Congratulations! You have died!

You think you have enough armor. You don't.

Well, I suppose I should post about the one game that’s taking over giant chunks of my brain’s processing “power”. Dungeons of Dredmor. Indy developer Gaslamp Games has dabbled in one of my favorite (and most frustrating) genres, the Rogue-like (aka a Dungeon Crawler). To steal directly from the wiki,

The game is a single-player RPG in which players traverse procedurally-generated dungeons, while killing monsters and collecting items to improve their character.

However, when you die, you are DEAD. Your character is gone, your money is gone, your stuff is gone, your save file is GONE. Do better next time, wussy. Roguelikes are not for the easily frustrated. If you can’t laugh off your death, this is not the game for you. I stopped thinking up new names for my characters since I kill them so fast. I now name them “Gnat” (as that’s the life span) and the Roman numeral of which Gnat they are. I’m at XIII now. (VII and XII were standout Gnats…;_;)

While playing through it, I realized how much hand holding the (awesome) DS game Izuna has. It’s in the same genre, but has a lot of creative ways to make your death less painful. Dredmor has none of the coddling, but lots of humor. It’s harder to get mad when your armor consists of a traffic cone on your head, flip flops on your feet and a cheap plastic ring on your finger. The entirety of the game descriptions are amusing and that goes a long way when the game decides you’ve done well enough and throws 50 monsters at you at once (not exaggerating, it’s called a Monster Zoo).

While this game is strict in what it is, you can build your hero any way you want. I’ve run a high damage berzerker, a crafting heavy character and even a warrior mage (still don’t know how that worked out as well as it did) There’s a large set of skills to pick from and they all have trees to expand outward. Three people can end up with three entirely different builds and still have levels of success. You can even roll a random set of skills. (there’s an achievement for beating the game with a random set called “I can’t believe that worked!”)

Dredmor does a few good things for me: it brings back that “Nintendo Hard” feeling. I find friends with this game and discuss strategy with them, and share my latest horrible death. (Seriously, the Bolt of Squid will kill you, be careful) I keep the wiki bookmarked so I can always refer back to it, I make character builds in my head when I’m doing something mindless. I always try to figure out why I died, and how I can tweak my build to be better. It’s always floating around in the old brain case.

It’s also good for busy gamers. In my 34th year, I find I just don’t have time to devote to games that I used to. However, Dredmor is busy gamer friendly. You can save at any point and play for as long as you survive. (this may be much longer or shorter than you had intended). You can turn off perma-death so you can load your saves, and there’s an option to turn on smaller dungeons for a quicker game with the same experience.

There’s a tremendous amount of stuff to think about when playing Dredmor. And the awesome/ridiculous part of it is that the game is only 4.99. There’s an expansion available as well (I’d like to get past floor 2 before I tackle that, kthx)

with six new skill trees, five new dungeon levels, a dozen new monster types, over one hundred new items, and a host of new rooms, features, and traps…

You can have the entire game, with expansion for 7.50 on Steam. That’s less than a meal at a “flare” restaurant, and without the horrible gas from the cheese sauce they insist on putting on everything.

What I’m trying to tell you, is that I really like this game and you should give it a try. It’s really a wonderful, horrible puzzle wrapped in stinky, stinky lutefisk.

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