Game Review: Instant Dungeon!

Instant Dungeon! is a game with a simple concept and a clean, polished execution. It drops you into a procedurally-generated dungeon populated with items, monsters, and treasure, and your job is to navigate the dungeon, use the items to avoid or kill the monsters, get the treasure, find the key to the next level, and get through the door. It's even simpler than it sounds: the dungeon halls are only wide enough for one, and one touch from a monster kills you, so you need to find ways to circumnavigate the creature or kill it. You carry one item at a time, use it with one key, and every item is single use. In the end, you have three functions: move (one of four directions), use item, and pause. Simple. Not necessarily easy.

As you play, the game scales up complexity. Dungeons become larger, more intricate mazes, with a greater number of monsters. The items scale up in complexity too, and require increasing tactical awareness to use well: the dagger kills the first monster it hits. The axe kills every monster in a straight line until it hits a wall. The fireball is like the axe, but fires in two directions. The shield protects you from one hit, but you have to use it deliberately. The helmet you can put on, and it will protect you without action. And so on.

Complexity doesn't always mean difficulty, and it wouldn't here except for one additional factor: the darkness. As you go deeper, the darkness becomes more oppressive, until you can't see any more than what's in nearby line-of-sight from your character. This ramps up the difficulty more than the size of the mazes or the monsters, because you become far more likely to turn a corner into an enemy, or to get boxed in by two monsters you can't see.

Speaking of complexity, I'm not sure the procedural generation adds much to the game. The levels are rather similar anyway. It feels rather like the gameplay/decision-making loop is too small for the fact that the level is different than it was last time--or even than the last level--to make much of a difference.

Every fifth level is a boss level, with a unique monster whose attack pattern you must figure out to get the treasure. The boss levels are authored and break up the routine of mazes and monsters.

Multiple game modes don't add much to the game. As simple as the game is, it's hard to see how they could. Instead of getting the most treasure, the other modes require you to kill a certain number of specific monsters, or to rescue people from the dungeon. This last is the only mode I've seen where you backtrack through dungeon levels you've already been through, and also the only time I've seen a bug in the game. (The third captive was displace to be off-map, so I could see the "Help" speech bubble but not reach the captive, making the game unwinnable.)

Instant Dungeon! has a nice collection of character sprites for you to choose from, of all genders and types, and it defaults to a random selection. The captives are likewise drawn from this pool of sprites, and not always any particular gender. I thought that was nice, from a feminist point of view.

Instant Dungeon! is a fun diversion. Simple gameplay executed very well, and good for an hour or two of play. Instant Dungeon! is available for $1.99 from steam, desura, and others.

The Last Employee

It was her first day of work, and she was already late. Her brother had forgotten to wake her, but excuses would get her nowhere. So she ran. The castle sprawled rather than loomed. She ran in one of the servants' entrances and threw on her black maid's dress and white apron, tying it as she went.

No one waited to scold her in the head maid's office. That's when she noticed the quiet. No one else had been at the changing room. The hallways were empty. The kitchen was still.

Following a sound, she walked out to the courtyard. Amid the lord's famous roses stood the castle's lord, its entire host of employees, and a beautiful stranger. She joined the crowd at one end, as far from her employer as she could.

"Until that time, you and yours shall be cursed," proclaimed the stranger. With that, the lord writhed, twisted, and became bestial. Rippling outward, a light washed over the servants, changing them as well.

The light flowed through the crowd like a wave, changing them as it went. It rushed toward her. Seeing her fate about to be written, she took in her breath and said,

"I quit."

To Shoot a Man in Reno

He whistled as he walked down the dark alley. When someone stepped out from behind a dumpster with a pistol, he acted surprised. "Gimme yer wallet," said the mugger.

He stroked his chin in thought. "Mmmmm, nope."

The mugger's posture changed. He couldn't be sure, but it looked like surprise. "Whatcha mean, nope?"

"I mean," he said, "I'm not in danger."

"Not in danger?" The mugger waved the gun. "Whyinell not?"

"We're in Reno," said the man.

"So?"

"Shooting someone in Reno? Like that Johnny Cash song? Way too cliché."

The mugger looked around, then at the other end of the alley. "Just... gimme the wallet."

"No one shoots anyone in Reno anymore," he continued. "Too embarrassing. Look, you don't want to be cliché, do you?"

"Not... really."

"So you're not going to shoot me, so my wallet is safe. Simple as that. Want to walk through the alley with me? I'm on my way to a party. Hey," he exclaimed, "you should come! Probably ditch the gun, though."

The gunshot echoed through the alley. He squeaked, and fell down.

"The line's 'shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.' Me, I need the money. Way less clichéd."

Game Review: Lyne

Many games claim to be simple to learn and difficult to master. Lyne achieves that elusive goal of elegance in design and applies it to the game entire. The game's art and music are simple: clean shapes, colors, and lines; simple tones and rhythms timed to your choices. All make the game stand out visually and musically. Taken together, they make the game beautiful and meditative. That feeling meshes perfectly with the gameplay. The goal is to draw an unbroken line between two endpoints of like color and shape, hitting all the similar markers in between without crossing any previously-drawn lines. Lyne escalates this simple premise by introducing multiple shapes, and then color-neutral waypoints that serve as intersections for lines that otherwise can't cross. Add in the requirement that each intersection must be used a specific number of times, no more and no less, and you have all the ingredients for a puzzle game of scalable complexity.

Lyne is pleasant to play as a break from an otherwise-busy day. It's easy to play for two minutes or twenty, and if you reach the limit of your ingenuity working on the puzzles that come with the game, Lyne also produces a set of new puzzles each day for your puzzling pleasure.

Lyne is available for $2.99 on Steam and can also be purchased for your phone, I guess.

Ilyich's Binding

"For your betrayal, you must keep us safe." The whispered words echoed in Ilyich's ears as the blackness receded. His bleary eyes blinked open, showing him the smooth, translucent deck of one of the great Arks. He pushed himself to his feet, standing against the dizziness. The great, smooth deck swept out before him, dotted with low structures grown of the same pale material. He could feel the gentle swell of the water holding him aloft.

He couldn't walk. Looking down, he saw the flexible material of the deck grown over his feet. Following it, he saw he had no covering but the elegant feathers of the keepers of the Arks. He was the ship.

People boarded him. They made their homes in the Ark's structures and below decks, and ate from the gardens that grew there. They tried to befriend their keeper, who would protect them on the waters. He would only mutter or yell, "I was a man."

On the day of departure, they asked where he would take them. "Nowhere," he answered. He flexed his new muscles, his deck and halls. He forced them out, and sailed away. "Better to go mad in solitude than serve you."

Leftover Cucumbers

He wondered about his leftovers as he pulled them out of the company fridge. The carrots looked a little dry, which didn't bother him because he wasn't picky, and he was too lazy to get more. But the week-old cucumber slices looked a bit shiny in a way that made him nervous. He at them anyway. Chances are, he thought, they're fine. As they hit his tongue, he wondered if they tasted wrong. What do too-old cucumber slices taste like, anyway? As he played his lunchtime board game, he wondered if they were actually more slimy than he remembered, or was he making it up? Was this queasy feeling in his stomach psychosomatic?

He felt dizzy. Obviously he was just making it up. It's his imagination playing tricks on him. He has an active imagination, after all. Remember that one time in college when you were able to make your vision spin just by standing there? You weren't sick then. It's the same thing here. You're fine. You're doing great. You're--

You're better off going to the bathroom.

He walked, then ran, and still only made it to the drinking fountain.

He never knew if the custodian accepted his apology.

Game Review: The Wizard's Lair

The Wizard's Lair is an unambitious Rogue-like with simple graphics and few controls. It reminds me of the Castle of the Winds. You move in two dimensions, pick up items (armor, weapons, and useable items), and fight monsters through the classic method of moving into one's space. The game's simplicity is its weakness. There's very little to maintain interest over more than fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on one's penchant for Rogue-likes. After several hours of play, including several deaths, I reached the tenth of thirty levels. It was a maze of serpentine walls with a boss monster and a mini-boss named, for some reason, Daniel, a unique experience in the game so far. It was the first interesting encounter I'd had since starting at level one.

Simplicity makes the game easy to play, but also obstructs use. The few commands and the rudimentary inventory system get in the way of play. When you have to set down one of your items to pick up a new weapon, just to check if it's better than what you have, or to pick up and use an enchant weapon scroll, it gets in the way of fun play.

Strategy begins and ends with manipulating your position and waiting. If you use your turn moving into a square next to a monster, you'll take too much damage in the long run; if you move and time everything so that monsters move into a square next to you, you'll win. Beyond occasionally using scrolls that blast all monsters near you, that is the extent of tactics. At least Castle of the Winds had ranged spells.

The Wizard's Lair is available for pay-what-you-want at itch.io.