“Oh, I would but I can’t: I need to play Spelunky‘s Daily Challenge.” For a fair few weeks, friends bailed on all sorts of commitments to squeeze in a crack at the leaderboards on that day’s randomly-selected seed. You might remark that I have flakes for friends, and you’d be right, but I can’t grumble: if The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth adds daily challenges, I will ditch every commitment short of a funeral to hit the day’s run.
First things first: I had every intention of making this a full Wot I Think, but, um, the game’s so damned tough/ I’m so damned weak that I haven’t been able to progress far enough for that. Impressions it is, then! I may follow up later with thoughts on the later game if I manage to get there in a timely fashion.
I have been posting about Desktop Dungeons for 9% of my entire life. Not constantly, of course, though sometimes it feels like it. Who’d have thought a a clever little one-level roguelike could wind up taking three years to come to fruition? ‘Tis a strange thing indeed to be sat here, offering a judgement of sorts on a free downloadable game I enthused about back in 2010. That free downloadable game is now a far fancier-panted game with a pricetag, which was released yesterday. I’ve been playing it today. All of today. Read the rest of this entry »
After exactly 98 million years and 17 seconds in development, tiny puzzle-roguelike Desktop Dungeons will finally see its big, fat, proper, expanded, more or less finished release next week. If you haven’t played it since its superb initial, free version, you’re in for something that’s changed almost as much as L’il Kim’s face* – rather than a quickie, randomly-generated dungeon which must be ‘solved’ in a very precise order and which clearly warns you of looming death, now it’s got an overworld, quests, character upgrades, an overhauled art style, a proper soundtrack and all sorts.
Can one of my favourite games of 2010 also end up being one of my favourite games of 2011? That’s a question you’ve been worrying about a lot, I know. So, allow me to answer it: maybe. Now allow me to answer that more usefully. Desktop Dungeons was a freeware indie title which pretty much transformed a roguelike into a logic puzzle. One dungeon, one character, an array of monsters of varying toughness scattered around it. Your challenge was to work out how you could kill your way up to the boss monster, by way of using spells, pickups, stat upgrades and devising the most efficient ways to level up without losing too much health or perishing in the process. Honestly, it’s an apparently effortless example of fitting one genre neatly inside another. Best of all, it only takes 10 minutes to play a session, and as such the original DD – now its ‘alpha‘ – will probably stand proud as a perfect gaming snack regardless of how well its new, Unity-powered do-over does.
That latter is a paid game and now in beta, but accessible only to those who’ve preordered. I’ve been taking a look at it (by ‘look’ I mean ‘playing until 3am’) and some thoughts follow. But – big but – these are thoughts on an unfinished beta, which has a ton of features, polish and changes yet to come. If you so much as hint that you’ve interpreted this as a ‘review’, I’m going to smack you so hard. Read the rest of this entry »
Oh! How did I miss this? Well, I missed it because I’m tight as a badger’s rear end and haven’t preordered the full version of exceptionally clever mini-roguelike Desktop Dungeons as yet. The original game (now designated DD’s ‘alpha’) was and remains free, but devs QCF Design are currently working on a massively tarted up and feature-boosted second version in Unity. A few of you will have briefly trialled a few elements of it in May, but now there’s a chance to give even more of it a spin on a longer-term basis. Read the rest of this entry »
As mentioned yesterday, the goodly folk behind the wonderful Desktop Dungeons have opened up a free-to-all demo of their planned ‘full’ version of the ingenious puzzle RPG.
You can play it in your browser, via Unity, right now, but it only lasts for the duration of E3 – i.e. until the end of Thursday. Hurryhurryhurry.
One of the best games of last year, the 10-minute puzzle-RPG Desktop Dungeons, is getting ready to dress up in daddy’s clothes. It began life as a freeware indie gem, but now devs QCF quite understandably want to make some money from their creation (unfortunately, someone else already did). They’re taking preorders for the new, improved, embiggened, super-flash ‘full’ version. Why would you want to pay for something that’s already free? Let’s read! Read the rest of this entry »
Desktop Dungeons: an incredibly smart roguelike, which takes 10 minutes to play and turns roleplaying into something akin to a puzzle game. We went slightly bananas over it last year.
Desktop Dungeons: a game ripped-off shamelessly and sold for profit by someone else. Following an attempt to buy the DD devs off with a free iPhone (!), clone-game League of Epic Heroes finally panicked in the face of DD’s lawyers and disappeared from the App Store. There ensued a web-wide argument about plagiarism/inspiration.
Suffice to say it’s been a strange year for South African studio QCF Design. Seems like a good time to chat to their boss Danny Day about just what happened, the curious moral debate around game-cloning, the welcome resurgence of roguelikes – and what comes next for DD now the dark doppelganger’s out of the picture. Read the rest of this entry »
The ‘games I keep meaning to play’ list has now reached the proportions of [unkind joke about your mother redacted], but today I finally found time to peer curiously at 10 minute RPG Desktop Dungeons. Kieron previously posted about it here, wherein the gigantic wibbling wimp praised its design but moaned about its difficulty. I have successfully proved myself the stronger man than he, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the balance-tuning patches added since release. Read the rest of this entry »
Tim Ashcroft gave me the nod on this, which I’d spotted around but hadn’t actually got around to playing. As usual, more fool me. Desktop Dungeons is a short-form rogue game, with almost everything you’d expect in a more traditional game crammed into something you can burn through in 10 minutes. It ends up feeling like a cross between a Rogue game and Minesweeper, with a splash of Patience. I suspect many of you will find a permanent space for it on your laptop, and I explain why below… Read the rest of this entry »
