Dungeons of Dredmor

[Orv]

I imagine many people have wanted to give roguelikes a shot, and while Dwarf Fortress sort of qualifies, I can definitely see why someone might be turned away.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/98800

- Graphical Interface, and point-and-click to boot.

- Randomly generated levels, loot and enemies

- 36(?) skills to choose from, from Vampirism to Mathemancy.

- Stab dudes, take loot, level up. You want more from life?

Did I mention it's 5 bucks and you'll probably never beat it?

I just spent far too long on the first level of the dungeon, got to the second and promptly got my face kicked in. I was a warrior-type fellow but running Vampirism. Vampirism doesn't allow you to eat food, but you can drink potions. As such, the only way to get health is to hit things and then explode ("eat") their corpses, so I got into a situation with very low health and it just went poorly. Ah well, Fun.

I'll do a proper write-up later (today or tomorrow) when I've had sleep and haven't been sick for a half week.

(Top Score: 5524, Level 2)

Oh, and this.

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[shammack]

I've played about an hour of this and it looks like there are some promising mechanics, but I have serious problems with the interface.

You move around with WASD (no diagonals!) or by clicking on a tile to auto-path to it. Clicking on a tile can also interact with whatever is on top of that tile (like to open doors, pick up stuff, attack a monster, etc.), but you have to position the cursor very precisely to indicate which of those things you want to do, so I frequently found myself trying to close a door on a tile and moving onto that tile instead, or trying to attack a monster but walking around it instead. Since it's a roguelike, having stuff like that happen can be pretty disastrous.

Also, whenever you pick something up, it just attaches to your cursor and then you have to manually move it all the way into a slot in your inventory or belt before you can do anything with it. There's just a lot more mouse movement necessary than I would prefer -- but it's also not practical to play it with mouse only, for the reasons I cited above.

There's also no hunger mechanic, so if you get low on health or mana, there's little to dissuade you from just waiting around until they regenerate (granted, that's not an exciting way to play, but it is the path of least resistance, so if you're playing with the goal of making progress, why would you eat your food when you can save it for later and just wait for a bunch of turns instead?). And you can't attack enemies by walking into them, which just annoys me on principle.

The art and animation is nice, the crafting seems like it could be interesting, and it has a sense of humor that's sort of amusing without being overbearing about it, but these issues make it pretty frustrating for me to play; I find myself asking whether it's really worth struggling with the interface just to play a roguelike with less complexity than free ones like Nethack or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

[Drath]

This is definitely interesting. I'm not sure if I will actually pick it up or not yet, but considering I am working on a roguelike game, and this is another modern roguelike, I may have to for "research" reasons, haha. There seems to be some genuinely cool/unique mechanics going on.

The strange thing I am finding about the visuals; although they are great and cool looking. They don't seem smooth, but this is inherently because it's a turn based game. It makes it appear very rough and harsh for people not understanding the underlining mechanics of the genre. It seems like if they want to have a fully animated game, they should have added some type of animation system where each turn transition would be animated, so it doesn't look so disconnected for the roguelike-unfamiliar player that this game hopes to attract.

[Murdoc]

Seems like a game I'd be into, but I can't stand the art direction. It reminds me of those paper doll web ad things, where you dress your doll to look like you.

Just horrid.

[Irishjohn]

Seems like a game I'd be into, but I can't stand the art direction. It reminds me of those paper doll web ad things, where you dress your doll to look like you.

Just horrid.

Yeah, I fired it up, but... I don't need everything to be mid-1990s GOTHIC and INTENSE or anything, but it just feels like a bit of a turn off.

Having said that, I want to give it more of a shot. I've never played a roguelike before.

[Lu]

It starts out pretty cool, but then every floor, besides the tileset is completely the same. Even if the enemies look different, they still do the same things. So, the longer it goes on, the worse of a grind it gets, really. Basically, once you've seen the first 2 levels, you've seen all of the game.

[F4T C4T]

I'm enjoying this one despite the art style and interface issues. As mentioned already here the picking up of items can be tedious and clicking to move around can be a bit clunky while the double height of the walls and certain objects creates a lot of confusing situations I find, hiding passageways, enemies and, though I haven't had this happen yet, potentially traps too I'd imagine (unless they aren't allowed to appear on hidden tiles, which would be sensible).

More nit-picky but I feel should be pointed out as the devs claim to have improved the interface of the traditional roguelike, is that I can seemingly do everything with the mouse apart from wait a turn. Which I've needed to do often enough to become annoying when I'm in my favoured position of relaxing back in my chair, one hand on mouse, one holding a cuppa.

That all sounds a bit harsh but as I said, I'm still enjoying it despite those issues. The exploration, skills, crafting, loot and humour are all hitting the right spot and I'm keen to go back and discover more. I've spent 4-5 hours so far and like Orvidos, a lot of that time was just in the first level (I've only managed to get to the 2nd level so far due to wanting to explore everywhere first) and there feels like there's a lot more to be seen.

I see your point about more complex free roguelikes Shammock, but I think something like Dungeons of Dredmor has a place for people interested in the genre without wanting to dive in at the deep end. The visuals (disregarding taste) and interface alone (despite the aforementioned issues) make it something I'd happily add to the very short list of roguelikes I'd recommend to newcomers along with Shiren and Powder.

[a purple future]

shift+click puts an item directly into inventory. if you do end up with an item attached to your cursor though, you can either drag it onto your character, or his portrait at the bottom of the screen to quickly drop it into the inventory.

i also found that turning on the option for "movement keys also attack and open doors" make the movement a little less tedious. you can also turn on auto-loot and set up filters (so you can have him only pick up food items or arrows or any combination) to make things less click happy.

it's still a little clunky control-wise, and the microscopic menus are annoying, but those things help somewhat.