RPS Feature Immersive whim
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
Accidental death simulators are wonderful. In Streets of Rogue, you can slip on a banana peel and set off a land mine. You can hack a computer and get caught by a policeman, who’ll cave your head in. You can set a bunch of stuff on fire but then run into the fire and die in the fire because it is a fire why did you run into that? Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature "I never asked for this"
Every week we send Brendan out to the slums of early access to see what goodies he can find in the rubbish bins. This time, the absurd chaos of Streets of Rogue [official site].
“You better pay this back,” said the bartender as I took the money from him. I left the bar in silence and went looking for some cocaine. It’s not often you get to play as an investment banker in a roguelike, and I am enjoying it. This one has the special ability to convince shopkeepers and bartenders to lend him money. I made great use of this skill in every bar or shop I came across. “You better pay this back,” each of my “investors” said to me. A couple of levels later, I was suffering withdrawal and trying to find a drug dealer for my fix when a gang of ninjas came out of nowhere and tried to assassinate me for being so deep in debt. “Phew,” I thought as I escaped their attacks and rounded a corner. Then I ran into the killer robot. He was also hunting me, and I’ll say this for him: he has much better aim. Read the rest of this entry »
If you fancy freeing a gorilla to murder some scientists so you can use their cloning machine to create a gang to do in a bartender, you might fancy a crack at Streets of Rogue [official site], which is free to try this weekend. Ignore the name: Streets of Rogue is not a beat ’em up, it is a curious emergent sandbox roguelikelike inspired loosely by games including The Binding of Isaac and Deus Ex. I’ve run through a few missions myself and yeah, even in its early access state it’s an interesting one to prod. Read the rest of this entry »
“I played it very briefly and made a bunch of idiots kill one another by dropping rage poison into the ventilation system outside their hideout,” Adam tells me about the free alpha for Streets of Rogue [official site]. It’s almost enough to make me stop grumbling that Streets of Rogue isn’t a roguelikelike beat ’em up. Instead, it’s some sort of stealth-o-action top-down 2D game with all manner of opportunities for immersive sim antics. Oh fine, that does sound interesting – but it better have neon punks and hot grooves.
