Perhaps it’ll be a chronic shortage of arrow drops and vending machines, rendering your crossbow useless. Because it knows that, sooner or later, its roulette wheel will wreak terribly cruelty upon you. It also doesn’t care if it briefly presents you with room after room after room of unguarded, fantastical loot. What this means is randomness runs rich in Dredmor’s blood: it doesn’t care if it’s monstrously unfair to you. It would surely be folly to try and balance so many elements, unless you’re someone with the resources of Blizzard. Its range of items, skills, potential mishaps and optional bonus tinkering, such as elaborate crafting and making fish-flesh offerings to a piscine god in the hope of reward, is simply immense. The thing about Dredmor is that, as far as I can, it’s incredibly unbalanced. It's not a game about rushing along dank corridors, giggling obscenely as you chop monsters into tiny monster-parts - it's about carefully inching along, forever wary, juggling so many balls at once that you're forever ringed by an orbit of skills, items, buffs, debuffs, long-term plans, short-term plans and near-death experiences. It might wear a cute face, but behind that smiling, simple visage hides dark and complex brain. For whatever is due to follow, it’s going to find the bar left pretty damned high by Dredmor. Perhaps they’ll be 2011’s indie comeback special, in the way leftfield platformers such as Braid and Super Meat Boy have been in recent years. I’ve got a sneaking, and very pleased, suspicion that we’re in for a lot of roguelikes over the coming months. I'm just some idiot.ĭungeons of Dredmor is a roguelike – a turn-based, dungeon-crawling roleplaying game where loot is plentiful, progress is tactical rather than gung-ho and death is permanent. Complacency, any Dredmor player’s true nemesis, had me. Giddy with victory, having spent my every arrow, every potion and every mystic fungus somehow holding off the flood of horrors from the monster zoo, barely alive but so joyful that I was, I was scampering back to the porcine shopkeeper nearby to dispatch my pile of unwanted loot. My own blade trap, put down moments before. I even survived the Monster Zoo, the dreaded room packed wall-to-wall with bloodthirsty enemies – twice. I fought cybernetic aliens, hulking Djinn, moustache golems. I survived the nameless horrors summoned by the Shrine of Eyeballs. I couldn't pretend to have beaten it - and it's very possible I'll never be able to - but here's what I make of it. More proof, perhaps, that big publishers' claims that the age of turn-based gaming is done and dusted are wanton foolishness.Īnyway! I've been playing Dredmor pretty much constantly since release. Indie roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor arrived on Steam late last week, quickly summoning a swarm of interest around it despite coming pretty much out of nowhere.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |