FruitPie

After Dungeons of Dredmor and The Binding of Isaac, I was feeling pretty confident in commercial PC roguelikes and decided to give this "single-player turn-based dungeon crawler", which by the pictures, gameplay style and description is rather obviously a roguelike, a shot. This is basically a crash course on bad roguelike design : it offers many unavoidable ways to die, but no ways to curb the random number generator's wrath. Your HP doesn't regenerate AND you can't carry healing items, which makes combat a death sentence pretty much anywhere. Nothing hits with any sort of accuracy, making combat a giant dice roll. None of the characters appears to be different from the others, other than their starting gear. There's lots of different gear around that seem like they'd be useful, but you don't have an inventory, so you're stuck to what you're wearing. For the longest time, Poison, the most common status effect, was effectively an instant kill, as it never worn out and could only be healed by using a healing item. Which you can't carry. So Poison gave you a few dozen turns to live and either lug your sorry behind back to somewhere you found a healing item (and for whatever insane reason didn't use it right away to fix your combat injuries) or rush to the next healing item lying around, which doesn't quite work in a randomly generated game, now does it? You get rewarded for your foolish persistence with a new class every few deaths. I'm not sure if they're stronger than the starting classes or not (none seem to have any special abilities). If they are, this just adds some unnecessary grinding to get the game to actually play like it should - I think it takes some ridiculous four digit number of deaths to unlock all classes. If they aren't, then what is the point? The game is just giving you more ways to unceremoniously die. This is a basic, extremely simple roguelike and suffers for it. It has all the death, but none of the depth. All the ways roguelikes screw you over, but none of the ways they help you. This game seems to miss the point : roguelikes are generally fair. Their whole point is to give you powerful enemies and great challenges, but also give you even more powerful items and tactics to defeat those. Death is used as a learning experience - this is how you died, this is why you died, this is what you should've done to avoid it. This, however, seems to think the point of a roguelike is to die. Die early, die often, die all the time, die for no reason or fault of your own.