The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 8th
A new meaning to bullet hell, perhaps?
The eighth door on the 2023 RPS Advent Calendar leads, technically, to Hell, but the good news is that you don't have to go through it so much as stop anything coming the other way...
Working hard or hardly working? It's time to build your deck and upgrade your tower in Heretic's Fork.
Alice0: Time to log into your PC for another shift at your lousy job: stopping sinners from escaping Hell by building and upgrading defences. Ugh! As a tower defence game, Heretic's Fork is a simple one. You can't build mazes, you can't even pick spots to place towers, you can only build and upgrade parts in the limited slots on your central tower, which sits at the centre of the escape portal. Some towers are just types of gun, some swing spiked balls, some summon different units to independently run around and attack, and... that's about it for towers. What you're really building is your deck.
All structures, upgrades, and abilities are represented by cards. If you want to build or upgrade that flame tower, you'll need to draft one as a reward, buy it from a store, or craft it using auto-battler rules (combine cards of the same tier to create a card from the next tier up). If you want to boost your overall damage stats, yup, you'll need those cards. Same goes for active abilities doing things like throwing holy lightning bolts, dropping hellfire grenades, shielding, and healing. And if you want dropped coins to turn into bombs. Or to improve your crafting options. Or recover spent cards. Or... you could build into many different directions even if you used the exact same towers.
When I first wrote about Heretic's Fork, soon after it launched, this wasn't the case. Tired of needing to focus on particular paths if I wanted to win, I thought I had played enough and was about down with it. Then the updates started, and I haven't stopped. Tweaks and new cards have made it viable to mix different elements and structure types. Other new cards have added exciting new opportunities and combos. And new difficulty tiers to climb. And new characters. And a Christmas update is still to come.
Fun little fake desktop environment, too. Nice little paperclip pal. Funny and silly and grim little stories of corporate Hell flowing through your inbox. Love a fake desktop.