1Dimensional Desperado
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BUY whichever Boots and a Hat you like! Don’t forget to check for their bonuses, penalties and price!
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EMBARK upon a journey along a fully 1-dimensional world! Move one way or the other, there is no wrong choice!
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EXPLORE every bit of randomly generated world with a single press of a button! You really have to! Or you will lose the game!
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GET REWARDED with those miraculous, fantastic potions for every brave act of exploring! You’ll need them to face the…
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DANGERS! Indeed, even 1-dimensional Wild West is not a safe place! Ward them off with one or more of the potions you have or else your hitpoints will take quite… a hit!
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MONEY! So, you were lucky and/or smart enough not to succumb to previous paragraph? Well, get paid for your hard work! The bigger the world you stumbled through, the heavier will be your pockets, allowing you to go right up at the top of this list and have another go with better equipment and even longer journey!
Challenge your preconceptions!
Your old routines won’t work here, learning from ground up is the only way!
Familiar principles all rolled up in a new form of gameplay!
Brute force will only get you so far!
Pick it up for five minutes!
Pick it up for an hour!
Walk around backyard or marathon through continent!
You are the one to decide the fate of your free time!
Silent gaming era is no more!
Enjoy your hearing being pleasantly stimulated!
Good ol' Western themed themes! Bips and boops from every button press!
Now you know why you bought that 5.1 Surround Sound System!
Read More: Best Perma Death Indie Games.
Necken
This is a rogue-like… a genre I am quite keen on… but what prevents each game from being the same as the last, and enables you to choose one over another, can often be their ‘identity’ … their atmosphere.
Necken is different to many of these games as it is not set in a dark dungeon, but a thick, verdant Swedish Forest, with dappled sunlight and mysteries behind each pixel tree. Accompanying this aesthetic is a peaceful yet somehow foreboding soundtrack … It’s a coupling which truly makes the game unique… but there are also many gameplay choices quite different to the usual dungeon crawlers I’ve played.
– Real player with 24.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Perma Death Exploration Games.
Great roguelike with hard but rewarding gameplay and looks like a swedish 8bit fairy tale.
The game is set in swedish folklore and will have you running around in a panic looking for wood and dodging gnomes in no-time.
It does a great job of never letting you feel safe and rich on resources and its a constant scramble for materials and survival. Once you’ve chopped all the wood on the level, thats what you have to work with, so inventory management is key. And, as with all roguelikes, once you die, youre back to (almost) square one.
– Real player with 11.5 hrs in game
Black Legend
This game is a rare gem, even though there are others like it. It’s true that it has gone through some rough stages, but if you like turn based tactics, this is a challenging title. Especially on higher difficulty, but unlike in the other similar games, the Ironman rules are not about the save scumming. You will die if you turn up that dial. That is certain.
You will only have one save and one goal, to survive. Luckily they don’t throw you in the deep end straight from the beginning, but you won’t be able to feel the bottom under your feet either. The encounters will start to come in fast, but if you’re into speedrunning, there is a sprint and you can find a way around the encounters. So anything is possible, but towards the end of the game, you will have to do some clashes.
– Real player with 89.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Perma Death Strategy Games.
I think when judging this game, it is best to keep expectations in check. This is from an indie developer and not a AAA one so there is a limited amount of time and money that can be put in a project. This naturally means some areas of the game will suffer and I am a bit more lenient regarding it.
My thoughts:
My first impressions of this game were actually very good. This is because I love the 17th Century period in general and was drawn to the turn based approach of this game. I have also wanted to play some of the classes present here in a game. The atmosphere of this game has been good along with how you can freely run around the city. The animations and designs, although not perfect and could do with some work, are still pretty impressive. I paid full price for the game and do not regret it as I do not find it disappointing or sloppy.
– Real player with 32.5 hrs in game
Stay Safe: Labyrinth of the Mad
MANY OF THE CRASHES HAVE BEEN FIXED.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THE OLDER REVIEWS.
The developer of the game actually tries to fix the bugs and crashes in this game (check the games update history). If your game crashes it (usually) sends a crash report to the developer automatically or you can simply make a post about it and you’ll likely get a response.
Anyways, actual review.
It’s a fun game. It’s a pretty simple rogue-like that is easy to get into but difficult enough that it’s actually fun. It doesn’t have tons of game mechanics you need to learn to enjoy it (I beat the game on my second try). It’s basically just your HP, Mana and positioning. No need to worry about breaking all your bones and being hungry or tired every 5 minutes. :) It’s actually pretty fair to the player and doesn’t feel like constant waves of RNG trying to make you lose. You get quite a bit of content for the price. There are a lot of spells/items to try and the enemies actually feel unique (they each have different spells/speeds/resistances). It takes about 1-3 hours to complete a run.
– Real player with 155.4 hrs in game
I totally adore this game, but the crashes! Still very painful, even after the various updates. I don’t mind having paid for this game, even if I may end up shelving it, because it has the potential to become unplayable. I’d just consider the payment a charitable donation to the devs. They deserve it, regardless. This is a super fun little game. I can see myself putting in over 100 hours into it. I grew up on ASCII rpgs. I said, ASCII, y’all. Haha. This game scratches that itch for me. I really do love it, but the crashes coupled with the current save mechanism makes for some very painful experiences.
– Real player with 29.0 hrs in game
Tales of Maj’Eyal
To begin with, I’ll mention that the base game without dlc is available for free at te4.org, so you can always just take a look at it and decide later if you want to pay for it because it’s one of the best games you’ve ever seen.
I’m the kind of person who leaves a game on while I’m doing other things (in fact I have another game open right now), but nonetheless, my 3k hours in this game is a fair indication of how much I love it. I’m not blind to its faults, so I will mention them later, but first I’m going to talk about what makes this game worth all the time I’ve spent in it.
– Real player with 4304.8 hrs in game
I 100% recommend this game and I feel like I am still not giving it enough praise in that statement. BEST. GAME. EVER.
Not a whole lot I can say that hasn’t been said before over the 20 or so years this game has been around. I didn’t start playing it until last year and the first dozen or so runs I thought this game was ‘overhyped garbo’. It took many deaths and about 60-80 hours of ‘off & on’ play (mainly when buzzed) before I was able to begin seeing the sheer beauty this game has to offer, hidden behind it’s incredibly retro graphics and at times obtuse UI/stat boxes.
– Real player with 1408.1 hrs in game
Age of Fear 2: The Chaos Lord GOLD
My friends on steam know that I have to completely love a game, or absolutely hate it, to bother with a review. Unfortunately that surprise is ruined by the thumbs up spoiler they put on these reviews. All I can do to make up for that spoiler, is tell you what you will be getting yourself into with this title. Bear in mind, this game is a trilogy and I have only played this installment (What can I say, I love Chaos on Warhammer, and the succubus looks like that girl all of us took home after drinking a case of beer, but you wake up next to the orc, so…..)
– Real player with 78.5 hrs in game
It has been a while I didn’t write a serious review of a game. It also has been quite some time before the last time I had fantastic experience of an old-school strategy game. Strategy games are the victims of the long misleading direction of the development of the video game industry. Now the old-school indie & strategy games get so little attention is a sad story of ‘graphic does matter’ problem which I strongly disagree.
I was dying to see a marvelous old-school chess types of game back onto steam and never thought it would be possible until Age of Fear 2 has come.
– Real player with 43.2 hrs in game
Templar Battleforce
I was in a mood for strategy and blowing things up one day. I found this game while I was cruising through my queue and pretty much bought it impulsively. How’d that turn out? Surprisingly well. While I haven’t gotten too far into the game yet, it did provide me with some inspiration to start a Let’s Play of something that wasn’t a dating sim. (And the dating sim Let’s Play didn’t even begin that long ago either.)
Before I get to the review, this is important to note. The thing about this game that may either attract or repel you is that it is heavily reliant on dice rolls.
– Real player with 152.7 hrs in game
Templar Battleforce is a sci-fi turn-based strategy game played on square grid maps with a focus on squad tactics. While it does have a story that accompanies the campaign, it is the gameplay, post-combat unit development, and a surprising amount of polish that makes this game so enjoyable. It doesn’t re-invent anything within the genre, but the mechanics are tight and well-explained, and the unit progression will hook players who, like me, love to work towards a better and better team.
TL;DR at the end.
– Real player with 116.2 hrs in game
ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Ancient Domains of Mystery… what a name. Truth be told, of all games I have played on my PC in the last 15 years, ADOM has surely been the one I keep returning to most often. And if there’s anything that hasn’t changed since the first time is that, whenever I do start up a new character, I can hardly keep myself off the game until the character dies… or until I win. Today the game is officially released on Steam, and the least I can do to repay ADOM and its team for hundreds upon hundreds of hours of fun is to review it.
– Real player with 1030.1 hrs in game
There’s a lot I could say about ADOM but I’ll try to keep this brief:
Positives
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The fact that the base ASCII game is, and always will be, free (it’s included in the Steam version, but you can download it stand-alone from the official website)
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The new graphics update makes it much easier to see what’s going on and control your movements compared to the base game (i.e. if a monster is hostile to you, health bars, dots above sprites denoting status effects, the ability to click on things is especially helpful in your inventory,
– Real player with 660.7 hrs in game
Rift Wizard
The first thing you should know about Rift Wizard is that it has no unlockables, which already makes it better than basically every other commercial roguelike out there. Just install the game and go ham with all the (so far) 130+ spells and 60+ skills already available from the beginning, no holding the player hostage with the same old moronic reward cycle that deliberately vandalizes gameplay because developers are so terrified of players figuring out their game is boring and there’s actually nothing interesting to do that they have to hide all the (pitiful) content behind more hours of your time than the entire game could ever really provide.
– Real player with 146.4 hrs in game
Short version: Rift Wizard is an amazing and challenging puzzle roguelike that will repeatedly put your analytical skills to the test as you experiment with fun free-form build combinations and explore realm after realm full of interesting creatures and hostile wizards.
Long version:
There’s just so much strategy packed into an accessible interface with simple, intuitive controls and plenty of information at your fingertips, pretty much everything you need to succeed–if you’re careful ;)
Rift Wizard is EXTREMELY overwhelming at first because you really do have instant access to the entire spell and skill list, over a couple hundred of them, each with their own variety of possible upgrades that offer so many options for dealing with the wide range of threats you’ll face, from mapwide effects, to creatures teaching other creatures spells, to creatures spawning more/different creatures, to creatures growing more powerful when they see certain types of spells cast, to simply way too many to mention–lots of interesting mechanics out there, and the battles get really really crazy.
– Real player with 72.4 hrs in game
Die Like a Hero
Play with a die that got tired of just being used and decided to become the game’s protagonist. In turn-based combat, he’ll do anything to be the hero of that game.
Your main skill will be to attack at the right moment, only then will you be able to reach the end of the game and be a hero.
Fight like a die! Your attack will be the number on the die that is face up, so move wisely.
Features:
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Procedural Generation - Procedurally generated environments and enemies;
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Permanent Death - Each death is a new experience;
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Turn-based combat - Use your best combat strategy;
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Rogue-lite - Less harsh and punishing mechanics.