. Menu choices have keyboard shortcuts, which is a nice touch. Overall good. 3 - Canonical roguelike display works well; the input is a little awkward to figure out, but then works fine.

Fun

2 - The premise is naturally fun. You're a monster and you really feel it. The townspeople hunt you while you try to hunt the most vulnerable amongst them. There's two big problems though. Lack of depth and lack of balance. Despite having a small HP resource (3 "wound" ticks), the combat still feels incredibly random. Sometimes I could kill one of the hardest enemies without taking a hit. Other times one of the weakest monsters would take me out. Getting abilities is fun, but didn't always seem to make much of a difference on survivability. SPOILERS: by far the biggest balance issue is that the wizard, who is not hard to kill, gives you a totally broken spell called Inferno. Inferno takes a few turns to charge, but then instakills everything in a huge radius. Doing this the first couple times was very satisfying, but it also trivialized the whole game. 3 - Really engaging and fun. Exploring the game and its mechanics takes a good bit of trial and error, but it never feels frustrating and there is always more to learn. Advancing in player knowledge across runs feels like peeling the layers off an onion, which is really great for encouraging replayability. The basic gameplay of ambushing creatures and eating their brains is very compelling, as is the feeling of slowly growing power. 2 - A bit too difficult to get going for my taste; seems to be dependent on discovering through trial-and-error a very narrow path through the enemies, which only works if the procedural village is helpfully laid out. Random early death seems unavoidable.

Innovation

2 - We've had lots of games in recent years with possession mechanics. This isn't possession, but is similar. You get abilities from enemies and the interesting part is each enemy type can several abilities you can steal. Stealing minds from fresh graves is also quite cool. 3 - The mind-eating mechanic is mostly quite original, gaining new abilities based on which corpse you plunder. On top of that I really like the parry mechanic, and how it gets joined up with a sprint ability. The game reveals new innovations as you progress, which is really nice. 2 - I'm not sure the theme is new, but it's more than hack-and-slash and is a well done take on the theme.

Scope

2 - There are a good number of enemies and a surprising number of abilities. Combined with the cool little village you explore, I was close to handing out a 3 here. However, the game is sorely lacking a victory condition. I think all you can do is kill everything and leave for a high score. Instructions on what to do are a bit thin as well. 3 - Really quite a bit bigger than one might expect. The game takes place on a single large level, but it's big and varied and detailed and it will take many runs before you see more than a quarter of it. Lots of enemy types, lots of abilities to plunder from their minds, lots of ways to play. Really impressive work! 3 - Impressive, from the variety of the village layouts to the variety of skills gained and the way they tie together into gameplay.

Roguelikeness

3 - Absolutely. Has all the staples, plus a persistent feeling of vulnerability. 3 - Not a traditional dungeon crawler, but solidly roguelike in spirit and mechanics. Indeed, few other games make you feel quite so much a "rogue" as this one. 3 - Mostly a roguelike; the world interaction is great within the system that has been developed.

In The Mind Eater, you play a monster that is terrorizing a small village. This monster can steal abilities by "eating minds". The theme is spectacularly implemented. There are several types of villagers like Lumberjacks, Farmers, and Anglers. Villagers are wary of you until they can attack in numbers. They shout "the monster is here!" when you are spotted. The game is interesting and worth checking out. I do think the game suffers from some balance problems, but maybe I wasn't great at using the abilities. In any case, there is one particular ability (not hard to acquire) that essentially turns on god mode. The game might benefit from some balancing and a better end game. Kill enemies, steal abilities from their brains, advance in power to kill more enemies. A simple enough idea, but executed beautifully in The Mind Eater. You start off trying to pick off a few fishermen and chickens, and end up looting hunters and wizards and having a lot of fun. Low hit points and clever AI keep you from ever feel too powerful, mind, so there's a great tension throughout. What's especially fun in the game is learning across many deaths about which enemies to pick on and which to avoid. You are what you eat. And there's something inside your head (grey matter). Eat a fisherman? Learn to swim. Eat a dog? Learn to dig. Eat a chicken? Umm... There may be a way to navigate your way through the menu of this very-well-built village to achieve overwhelming terror, but it's dreadfully difficult, and a bit random.

The Only Shadow That the Desert Knows

Completeness

2 - Feels mostly complete and polished but a few things, such as all the npcs saying just the one thing, made it feel not quite superpolished. Also I felt there was a balance issue with the combat being way too hard, but again, might just be me. Almost a 3. 3 - The game is complete. No bugs found. Probably. Once I've time traveled to the point of death of a person it he refused to die on assigned day. But I'm not sure if it's a bug or may be I missed something. 3 - Time travel being implemented is a bit tricky. I hopped forward in time thirty years and a frog was still waiting for me. This was patched a little, to scatter the frogs but I was informed that having enemies die from this would be tricky to implement. Easier win conditions (hp degraded too fast) and a societal war system was added late development too.

Aesthetics

2 - Clean, good, just maybe a bit heavy on the cyan and magenta. 2 - The game look ok for an ASCII roguelike. Functional, but nothing special. 3 - TOSTDK is a pretty game. Animated water, fluctuating Xenotime and vibrantly colored areas depending on your region on the world map.

Fun

2 - Again, the difficulty is a bit much. I would have enjoyed the game a lot, but felt the game would kill me before I could do that. 2 - It's quite hard to measure fun of this game. It's definitely fun to figure things out. There is some Wow factor when you understand how things work. But the actual game play is somewhat repetitive and boring. And depends on luck a lot. I have no idea how I can even read books in cities if my race is in war with ALL other races. 2 - This is a fun game, and surely one I'll be re-visiting soon. While patched, the desire to travel the world map without being dragged into tons of encounters sours things a little. Traveling on the regular world map has you constantly dodging trees and there are no paths or roads.

Innovation

3 - I'm giving it a 3. Time travel isn't such a novel concept, but here it was done in a way that is big and interesting to me, rather than the usual small-scale tactical thing. 3 - There were attempts to make a roguelike with time travel, but this is the first one where it is actually implemented and have meaning. 3 - The time travel artifact hunting and information gathering through delving into spoken history is clever and well implemented. I feel that the game may be done with development and progress has halted, but it's good.

Scope

3 - I felt the scope was very nice for a 7drl. 3 - This one is huge. All these books, relationships, overworld, caves, time travel. Much more than you would expect from an average 7drl. 3 - This game went after an odd win condition using a difficult mechanic and pulled it off. Things were rocky at first (Like when I did my let's play of it) but that was mostly sorted out and delivered a product that was what the developer envisioned.

Roguelikeness

3 - Certainly no problems here I think. 2 - Bluntly speaking combat in this game feels more like "because it's roguelike" addition. Without combat and with more complex artifacts destiny tracking it could be nice 'temporal detective'. So yeah, it feels more like roguelike influenced than true roguelike. 3 - Turn based bump combat, proc gen caves and overworld, permadeath that gets closer and closer the longer you take. Missing any character creation, but it's a roguelike.

For once time travel is done in an interesting and epic way. However, might just be my general sucking at roguelikes, but the game is really hard. The monsters are tough and I died all the time trying to get decent enough gear to even have a chance at the even tougher monsters earlier in the game (heh, time travel is fun). And then I died some more. I got some ideas as to where to look for the artifacts that are the goal of the game, but came nowhere near to finding them. Being hard is not wrong by any means, but here I felt the tough battles took away from the meat of the game, looking for clues about the artifacts through time, especially as I didn't feel there was very much tactical depth to the battles. Now I was mostly running from monsters or getting jumped by a townful of people when a war suddenly broke out. Still, all in all a nice, if a bit frustrating, experience. The game looks nice enough and is mostly clear visually. The game is interesting and innovative but suffers from too much too hard combat in a game that doesn't need it or do it in a very interesting way. Very much worth playing, you might suck at it less than I. Major part of difficulty of this game is figuring out what to do. Basically you need to track legendary artifacts in time and acquire them. An ambitious and far traveling title. Scour different time periods for artifacts while racing against your powers that are ripping you apart. Learning from locals to research the locations of artifacts is a fascinating touch.

The Trapped Heart

Completeness

2 - A great deal of effort was put into this game, clearly. However, I still encountered several crashes during my playthroughs. And the one of the biggest omissions is pixel art for the monsters. Menus also appear to need some more work. I'm assuming there's a menu that's supposed to display at the start of every level but is instantly closed. 2 - It is always hard to tell what are TEngine issues and what are Trapped Heart issues, but the sad part of using an engine is you get responsibility for all of them. Pop-ups don't go away until you click off them. This confused me for a long time as I hit keys or clicked on the pop up itself, I ended up thinking things were just long load times. Quit & Save and then reload and you will discover the exit portals don't work, forcing you to play in a single session. I managed to get a stack overflow in LUA when the red bull charged me one time. 3 - It's quite weak 3. I had some glitches, like unkillable ectoplasm and strange behavior of lightning. But none of them are gamebreaking.

Aesthetics

2 - The tiles are so damn good. I'm really amazed by them considering how many different levels have their own unique look. The effects are quite special too. Unfortunately, the monsters were not drawn in the same style as the tiles. Consistency counts for a lot and it's not here. A few other nitpicks: the handling of fonts feels a bit cheesy at times and there seems to be a momentarily lag where the character is drawn in the previous tile even after you've moved. No complaints with controls. 3 - While the comment on the blog was that it remained programmer art, I found a lot of the tiles delightfully cute, especially things like the turtles and swarms. The slug and red bull are probably the exception. Flying logos for new levels made for an excellent transition.Click to move is a dangerous thing to combine with click to attack; especially with no range indicator and with ranges that change as you level up! I was always horribly confused what my distances were, no doubt partially due to unfamiliarity with hexes.I liked the subtle indicators of being slow and fast. I really loved the custom death messages to try and train users in common errors; though admittedly they were of little help for me against the knights of undying friendship.I really, really, want wall-slide with hex movement and horizontal corridors! Especially when playing as earth! 3 - Nice sprites, convenient controls. At first it might be somewhat confusing, but in a good way.

Fun

3 - It's very compelling. Early on, I felt a lot of frustration, but I came to realize I was only frustrated because of my misunderstanding of the mechanics. Once that cleared, the game was really fun and often very tense. 3 - A lot of fun!I would have even more fun if it were less roguelike (blasphemy!), however. It is a lot of work to re-progress to a level which has you stuck, and while one could argue that gives you a chance to experiment with a different set of level ups, when one has determined a set you want to try out, it is very punishing to repeat over and over again. I began to really hate the first levels.I also argue with the design decision that the exit portals count as walls for being surrounded... 2 - Unfortunately there are two major problems that are somewhat lowering fun factor. First - only boss fights are of any threat. Exploration and kills of small fray feels like a waste of time. When playing for the first time it might be considered as learning phase, but on nth playthru it's cumbersome. Second - the game's replayability goes as far as 2 or 3 wins. Air build, earth build and may be hybrid.

Innovation

3 - No one component is totally original, but the synthesis is impressive. I've seen shields done at least once, but never even close to the extent we have here. 3 - I really like how the one-hit point mechanic didn't feel forced. It really doesn't play like a one hit point roguelike, it plays like a zero-hit point roguelike. The two-pass approach with inverting the player behaviour worked surprisingly well to force one to rethink all the levels one had played too many times already. 1 - It feels very much like variation of last 2 (or 3?) 7drl games by the same author. And bluntly speaking both air and earth abilities are quite dull and unoriginal. The only original thing here is the way how choice between builds is done. But it's not enough for a game changing innovation. After all there were games where finishing an enemy with some ability was increasing proficiency in ability itself or general field where this ability belongs to.

Scope

3 - Lots of monsters, lots of bosses, lots of abilities, and lots of pixel art. 2 - An excellent 7DRL scope. I would have loved to see more work on the theme; the start has an excellent exciting theme that sort of falls apart into random fever dreams rather than tie together... 3 - Slightly more that I would expect from an average 7drl.

Roguelikeness

3 - More roguelike than Darren's other recent entries. The levels are more like dungeons instead of just boxes. The best part is how you very often alternate between moments of power and vulnerability. 3 - It suffers from being too much like a roguelike. It needs a way to lock in level ups after multiple runs so you can experiment. Also, from running the debug mode, I'm convinced you can have wildly different luck for the knights room in particular. (Yes, I'm not smart enough to solve that without cheating...) 3 - Quite weak 3. From a true roguelike I would expect more variation and random factors.

Darren Grey has spent the last few years working on a formula for roguelikes: hex based, a failure state triggered when surrounded, and a focus on bosses that spawn minions. The Trapped Heart feels like the perfect culmination of this lineage. I was fortunate enough to review the previous incarnation, FireTail. It was good, but it really tested my patience with the insane amount of monster spawning. I have to say that The Trapped Heart knocks FireTail out of the water. There's two sets of abilities here: earthquakes and chain lightning. Both feel very distinct and very powerful. Likewise, the monsters and bosses each have their own unique identities. The theme of friendship is very interesting too, though sometimes it's seems to be tongue or cheek or outright cheesy ("BRO POWER"). Early on, I got very frustrated with the game and I assumed it was heavily dependent on luck. As it turned out, I had just spent many hours with the game while not understanding the core mechanics. Even with detailed in game tips, it can be challenging to visualize the effect of each ability. The game might benefit from some sort of visual preview during each turn or even for the abilities themselves. There are certainly some issues with The Trapped Heart (the programmer art for monsters being the most noticeable), but even so this is easily one of the best 7DRLs I have ever played... in any year. It's a must try. With Trapped Heart we see another foray of Darren's into the world of hit-pointless roguelikes. As we've come to expect, we encounter numerous interesting mechanics interleaving cleverly and being unlocked level by level. What I really love about this game is ... learning to play it! My first impression was 'what the heck is going on'? Than I started to notice 'uh. this' and 'ah. that'. And suddenly everything started to make sense. In a nutshell you have easier to obtain, but not as powerful air build and harder to obtain, but much more powerful earth build. And some variety of enemies.

cr@sh

Completeness

3 - No crashes, in game help, didn't encounter any game breaking bugs. 3 - The game is complete and mostly bugless. There are even online high scores! 3 - The game is playable, beatable and has a some nice graphics and a little sound. Looks good here.

Aesthetics

3 - My only complaint here is that the help screens were a bit hard for me to read, maybe due to the high contrast and thick font face. Otherwise looks beautiful. Controls are fairly well laid out and were easy to learn. 2 - The game looks cool. All these animated menus, radar, energy distribution. Main complains are: results of radar scan are damn hard too look at, radar and camera could have own hotkeys. They are actually used way more often than firing, so two key presses instead of one at some point becomes irritating. 3 - Cr@sh has a neat little tileset that doesn't fall short anywhere as long as you aren't allergic to ASCII. Effects like Radar and camera look good too.

Fun

3 - Intriguing game with a fun set of mechanics to learn. There's room for mastery it seems too. Recommended! 2 - The game is intriguing. Main fun killer is balance. There is a high chance to die right away. There is a chance to run out of conduits. Yes, you can pick them back, but not if they connect to solar batteries. And final target is so hard to notice/distinguish, that I have a feeling that I might have seen it several times, thinking that it's some kind of an alien plant. 2 - Crash is fun and challenging. Running out of Conduit and traveling is kind of a weak point and there are some overpowered enemies currently that almost ensure defeat.

Innovation

3 - Your probe is power hungry and must maintain a constant line of supply or quickly lose power and die. Vision is limited to a radar pulse, which is a one turn radial sweep. It's only accurate as the last sweep. You can turn on cameras for more traditional vision, but this requires more power. Which you are always hungry for. Very good innovation tying these together! 2 - There were engineering based roguelikes before. Movement limitation on conduits only and vision limitation caused by camera power consumption are interesting twist, but too specific for this very case. 2 - I feel that this game went for a concept, grabbed it and made starting off exploded and blind fun. Not sure if there are other interplanetary probe games out there this year, but this one is good.

Scope

3 - Leaderboards, a reputation system, and in game help? This is an impressive set of features and pretty much a full game. 3 - Much more than you would expect from your average 7drl. 2 - This game is about what I could expect from a 7DRL. It seems like a lot of work went into story and setting.

Roguelikeness

3 - The major factor here is variety of play. The game delivers in that the random distribution of item pickups and locations of the probe parts greatly influences how each new game plays out. 2 - Technically there are roguelike elements, but it doesn't really feels like roguelike. 3 - Turn based, permadeath, procedurally generated, resource management, shooting combat, not bump, but I'll give that a slide. It hits enough roguelike qualifiers for me.

Very fun sci-fi RL with an innovative take on hunger and vision. This game is interesting and strange. I have a feeling that it's missing tools for 1) fending off aliens without killing them 2) automatic defense to kill anything that approaches. I won the game by being aggressive, because previously I lost a lot of games due to disconnection from controller. Crash is a slick little game where you are a crashed probe trying to spread conduits around an alien planet. Your goal is to find the communications array, and you connect to storage units, solar cells, batteries and can build a couple structures. Game feels good to play, but there are a couple unfinished and imbalanced mechanics.

A Roguelike Where You Dodge Projectiles

Completeness

2 - The game is complete from a tutorial to a win condition. However, I ended up with some random crash to desktop on level 9. The game also frequently pauses making it unclear if it is just doing huge amounts of processing or is hung. 2 - Crash on the second-to-last level, but otherwise very nice. 2 - It's fairly playable. I experienced heavy slowdown in later levels as the number of projectiles increased, leading eventually to crashes. I think I also ran into a situation where the autopilot stopped working.

Aesthetics

2 - Excellent use of ascii. However, the inter-character spacing (kerning) which is fine for the map is painful to read for text, especially the intro screen. F seems to be re-used for Fighters and Frigates that are rather different beasts I think. Controls are standard, which is nice, but the jump-to-next level is backwards. > is downwards/onwards/next page, but the jump point requires 2 - Could use a little more UI and tutorial work, but once you learned the conventions it worked well enough. 2 - I understood most of the information I needed to, eventually, but it could probably be arranged more cleanly. It took me a while to understand how sectors related to the play space, for instance, and I would have liked rollover tips to extend to the projectiles themselves. On the other hand, I thought the game did a fantastic job of conveying the feeling of weaving and dodging flying projectiles.

Fun

3 - While I'm sure some players would find it on the easy side, I appreciated the slowly ramping difficulty that let me slowly learn the patterns of the enemy fire. The shot-highlighting is a genius way to allow people to deal with the somewhat chaotic motion of shots in ascii grids without making it trivial. Not only do you have to avoid getting into dangerous locations, but if you find yourself with no exit you will want to pick the exit path with least damage 3 - I can't believe it's just a libtcod tutorial retread. (It is, isn't it?) I stayed up way too late, and then started playing this again the next day instead of reviewing other 7DRLs. You win. 3 - I think this game's got the seed of a great idea. When my mind starts spinning with possible additions and changes I know I've got a good game on my hands. The game could use more effort put into depth of the flight mechanics; occasionally I'd get into degenerate strategies where I could destroy a carrier, say, by shuffling left and right alternately for a long time. But overall I enjoyed it and felt like most of the elements had a place.

Innovation

3 - A well done roguelike in a space-craft setting alone is worth some innovation, but this one also brings to the table some excellent combat mechanics. Clever ideas like removing the ability of the player to explicitly fire both makes the game manageable, but also feeds into the setting (why shouldn't a targeting computer just fire every turn). The zone-based exploration is likewise very cool; it lets the player make some risk vs rewards choices. But may require non-auto piloting to avoid intermediate war zones. Further, the wide stretches of empty space really sell the space-flight mechanic once more. 3 - Yeah, completely unexpcted. I could learn to like turn-based bullet hell. 3 - Dodging projectiles that move over time is not a mechanic I've seen used a lot, and it's a good fit for a space battling theme.

Scope

2 - An excellent scope for a 7drl game. 3 - I can't decide if this is expected-in-a-7DRL scope or OMG-so-awesome, but going with the latter on general principles. 2 - I thought the author chose a good scope for a 7DRL. Solid core action, some inventory management, character stats improvement, map exploration and level progression.

Roguelikeness

3 - In terms of raw combat mechanics this is very much not a roguelike. No melee, no bump to attack, no corridors. But its combat mechanics fit so perfectly to its theme that those things become irrelevant. An example of a 100% roguelike that escapes the Dungeon genre. 3 - 3 - Yeah, it's a Roguelike in my book.

The plain title, "A roguelike where you dodge projectiles” does little justice to the amount of flavor this roguelike actually possesses! It is a very impressive example of a roguelike that attempts many things that often destroy tactical combat: ranged combat After the third level, I forgot to be inquisitive and experimental. After the fifth level, I forgot what time it was or that I was supposed to be reviewing it; I was just fighting to stay alive. Although it starts out easy, the game is quite serious by the later levels in saying that gaining intel is key to survival as your fly your lone ship armed with a single short-ranged (but extremely powerful!) weapon against the entire might of the enemy fleet. The *only* reason I'm writing this review instead of playing the game again is that it crashed in level 9 (of 10), and doesn't support saving the game; otherwise the most unexpected and gripping thing I've seen in this challenge. A cool space-battling game with asymmetric abilities. Your ship has an instant-hit laser that will automatically shoot anything that comes into range. Enemy ships launch projectiles that fly through space a few squares each turn. Areas that will be intersected by projectiles in the next turn are highlighted. Missiles streak this way and that across the sky as you juke and dodge to keep the enemy ships in range of your own laser.The interface, while barebones, does convey the information you need. Mousing over items in the play space gives tooltips, for the most part, and inventory items have their effects clearly described. The game's got a wacky tone: the healing item is duct tape, and the speed boost is red paint, for example. Auto-fire for the player's own weapon keeps the game to around one key a turn, which gives it flow and helps make the projectile motion visually apparent.

Becoming Northerly

Completeness

3 - Functional from start to finish, no bugs 2 - The game is complete, playable, winnable, but have some glitches, especially near the end. 2 - The game seems complete. Minor slidy ice aside, the only thing that feels off is balance. Endgame is brutal if you've been picking up the wrong stuff and paradoxically trying to avoid fights while trying to kill enemies to get pelts.

Aesthetics

3 - Charming little sprites. Shows you information about enemies and items. 3 - The game looks cool. All compressed, but comprehensive information about all items and monsters on screen is displayed. Sprites are nice. Controls consist of 3 keys, but it feels like enough! 3 - Game looks nice, and controls well. From the Author's blog, he got some outside graphical help, and it not only looks good but appears to have changed the tone of the game?

Fun

3 - You slalom down the mountain and kill snowmen for their pelts, what's not to like! 2 - The game is quite fun, but there are a few problems that spoil it. First - accumulating error problem. You have to risk early in order to survive later. And random nature of the game sometimes creates unwinnable situations (IMO). Second - cracks in the ice. They behave unpredictable. I felt that my character was jumping around randomly. And horizontal walls. They just feel glitchy. 2 - I had a good time playing this odd skiing/animal crushing game.

Innovation

2 - Down down down you go, this is a nice twist. Psst - you can actually go left and right with 7 and 9 on the numpad, don't know if intentional or not. 2 - I wouldn't say that once direction game was never done before. But in this setting and with these implementation details it's more or less original. 3 - I don't think a lot of one way heroics-esque games made it in this year, and if they did, I doubt they would be as fun and well put together as this.

Scope

2 - It's a full scope poject, with a variety of enemies and attacks, enemies even get tougher over time (and so are you, buy those upgrades) 3 - Slightly more than I would expect from an average 7drl. So, it's not 'overwhelming' 3, but definitely more than 2. 3 - This game has a lot going for it, and i'd like to suggest lots of people play it to see if your experiences were as good as mine. Good luck!

Roguelikeness

3 - Has all the traditional roguelike features. 3 - Quite week, but 3. There are all elements of the roguelike, but in minimal quantities. 2 - Turn based with kinda vague auto combat, looks random genned, and you have one life. Just the content and feel don't seem all the way roguelite. More arcade game.

A perilous one way mountain slalom wherein you kill beasts for their pelts, collect items and buy upgrades and try to stay alive in general. Careful, some enemies have ranged attacks! I have mixed feeling about this game. It seemed very fun at first, but after playing it quote a bit I came to conclusion that mechanics of this game have 'accumulating error' problem. If you miss some opportunities early, you might find yourself in a situation when your character is not dead, but there is very very low chance of winning. But for a game with 3 buttons controls it's full of meaningful decisions. Becoming Northerly is an odd gem among this year's 7DRL entries. You are locked going one direction (downscreen, meant to symbolize going up a mountain?) and can move either straight or diagonally. I misunderstood the mechanics a couple times and that cost me the game, and a decent run.

Switch Hook

Completeness

3 - 3 - In a different game I'd have said that the enemies need more introduction, but in this case working out their mechanics in gameplay works just fine. Nothing here feels lacking. 3 - The game feels complete to me. The help is on the game's web site; that's perhaps the only thing I would have wanted included in the game itself.You can turn the sound off if you don't want it, and run full-screen or in a window. Clicking on an empty hex starts the player auto-moving to that hex, stopping when an enemy is sighted.

Aesthetics

3 - Polished simple graphics. 2 - The graphical style is quite bare and having sound at all in this game feels superfluous. Nothing particularly offensive, though. 3 - It looks, sounds, and plays great. There are simple sound effects and animation, and good use of color. There's an optional display to show enemies' attack ranges.

Fun

2 - 3 - It's paced for a single runthrough instead of several replays (as the enemies are always introduced in the same schedule), but that one runthrough was quite a lot of fun for me. 3 - Very good difficulty ramp. The enemies and items have interesting interactions, and the game lets you come up with strategies that feel clever. I was able to get all the enemies on a level to chase me into a side room, run to the exit and then swap places with a heavy stone moai, which locked them in. (Finishing a level without killing any enemies nets you an extra bonus health point. It's very difficult to do, generally.)You are at the mercy of the random level generator to some extent, in terms of whether the tools you need to get through the level unscathed will be accessible or not.

Innovation

2 - A sensible exploration of a novel mechanic. (Or, apparently, a mechanic used in Zelda many many years ago, but pretty novel in roguelikes.) 2 - While the hook a fun gameplay mechanic, there's pretty much no way it hasn't already been done by plenty of games. 2 - The game runs through a lot of the implications of its main mechanic, which is an unusual one.

Scope

2 - 2 - Simple but functional. The game was still introducing new enemies at the farthest point I got to, so I might not have got to see the entire scope of the game. 3 - It's a simple game but I'm impressed with the polish on everything, particularly on the difficulty.

Roguelikeness

2 - More roguelite than roguelike - not that there's anything wrong with that. 3 - Maybe slightly in the "procedural puzzle" direction in terms of game feel, but certainly a roguelike in terms of the mechanics. 3 - Yes, it's a Roguelike. It lives on the puzzle end of the spectrum (as opposed theme or role-playing).

A fun little puzzle game, extremely reminiscent of Hoplite. Some 7DRLs are unfortunately hard to approach and figure out. They try to overload features and different sorts of gameplay into a package that probably never sees player testing before it's out and the challenge is over. But then, then there's games like Switch Hook. I clicked on the screen once and went "oh, so that's how you play": You click on enemies to switch position with them and do one point of damage, or you click on a hex without an enemy to move in its direction. Everything else after that is mechanics relating to different enemies: Wolves move two tiles a turn, trolls don't switch positions, bombs and toads explode upon death, archers shoot at you if they can see you on their turn, etc.. Switch Hook is a fun, very solidly-designed game built around the Zelda-inspired switch hook mechanic. The player attacks enemies by exchanging places with them on a hex grid, a move that also deals a point of damage to the enemy. Each level introduces a new enemy or item, or a new combination of enemies. For instance, there is an enemy that is damaged by the switch hook but does not swap places, or a bomb item that explodes after swapping twice. The levels are fairly small and you have to try to use walls and obstacles to your advantage.I made it as far as level 16 (out of 20).

Billiard Dungeon

Completeness

3 - Polished and well-done. 3 - I played the 7DRL build and then the post build and in both the game was pretty polished and only a minor weapon repeating bug was in evidence as far a problems went. The post version is very polished. 3 - It seems quite complete to me.

Aesthetics

3 - 2 - The game plays well. Being a ball that bounces around is a clever choice, but it seems that even with upgraded weaponry it is very difficult to try to position enemies where you can push them into spikes or hit without being hit, so you get worn down as the game progresses and run out of resources. Then die. Pretty much all you can do then. 2 - Billiard Dungeon has some wonderfully atmospheric music and sound effects. The levels with their oblique angles are rendered very nicely, and there is a snazzy exact rendering of line of sight (as in the old game Nox, for instance).I found myself wishing for some description of the weapons and their effects, and similar for the differently-colored potions.The view of the level is rather zoomed-in, and given the chaotic nature of the levels it's easy to get lost.

Fun

1 - Interaction modes are limited enough it just didn't hold my attention. 2 - This was fun! I suggest giving it a try. The bouncing concept should be enough to lure you in, and while it maintains a standard roguelike difficulty curve there is a good time to be had bouncing a goblin into some spikes. 2 - It's interesting but I found it fairly frustrating. The ball doesn't travel far enough to really take advantage of the bouncing and I found it was relatively rare when I could knock enemies into traps.This game has given me a newfound hatred for doves. They dart in and whack you and then fly off out of reach. On level six I once ran into an entire flock of them. Grrr!The use of potions takes experimentation. For instance it took me a long time to figure out that blue potions put out mushrooms which you could then roll over to regain health.I still don't really understand the difference between the various weapons, or their alternate attack modes.

Innovation

3 - Complete exploration of a novel mechanic. 3 - Yeah, this gets a 3 because there isn't anything else like this project this year (AS FAR AS I KNOW) and I think it's clever and makes a nice game. 2 - Suprisingly this is not the only billiards-inspired game I'm reviewing today. This one is turn-based; the player shoots her piece, then the NPCs shoot their pieces, etc. Still, there are ideas explored in this game that I haven't seen before.

Scope

3 - Music, sound, animation, itemization, enemies... a lot got done. 2 - The Author set a goal and got done in a timely fashion. I have no serious coding experience, and I don't know how long physics like this take to make, but everything got put together tidily in the allotted amount of time. 3 - I'm impressed at what the author has accomplished. There are help scrolls you can roll over, and I came across things like a "breather" level.

Roguelikeness

2 - Although it's got a roguelike theme, it's much more a puzzle game in my book. 3 - Not turn based, but bump combat to an extreme. Permadeath, hard as nails difficulty, procedural generation, items aren't randomized.. Still, I would classify this as a roguelike, partially because I'm not sure what else to call it. 3 - Despite the unusual control mechanic I think this falls pretty squarely in the Roguelike camp. It's turn-based with procedural dungeon levels and some progression as you acquire better weapons and an arsenal of potions.

The idea of navigating a dungeon as if you were a pool ball might leave you bouncing with joy, it just left me bouncing off the walls in frustration. Hack and slash - but a really complete and well-done hack-and-slash game. Billiard Dungeon is a neat mouse and physics based dungeon delver. Like the name implies, you move like a pool ball and different weapons provide different ranges and strength. You need to get to level 12 and must bash and bump those that oppose you either into hazards or in melee to win. A dungeon crawler with a movement mechanic inspired by billiards. Use the mouse to pick a direction and force; watch your character's ball bounce off walls or enemies and come to a stop. Then the enemies get a turn to shoot their balls. The level generation features lots of oblique angles, presumably to make bounces more interesting, and there are bumpers that function very much like a pinball machine. In practice I didn't find myself bouncing off walls that much though; my ball could not travel very far before coming to rest, and the dungeons tended to be rife with spike traps.I have not completed the game; I only managed to get down to level 6 or so in the dungeon.

Quaestum Facere

Completeness

2 - Was really proud when I successfully escorted the archaeologist back home, only to be told that the archaeologist had died and i was getting no pay for that mission. That was the only bug I ran into, although after that I avoided any sort of escort or rescue mission. 2 - Overall the engine (which the author has been developing for some time) is quite nice, and this entry has a nice level of polish because of it. I found some annoying bugs with the escort/rescue missions, basically, just avoid those. It would be nice to have a help file with the distribution, to explain some of the options in the HUD. 3 - The game feels very complete and polished, although I did spot 2 bugs: Occasional inaccessible diagonal map openings in caves, and a monster-infighting crash bug (but the game successfully recovered my file).

Aesthetics

3 - Polished graphics and UI. 3 - I found the game nice to look at and with good sounds. The music was fine. Controls are great, I used the mouse the whole time. The context sensitive mouse click worked great. There some learning curve as the guns have a narrow field of fire, enemies directly diagonal cannot be fired at. 3 - Gameplay is smooth, with keyboard shortcuts and mouse aiming available. The menus flow nicely (except a minor problem where item info sometimes gets cut off at the bottom). The graphics are clear and used well, and the game uses some excellent Kevin MacLeod music (I spent almost 5 minutes just listening to the title theme).

Fun

2 - 3 - I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game. The game lets you holding down left mouse to repeatedly fire or move. It has a great run and gun feel to it. 3 - There are two endings, and I played until I saw them both.

Innovation

2 - 2 - Abilities have cooldowns of different types than time, which I think is quite an improvement. For example, the stock Healing ability has a cooldown of 20 hits, you must land 20 hits against monsters before the ability is ready for another use. 2 - Recharging the utility items requires you to score some number of hits against enemies. Instead of being incredibly innovative, this game takes familiar mechanics and uses them well.

Scope

2 - 3 - There's quite a bit of utilities and gear in the game. There are also a bunch of missions to undertake on the quest to retirement. I completed the game a couple times and didn't feel I had seen all of them. 2 - Several different mission types, procedural caves and static spaceships, weapon modifiers, a handful of enemy types, and a bunch of nice story text.

Roguelikeness

3 - 2 - There doesn't seem to be a time pressure or mechanic to force the player to take risks, which makes this feel like more of a straightforward dungeon crawl than rogue. 3 - Turn-based, grid-based, single-character, tactical, permadeath, with some of its maps being PGC. Despite that list, I don't feel that this is a strong 3.

Great vertical slice of a sci-fi roguelike. Theme, details, itemization, sense of humor. With another day could have a much wider variety of things to do and thus be even more engrossing. Fun little sci-fi dungeon crawler.Fav: The silly end goal of affording the prefect retirement plan.Not so Fav: There are some escort missions, and they end up being broken as all escort missions are. Play this! Quaestum Facere is a primarily ranged combat game where you accept missions, buy new gear, and try to save up enough money to retire from the mercenary life. It's fun, atmospheric, and the goal is close enough to your grasp that you'll want to start another character immediately when a space pirate leader blows you up.

Arachne

Completeness

2 - If you throw your javelin at a spider on top of the chest, the javelin is lost? 3 - Seems be complete and bug free. 3 - It's a very polished game.

Aesthetics

2 - Serviceable for the gameplay, music and sound effects are a bonus. 2 - Looks a bit minimalistic, but it is good for this game. Web animation is great for this type of project and UI is clear. Although I have some complains about player / enemies tiles - there are simple colored letters. This looks (too) simple and (especially the red ones) doesn't fit to atmosphere of this game. 3 - The game's got music, sound effects, and animation, as well as a dialog box system.The powers are clearly described and straightforward to understand.

Fun

1 - A bit too unforgiving for me, and the short game length didn't fix that the way it's said to. 3 - Very enjoyable game. Mechanics is simple but provides a lots of possibilities. Disabling enemies, creating new links and nodes in the web, collecting and using items is very funny. Unfortunately gamplay is quite repetitive, but... Still '3' as score. 2 - It's interesting but I found it frustrating. I got the furthest when I ignored powerups and enemies and focused on just making a beeline for the exit.You can get yourself stuck if you stun enemies because you can't move through the nodes they occupy.The game (be)rates you when you die, assigning you a label such as "pitiful" or "atrocious" or "awful." I'd have preferred some hints about ways to get better, personally.

Innovation

3 - A completely different take on noneuclidean destructible maps. Great prototyping of a set of related mechanics! 3 - Very innovative. I never heard about game which relies on such a topic and uses such a mechanics. 3 - Moving around on a graph, and editing the graph as you go, is a great mechanic, and the game's got a good theme to go with that. The player and enemy abilities all tie nicely in with that central mechanic.

Scope

2 - Nicely put together, a good week's effort. 2 - Simple, small game, but scope is reasonable for 7DRL. Some enemies, few items - it's ok. 3 - It's an impressive job for a 7DRL.

Roguelikeness

2 - 2 - Ouh, it is hard to judge. It looks unlike roguelikes used to look, mechanics and style of gameplay are far from Rogue, but I still could evaluate Arachne as roguelike. 3 - Yes, it's mostly Roguelike. The web is a spring simulation so it bounces and bobs around. If the web is malformed it can be very hard to aim your powers at the intended nodes, making it the rare Roguelike that requires good reflexes and timing.

Not for the spider-phobic. Or the geometry-phobic. Or the dying a lot phobic. But interesting, and nicely riffing off of the Greek myth. Nice entry by Paul Jeffries. Very unusual game about... about what? About managing spider's web? Yeah, sort of. This is one of the weirdest roguelikes this year. And still one of the best - regardless of how far from Berlin Interpretation Arachne is. Arachne uses its spider theme pervasively. Each level is a graph shaped like a spiderweb. Each turn, the player and enemies move along the edges of the graph from node to node. Each level has a power-up you can grab and an exit to get to the next level. Different types of enemies, each with a graph-related poewr, appear as you work your way to the final boss. Some enemies can snip edges in the web, for instance, or burn away nodes, or jump across gaps. You can't (generally) harm the enemies so the focus is on evasion.Because of the graph nature of the game it has to be played with a mouse. It's also using a real-time spring simulation of the web, so timing is important to ensure you click on your intended nodes when you're moving. Apart from that the game is turn-based.I got to the final boss once but wasn't able to figure out how to beat her. I've died dozens of times on level 2 or 3.

Cult

Completeness

3 - Very polished. There's a lot of little details in this game. I did encounter one crash after several runs, but considering the high level of polish and completeness otherwise I think a 3 is still deserved. 3 - No bugs, in game help, works great. 2 - A few small bugs, and once you get a lead you pretty much win, but the game is all there. Equipment upgrades don't seem super effective.

Aesthetics

3 - From the dynamic lighting to the avatar effect, everything looks fantastic! Of course, it clearly looks like a Numeron game. It's somewhat amusing to see some of the same tiles being slightly modified and reused year and year, but I can't complain too much. The big NPCs like the Reaper and Azzafel are fricking amazing. Controls are excellent as well and the controls screen is really helpful. 3 - Perfect presentation as always. controls work excellent. No sound but oh well. 3 - The graphics look nice, the crypt is interesting and Azafel is nicely animated. Cult looks good and I wish I had more time in game to explore the map.

Fun

3 - Really fun. It's action packed and well balanced. I can't see a huge amount of replayability, but it took me several tries before winning. To be fair, there are 3 classes to try out. 3 - Really fun fast paced combat. Nice selection of abilities to use against the competing players. There's a cool push/pull dynamic as you've got to balance powering up with being king of the hill. 2 - Bump combat and abilities that vary between classes. Sometimes it's very diffucult to keep your health up and maintain demon form, but this may be on purpose to keep balance.

Innovation

2 - The king of the hill style combat is new to me, but it sounds like there may have been some similar games in the past (e.g. Twelve Hours). The style of map is pretty intriguing too, not just that it wraps but that certain map features like the shops are replicated. Thus you can travel in various directions and still come across what you need (I still got lost a lot early on though). 2 - It might be interesting to see something like this king of the hill arena somehow worked into a traditional roguelike. 2 - King of the hill isn't something you run into a lot in roguelites. I really wish there was a life counter at least, a way to die before the game's end.

Scope

3 - A bit above average with the graphics, the AI opponents, the abilities, and the shops. 3 - Really impressive array of abilities and features. 2 - Cult aimed to be a king of the hill action fest and got its target. Varying ability loadouts ,upgrading weapons and holding influence and staying alive balanced with gathering gold outside the center of the ring add a tactical edge to the game.

Roguelikeness

2 - Outside of the grid/turn based nature and bump combat, actually not very roguelike. There's no permadeath and I'm not even sure how much is procedural. The map layout is somewhat static, so if things are shuffled around I certainly didn't notice it. 1 - Different type of game. Focuses on combat and doesn't build on or use any other features that rogue has. 2 - Not a strong point here. Turn based tactical combat. Permadeath is nowhere to be seen, the level layout never changes. It's at the bottom of this 2.

A turn-based, yet very fast feeling "king of the hill" style game. You try to stay in the "altar” a 5x5 square Fast paced and fun arena combat game. Cult is a king of the hill style brawler where you fight to gain and retain the highest place of honor in the Demon Azafel's Cult. It's lite on roguelike elements, fun and only a little glitchy.

Helix

Completeness

2 - Runs without problems until winning a level, then may just get stuck 2 - All game mechanics work, but game always crashes after few levels, so I'm giving 2 due to this sad bug. 3 - Feels fairly complete and polished, to me. I didn't have any trouble picking up and playing the game. Much harder time getting anywhere in it. It has on-screen directions for most things.

Aesthetics

2 - Spirtes show what everything is, ranged guys, melee guys, wizards, obstacles, explosives, it's all pretty clear 2 - Looks very nice, but most of content seems copied from previous 7drl 3 - Looks and sounds good. The arena scrolls smoothly, the enemies slide from square to square. The main thing that's missing is good feedback showing shots hitting the player.

Fun

3 - Unusually fun distraction though sometime the RNG doesn't play fair 3 - Nonstop dodging from bullets and exploding the barrels, sign me in! 2 - It's fun but I don't tend to last more than a few turns.While you can only aim through the points on your current template, enemies can aim in any direction. It is hard to read which squares will be affected by an enemy shot when it's moving at an unusual angle across the board.The sequencing of whether shots hit you if they're arriving in a square on the same turn as you are leaving feels a bit off.The movement cards seem more useful than the firing cards; they're easier to play without leaving yourself exposed to harm, anyway. You can one-hit kill anyone with your bump attack, which you always have, and staying out of the line of fire is crucial.What if doing any of your always-available moves (move/wait/melee) discarded the current card from the list and advanced to the next?

Innovation

3 - Very unusual concept, you get served moves and attacks in a queue and must perform them in the order they come 2 - Random stream of abilities used both for atacks and escaping, even though as author says he planned more varied abilities. Also pseudorealtime enemies combined with turnbased player. 3 - It's an interesting system.

Scope

2 - There's just the arena, good for demonstrating the gimmick, but nothing beyond that 2 - Scope is good for a 7drl. 2 - It's a healthy amount of work! The game does not have progression (I think; I never managed to clear a board) or upgrades so it's more of a puzzle game. I like those, though.

Roguelikeness

2 - Tile based and randomized, good enough, I guess 3 - All important parts of a roguelike are present. 3 - Yeah, basically Roguelike.

A combat arena where your special moves, which can be teleports, attacks or a mix of both, are randomized. You have to spend your current move to get your next one. All in all pretty amusing In this game player must kill all monsters on a randomly generated board that represents spaceship or something like this. Player have 4 hp, monsters have only 1, most of the monsters shoots and there is a lot exploding barrels, so fights are very dynamic - kill or get killed after few mistakes. The original part is player weapon - most of the time he must use a randomly given ability that is either blinking to a certain offset or shooting in some directions. Due to this the player chaotically jumps around the enemies, use obstracles and barrels to his profit and kill enemies while they are reloading. This is very fun, and doesn't require as much tactical planning and careful analysis as in 1-hp roguelikes. On the other side abilities and enemies aren't very diverse, so after a few hours there is no challenge in winning on a first 2 levels (and levels after second sadly always crash on both of my PCs). The second problem is that due to nondiscrete nature of monsters and bullets it is difficult to predict whether a bullet will hit a column or pass it, even in simple cases. This is a wildly chaotic puzzle Roguelike. Try to clear a board full of enemies all shooting at you. You can do the usual Roguelike movement and bump-melee attack, or you can use the top card on a never-ending deck of "ability" cards. Each card illustrates (on a little grid) shooting through one or more squares, and/or teleporting to a nearby square. You get to pick whether to use it facing north, south, west or east. Once the card's used it is discarded and the next card becomes the current one. (It's a bit like how you can see the next piece in Tetris, except here you can see the next four cards.) Shots are always hitting unintended targets: walls, exploding barrels, other enemies.You have four hit points and that's it. The board is littered with obstacles and exploding barrels. Enemies have line of sight, and can shoot at any angle. They have a targeting turn, a firing turn, and a reloading turn (although I think the number of those varies by enemy type), so you can teleport in while they're aiming and melee them.

WRAITH

Completeness

3 - Seems to be complete. 3 - Dungeon has five levels and varying enemies. Balance is an issue with the inability to skip turns, you tend to get pinned into corners. Also, Poison is miserable. 3 - Complete, playable, and I encountered no game breaking bugs. There a help key, that tells you where the manual is located, which is better than nothing! Balance wise its OK, maybe on the unfair side. There's a good difficulty progression as the player dives deeper with new enemies being added along the way. I wish there was more healing options.

Aesthetics

2 - Great tiles and nice interface, but the FOV vas a bit too restrictive and behaved strangely now and then. 2 - The game plays well. The combo is hard to work up while staying safe and healing is too far between. Sometimes I wish the attacks were a toggle instead of an action queue. 3 - Game looks and feels good. Mouse over gives tool tips, keyboard binds are logical. Oryx tiles are always nice to look at. There's no sound, but that's not deserving of a -1 for this type of gameplay.

Fun

2 - Nice but gets repetitive quite quick. 2 - Very challenging, but not for all of the best reasons. Enemies like to remain tantalizingly out of reach either due to pathfinding or bad aggro range and healing isn't super easy to get to when you need it. 2 - The combo system adds some interest. The vault ability is a key feature that is refreshing. The 'dummy' slime monster is a nice addition as well, an enemy that is actually more useful when kept alive. I mention earlier in the review text that there's no ability to wait a turn. I think that the way combos decay over time are enough of a reason to keep moving. To make matters worse, some enemies will just blithely wait around until you try to pass within one square of them, at which point they instantly strike. Doesn't quite feel fair.

Innovation

2 - The combo idea is nice but does not feel relevant enough here. 3 - The captain system (The enemies with the red swords) were cool once I figured out what the heck they were. Having the area cleared after killing my prior killer was rewarding. Assuming I could do so without being torn to shreds. 2 - The vault ability is great. The dummy monster is quite interesting. Both fine aspects to learn from.

Scope

2 - Reasonable for a 7drl. 2 - I was unable to find what the author was aiming for, and only having a passing familiarity with Shadows of Mordor, I may be missing some stuff. Still, it was in on time, and rather playable. 3 - This game is pretty ambitious and I'm impressed how much depth of play there is. Great work.

Roguelikeness

3 - Clearly is one. 3 - Turn based Tactical combat, permadeath, brutal difficulty, resource management (sorta) and proc gen levels. Roguelike to me. 2 - The game just almost tips the scales of roguelike-ness. It's missing a certain feeling of tenseness and uncertainty that a fine roguelike creates. Gameplay felt like more of a puzzle than a rpg.

A nice simple puzzle kind of a roguelike all about managing groups and getting the first hit in. The player has three different attacks and choosing the right one is very important. Killing a lot of enemies in a row adds to a combo count, giving benefits, but the cound decreases too fast for the combp mechanic to be too relevant I feel. All in all I liked the game, certainly worth playing. Shadow of Mordor inspired WRAITH has you playing a spooky ghost that has to position himself tactically to fight the hordes of darkness. Gain life by drinking from fountains and try not to get mashed by trolls. Positioning and clever use of abilities and even opponents plays a key part in this clever entry.Fav: combo systemNot so Fav: Can only move, there's no wait. I get why some designers like this idea, as it forces the player to position carefully, but as a player I'm over it. It makes me do a silly tap dance routine just to avoid taking damage and makes no sense from a story/lore perspective.

Darkyr

Completeness

2 - Alt-F4 to quit is not really suitable for a complete game. Text in the new levels is often cut off when playing at 2560x1600. Pressing buttons doesn't work with a Wacom under Windows, forcing me to use a mouse rather than tablet (but this is likely Unity being silly) Many spells are missing icons on the map, resulting in empty halos that you pick up to get fireballs or frost bolts. Odd, as they have icons on the caster bar; surely those could have been used? Likewise I'd prefer the weapon icons rather than a generic sword on the ground so I know which weapon it is at a glance. 2 - The game needs some balance because you need weapons or spells to fight enemies, and in their current swiftly consumable rate you run out of oomph when trying to fight scaling foes.

Aesthetics

2 - I want to love the geometric aesthetic. And I think I do. The problem is having all monsters and yourself represented by the same tower-of-blocks really is too abstract for me to handle. I couldn't ever feel for the kobolds, or the orcs. I think this is a strong argument to have instead built them out of voxelized ascii, as a k or o would be easier to identify and relate to. The tooltips are nice and necessary to understand all the interactions, but often got in the way of actual targeting. I think I'd prefer if the roll over stayed in one spot on the screen with an arrow pointing to the current target so it doesn't jump around all the time. It was very unclear when I was frozen that all I could do was hit space, probably need to glow that menu or move the Frozen: Hit Space to center stage.With all the interactions, it is pretty important to have the tooltips reflect them, as far as I could tell this wasn't the case, kobolds didn't seem to get the +2 from a mushroom in their tooltip (but people with rage did increment...?)I appreciate how the mouse move switched seamlessly to single-step movement around enemies. 3 - The game has a pleasant glowing bloom and the in game audio (monster voices and sounds) is my favorite part.

Fun

2 - There is a remarkable amount of stuff to figure out. Unfortunately, a fair bit of it ends up being irrelevant as most play is seems to be about resource management rather than tactics. The low hit points per monster often makes sit & kill an effective strategy. Multiple play throughs are rewarded with cool encounters, however. 2 - I had a good time with Darkyr and I will likely continue to play it after the competition. Three classes with vague restrictions, enemies that respond synergistically with each other and varied pickups make the game keep my interest.

Innovation

3 - A lot of neat systems here. The UI/look is worth studying. The simple weapon/armour/spell mechanics is surprisingly deep with the various relationships between the systems. 2 - Using the resources of a small team Darkyr was able to get more polish in than some of it's competitors. nice graphics a little silliness, tight resource management and a consumable spell system. Also there is a nudist class.

Scope

3 - There is a lot more here than is apparent in any screen shot, which is why I wished the art-style would make the variety of creatures more obvious. 2 - The game delivered most of what it aimed to deliver. Needs some balance tweaks and a little more explanation of mechanice, but that's pretty much any 7DRL.

Roguelikeness

3 - Most definitely a roguelike. 3 - Bump combat, permadeath, rather unforgiving, procedural etc. Fits my description of Roguelike.

Darkyr is an isometric roguelike played with a very clean, geometric, look. You can pick your initial adventurer, and in the roguelike tradition, this has more to do with how much difficulty you want to face than your personal style. Gameplay is fluid and mouse-based. Monsters and items have many interactions based on triggered events; often making it wise to pick carefully which monster you defeat first. Darkyr is a neat little 3D roguelike created by a small team. Resource management is difficult and vital in its current state, but continued development seems likely.

Beyaz Dag

Completeness

3 - This feels like a published game, not a 7DRL. The only weakness was enemy pathing, but that's stated up front in the readme. 2 - There is a lot going on here. Quests, lots and lots of area to cover that grants your exploration experience. Not sure if the game is beatable, considering how hard it is to stay alive, and a prominent pathfinding bug lets you force enemies like snow leopard face first into a rock while you flee to safety. 2 - The game is stable and feels mostly feature-complete. There are some oddities; for instance the game does not always erase an enemy from his old position as he moves, which can make it difficult to know where to aim your bow. As mentioned above the pathfinding is poor and in the notes the game says exploiting that is necessary to win. I did not win; the game takes quite a while to play.

Aesthetics

2 - The game interface is pretty typical and average. The fonts were not my favorite, nor the arrangement of the screen. The color palette for the world seemed appropriate for the theme. 1 - Graphics and interface are not this game's strong point. Not a fan of the tileset either. It gets a little better when you get out of the swamp, but it's pretty confusing at the start. 2 - It looks pretty good. There is a lot of space between the monospace font characters which decreases readability. I love the look of the elevation layers, though, and the different biomes as you go up the mountain.

Fun

3 - I spent longer than I should have playing this game, and I'll be back for more after I'm done with all my reviews. 2 - The game is intriguing, hints at depth and has a lot of story going on. Combat seems very interesting but it's super dangerous. 2 - It's a big game and I love the atmosphere. If the combat was balanced I would happily play this game a bunch more.

Innovation

2 - I like the varying altitude, dwarf fortress style. The exploration and skill point system has promise. 2 - The depth and scale of this game, and an overarching quest stand out amidst a lot of entries with little to no story at all. 2 - It's ground-breaking in having solid tone and an unusual combat system.

Scope

3 - I don't think I saw everything the game has to offer, in more than a few hours of [re]play. 3 - This may be one of the most ambitious projects I've judged this year, and if I wasn't bleeding to death all the time I would love to see how it goes, and even take a peek at the cyclops's maze. 3 - Very impressive scope for a 7DRL. You don't see NPCs and quests much in this time frame. The game has skills to develop, various weapons and enemies, and several distinct dungeon styles.

Roguelikeness

3 - Almost everything I expect from a Roguelike, and nothing that would disqualify it. 3 - Turn based combat, brutal difficulty, static world, static items, 9 key and bleeding to death with no way to stop your inevitable sad collapse. 3 - Yes, Roguelike!

One of the better 7DRL games I've played. I kept wanting to play it more to see more of it, but eventually had to stop. It is probably even more deep than my review accounts for. Beyaz Dag has you looking to save your village from a terrible plague, no matter the cost. You should not fight in this game. The game's description tells you not to fight and if you do more than beat a deer to death with your bare hands you'll be in trouble. You are on a quest to the top of a mountain (Beyaz Dag), to convince a goddess there to save your people from the plague.This is a deeply atmospheric game, with writing that hints at unseen depths. The main part of the quest has you clambering over the mountain and its surroundings, avoiding predator animals and bandits. The game is a series of quests: go talk to so-and-so, go kill so-and-so. The mountain map is always the same, so far as I can tell, while the occasional dungeons are randomized a bit (I think). The quest sequence is the same, too.The fact that the main map is always the same, and the quests are the same, means the game becomes increasingly repetitive to play as you gradually piece together how things work. The combat system, inspired by the old game Wizard's Crown, is interesting but fairly lethal, and I never found any additional healing bandages beyond what I started with. Combined with the fact that enemy pathing is very poor (it's easy to leave them stuck behind a boulder), and that you earn nothing from killing enemies beyond the occasional new weapon, it's clear that combat needs to be avoided. (The readme says as much.)You earn experience to spend on skill upgrades simply by exploring the maps, which is a design decision I applaud although with the pre-authored map it does get tiring when you replay it over and over as I did.

Six Two One

Completeness

3 - Complete and bug free. Includes an easy mode that gives you plenty of time and eliminates enemies. 3 - The game is clever, playable and beatable. 3 - It's polished.

Aesthetics

3 - Everything is clear. Colors are saturated, but appropriate. As is typical of a Jeff Lait game, the left of the screen has a cool looking visualization and this time it represents your "life force." The controls are fine, though strangely unused commands are still in the game. Even the first documented key (Rest) is useless as you're told that you don't have time to rest. Perhaps that's an intentional hint. 2 - The game looks nice, but just what the heck you are supposed to do and how to do it isn't very apparent off the bat. Also every time I tried to heal I was told I couldn't. 2 - A bit programmer-art but otherwise fine. It's using a demo-style animated fire effect for the health meter, and the game level can end up scrolling on top of that, which does not help readability.

Fun

2 - The fun part for me was figuring out how to discover all the words in the right amount of time. I didn't have the a Rubik's cube handy and couldn't find a good simulation online. Instead, I spent a little time thinking and came up with a simple solution. Unscrambling the words will be fun for some, but I only managed to solve a few before cheating and using an anagram solver. Some of the words are pretty obscure (e.g. Executrix); 2 - This game was very interesting, and it was neat to play a fresh game by a creator that I was told "was a legend" in the 7DRL competition. 2 - I did not enjoy it much. I was glad for Easy mode and an Internet anagram solver or I'd have given up in frustration.

Innovation

2 - The "tesseract" is rather unique, but it's another question how well the mechanics are incorporated into the roguelike genre. 2 - You certainly didn't run into a lot of word puzzle roguelikes out there this year. Or ones where you mash your face against a plinth to get letters. If anything this has taught me that the online anagram finders are woefully in need of more nine letter words. 3 - It is literally a twist on the Roguelike genre.

Scope

2 - The enemies are dead simple, but the word scrambling and face switching make it about average scope. 2 - This has all the fun and challenge that you could expect from a 7DRL title. I wish the words weren't quite so insane. 2 - Pretty good for a 7DRL.

Roguelikeness

2 - Seems like it's trying to jam a hypercube peg into a round hole. In other words, there are basic roguelike elements present, but they're somewhat superfluous to the main goal. As far as I could tell, the numbered enemies have almost no effect on the game besides being obstacles. There's permadeath technically, but it appears to only be triggered by your clock running out. 3 - Bump combat, demons saucy liches. Also permadeath, and rather high difficulty. It hits roguelike, at least in my book. 3 - It's Roguelike.

Your goal in Six Two One is to defeat the lich T'losh, who has trapped you on the face of an infernal Rubik's cube. Defeating T'losh is as simple as first discovering the letters in six nine-letter words and then descrambling them. The challenge is figuring out how to discover the letters quickly and then, if you really want a challenge, to descramble the words without an anagram solver. The game is not much of a roguelike, but it is a satisfying and mind-bending puzzle. Six two one is a letter unscrambling roguelike that honestly I am not smart enough to beat under normal circumstances. Easy mode and an anagram unscrambler I still wasn't able to get super far. Damn. The game's played on the surface of a Rubik's Cube; you can see one 3x3 grid of rooms at a time. Rotating the row or column that you're standing in reconfigures the rooms you can see and get to. The rooms of each face of the cube are color-coded so you can see where they came from.Each square of each face of the cube has a letter in it. You have to discover all 54 letters and build a 9-letter word out of the letters of each colored face. An optional easy mode lets you do this without being harassed by monsters.

Skeleton Crew

Completeness

2 - Simple but effective graphics; sometimes seems like the room starts venting for no discernable reason (if this isn't a bug it's a minor UI flaw). 2 - The game is complete, but execution is far from perfect. I experiences serious slowdowns and moments of unresponsiveness while playing it. 3 - This is a nicely polished game.

Aesthetics

3 - Entirely appropriate; nice level design. 2 - Looks nice. Not amazing, but nice. Color coded state of room is a nice touch. Some kind of targets cycling definitely will improve experience. 3 - It's got a good, coordinated color palette; the interface is clean and well thought out. The animated weapon effects are great; firing a machine gun and seeing the spray of bullets never gets old. The fire and atmosphere effects are quite effective too.My one complaint is that aiming and firing a weapon adds many keystrokes to a turn. One suggestion might be to allow firing only in the cardinal directions and rely on movement to get aligned with enemies. I found myself doing that anyway because then you don't have put the reticle directly on the enemy; you can just move it one square in their direction and rely on the bullet flying through to the enemy.

Fun

2 - My first playthrough left me cold (down around 2 kelvin?) but going back to it a couple of times proved it had some interest. 2 - It's moderately fun to win it once or twice. 3 - I cannot figure out if there is a way to kill bloats without them exploding. I can't figure out if there is a way to keep skeletons from re-animating. Recovering from a hull breach is something I've maybe succeeded at once. Nevertheless, the game is really playable and fun; it keeps me coming back for one more run.

Innovation

2 - Twist on a standard setting, nice variation in firearms. 2 - I'd say theme of space and fragile environment is not untouched, but definitely not well explored. This game is another two cents into general 'how things can be done' bank of ideas. 2 - The atmosphere, fire, and level destruction effects are all really cool. The level generation is pretty good, and the monster AI is reasonable (undead don't have high requirements, but they can at least open doors and make their way toward you).

Scope

2 - Feels like a solid week's effort. 2 - Just enough for a 7drl. 5 weapons, several enemies, basic pressure simulation. 2 - This seems like a good scope for a 7DRL.

Roguelikeness

3 - 3 - There are resources management (ammo, health), tactical decisions (run away, blow a hole in the wall so that enemies are sucked into space, kill bloat to kill lot's of enemies at once). So, while minimalistic, it's a roguelike. 3 - Yes, Roguelike.

Zombies, skeletons, bloated exploding corpses - in space. The whole 'damage the spaceship and get sucked out the whole or die from suffocation' thing seems a bit random (since explosive enemies can spawn next to the wall) and hard to recover from. Nice little game. Destructive weapons/objects in fragile environment - hell yeah. In Skeleton Crew, the crew of your starship have succumbed to some sort of undead plague. Fight your way through three levels of the ship to the escape teleporter. The arsenal of weapons is familiar: pistol, shotgun, machine gun, flamethrower, rocket launcher. Be careful where you aim, though; puncturing the hull will result in depressurization, and you'll find yourself scrambling against the escaping atmosphere to reach a bulkhead and slam it shut before your oxygen runs out.Enemies have tricks that make life more difficult: skeletons can be felled, but will rise again after a few turns. Bloats explode when they die, which generally blows a hole in the hull.All in all, it's a cool game that I am terrible at; I spent an hour or more and never managed to get to the third and final level.

MagicianRL

Completeness

2 - You can't zoom in with shift-=, but need a number pad +. I had to blow the dust off my number pad to play! The kill count doesn't seem to reset on death. I'm not sure there is a victory condition, I seemed to get set to a point where I could go arbitrarily far, so gave up. 2 - Not sure if this game ends. Pathfinding and enemies noticing you are a little buggy. Also the game ran out of memory and crashed when I cleared level 6. 3 - It's pretty polished! I did have one out-of-memory crash when exiting the fifth floor.

Aesthetics

2 - Cute graphics for the play area. The air elemental reminds me more of a tunic than a tornado, however. The surrounding UI is very harsh and unfinished. Using WASD is forgiven for a EQ inspired game, and thankfully arrow keys work as well. You can't close the death screen with the keyboard but have to go to the mouse.I had a lot of trouble figuring out when and how the 'q' key or attacks worked; as I neglected to first target the enemy. Perhaps a "no current target, hit tab" could float up when this occurs?Having to clear all the enemies to advance can work, but without a to-kill counter it feels like a sudden teleport. I'd rather a ladder/portal appear when this occurs to let me move forward at my own pace.Click-walk is nice, but there is no way interrupt when you click leading to watching yourself suicide. I'm also always worried about click target mixed with click walk, a misclick can be disastrous. 3 - This game is very nice looking. Combat animations, animated walking and what I assume is unique tileset tie this all together. It's been a while, but the color scheme reminds me of befallen. 3 - It looks good! The UI is clean and shows what I need to know. The occasional "Following, master!" from the pet is cute.Complaints: * The walls and floor look very similar to each other. * It seemed like sometimes, but not always, I could use the mouse to select a target. Eventually I switched to using Tab because the mouse was so unreliable. * The movement animation was a drag when I needed to move across long distances on the map.

Fun

1 - It was a miss not to make the spell book full screen when meditating. That was the case in EQ, and would make meditation a lot more of a no-brainer. As it is, as soon as one finds the right strategy it is pretty trivial to kill/mediate/repeat.Smooth movement between tiles looks great, but is *painful* to play when you have to move through empty areas. 3 - It was fun to re-visit Everquest, the game looks nice and the icons and spellbook meditation are true to the original source game. 2 - It's fun for a few minutes. I had a nice difficulty curve from "Why am I dying so fast?" to "Nobody can stop me!"There's some good positioning play in managing the approach, but I feel like there is basically one strategy that works, which is to arrange for you and your pet to be next to a single enemy, then command the pet to attack it. The pet leads out with a stun and then it takes a couple turns of whacking the enemy to defeat them. Rinse and repeat.

Innovation

2 - I like how the non-regenerating health guides is coupled with a respectable melee attack. It isn't readily obvious you shouldn't bash people because it will work, only when you analyze your renewable resources do you properly adjust your tactics. 2 - Pet class combat supplemented by your own spellcasting. I wish there were more of a variety in the enemy pool, well more than one. 2 - I think it's atypical to have a sidekick in 7DRLs, but it is very common in the big-box Roguelikes.

Scope

2 - Good for a 7drl. 2 - The creator stuck to a strict schedule and implemented features in a timely manner over their seven day schedule. 2 - It's quite good for a 7DRL. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of a role for the spells, or a second monster, or some kind of progression in ability or change in the environment. Perhaps I didn't go deep enough, but I saw eight levels of exactly the same thing.

Roguelikeness

3 - Good tactical combat, so yep. To be more roguelike I'd want to see more wandering monsters. 3 - Turn based, procedural generation, permadeath, no items, but roguelike enough to me. 3 - It's Roguelike!

Magician RL is a simple maze crawler that has you playing a summoning class from an Everquest-like game. It does an excellent job of gently guiding the player to a pet-first playstyle through its game mechanics, avoiding any outright telegraphing of how to play. Unfortunately, once learned, the gameplay becomes simple and rote. Time to play a Gnome mage with his trusty air elemental beating up decaying skeletons probably in befallen. Clearing a floor advances you to the next floor. You have a few spells at your disposal including a powerful and vital air elemental ally. It's you and your pet versus skeletal warriors in a 7DRL inspired by Everquest's magician class. You're not particularly beefy so you have to work as a team to take down the enemies. Tell your pet which enemy to target, and use a handful of spells to offer support.

My pet is a rogue?!

Completeness

2 - The core of the game is present and playable, but it needs a lot more to make a whole game. 2 - I can see this game being beatable with a touch of luck, but otherwise, starting with 0 food I died my first time without knowing why my little gang of creeps wouldn't eat. Still, I think this can be beaten.

Aesthetics

2 - The controls are mostly straightforward, and the art is not entirely unpleasant. 3 - This game is cute. The hex based dungeon looks nice, and the goblins are clearly definable as goblins. Also the animations of the actions you assign your pets make it very clear what they are doing.

Fun

2 - I sent way too many minons into the dungeons just to see how far they would get before they died. This is rather replayable, with something of an achievement-oriented goal. 2 - I want to raise my pets further, but they are stupid. I wish I could send them the occasional command, or if they were smart enough to stick together instead of splitting up and dying. Seeing only two or one next to the campfire is rather sad.

Innovation

2 - Indirectly controlling characters/units isn't new, but it's also not common. 3 - I don't think there are any other pet sim roguelikes out there this year. and this one is interesting enough that I'd like to see refinement and further progression.

Scope

2 - About the right amount of game and content for a 7DRL. 2 - This game still needs refinement, and probably a little balance tweaking. Your little buddies die super fast and could possibly stand to forage or something, getting a little food outside of the dungeon.

Roguelikeness

3 - Turn based, random dungeons, looting of food / weapons / armor, equipment decisions. Very roguelikelike, given the scope. 3 - Turn based, difficult dungeon crawling with random item distribution and goblins. Lots of goblins. Also corpse eating, a standard staple in roguelikes.

Tamagotchi meets a roguelike. You have control over what your three minions spend their time doing, but not how they go about it. Send them into the dungeon to explore, fight, and loot. Tell them to cook, eat, sleep, or exercise. See how l