mysterious dungeons of desktop castles of dredmor (the roguelike)

i suppose that this is a review of sorts, but neither game i want to write about is officially finished, so titling it a  "review" in earnest seems a little unfair. of course, if you play indie games at all (which i do) pretty much every fucking game in the universe comes out nowadays in "alpha", "beta", "triad", "delta" and "half-cocked" stages for everyone to buy, and only 2 years later is it revealed that because the game is so not-mainstream it'll never actually be "finished", dude. because actually finishing is for The Man, or something.


so yeah. i want to write a little bit about some roguelikes i've been playing, how a game that forces you to constantly do basic math can still be fun, and how sometimes i get so fucking mad at video games i really just want to kill and eat somebody, anybody, to make the pain stop.


and now that i have scared the absolute SHIT out of you, here we go.


this is a tale of two roguelikes: mysterious castle and desktop dungeons (and, to a lesser extent, dungeons of dredmor). so maybe i should talk first about what the hell a roguelike is, in case you don't know. according to the internet, "The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue." according to game designers, however, a roguelike is "whatever the hell we want it to be because people tend to buy games with words like 'roguelike', 'procedurally-generated world' and 'permadeath' in the description this year".


if you're benedict cumberbatch's sherlock holmes, you can probably tell from the capitalization in the first quote that i pasted it in here from wikipedia, while you can probably tell from the lack of capitalization in the second quote that i made it the fuck up. but they're both completely true!


so. i got into roguelikes the way that i got into pretty much anything i've done that's been fun in the last two years except for high-speed sledding: minecraft. among many, many other things, i was drawn to minecraft because of the procedural generation of the gameworld, its stressing of freeform exploration, and the very heavy consequences of failure/death (there's no permadeath, but death is still a huge pain in the ass, unlike in most games nowadays). i hadn't really seen these qualities expressed in a game together before. they were new to me, and they were exciting. never-ending, randomized worlds? fuck yeah! with no map or totally prescriptive goals, so you can just wander but still feel a sense of accomplishment just by surviving? that's how i feel about real life, so YEAH! so when i started to see lots of other games with these buzzwords attached to them (unsurprisingly, shortly after minecraft blew up like a skyscraper-sized creeper), often for 2-3 bucks on steam, i started buying them by the virtual fistful. very quickly, though, this buying spree brought me to wonder if roguelikes were actually supposed to be fun, or if they were instead just some weird mutation of a "game" that you "play" for insanely sadomasochistic people who don't actually know what either of those words mean. 


take, for example, dungeons of dredmor (or, as i like to think of it, rageons of ragemor). this is billed as a "beginner's roguelike", so unlike something completely fucking nutballs like rogue or dwarf fortress, dungeons at least acknowledges that there might be a bridge between semi-autistic dungeon-crawl savants and your typical frat boy whose gaming literacy only extends to the best camping spots on the latest iteration of modern warfare's multiplayer maps. dredmor acknowledges this by tricking impressionable gamers with a pretty interface and an interesting presentation style and then it crushes their goddamn skull to a pulp by striking it again and again with a huge microwave while belting out lyrics to korpiklaani songs at the top of its lungs.


dredmor is not a bad game, per se, but it's a game that makes me question if i understand what "game" really means. so much time needs to be spent sorting equipment, digging through loot piles, and interpreting excruciatingly detailed minutiae just to get past the game's first few levels that i felt like i was hooking up an HDTV/DVR combo instead of playing a video game. even on the rare occasion that i succeeded in completing a level (and had paid enough attention to understanding why i succeeded), i was just exhausted afterward. this trailer makes it look both fun and easy, but it was neither of those things for me.

i was intrigued by the game's premise: that a turn-based affair with potentially endless dungeons, heavily randomized loot and a modicum of stat-based strategy could have such a small focus: that you didn't need to command armies and the fate of the multiverse every time you took a turn, that you didn't need to micromanage the grain watering rate and the education levy percentage every time of ever province in your entire civilization every time you took a turn, that turn-based gaming could be a bit more personal than in something like civilization. distilled in such a way, turn-based gaming with a touch of roguelike-ness could be a satisfying puzzle generator. fortunately, the makers of desktop dungeons were apparently thinking the exact same thing.


desktop dungeons has been my favorite go-to activity during writing breaks for something like six months now. for one thing, the game hits that perfect balance between "easy to play" and "difficult to master", and as such, every time the dev team tweaks something or adds something or removes something else, it makes the game (in a sense) completely new without forcing you to relearn the basic rules. also, it does something brilliant by taking the rogue formula and not only making it more accessible but confining play sessions into quick 20-minute dungeon runs. this deals brilliantly with a problem that many devs haven't seemed to notice yet: that procedural generation can easily come to just mean "really huge, boring levels". i've felt this even a bit from time to time in minecraft: you're a player playing a game, ultimately, taking time out from your actual life to get caught up in the game's world, but also to feel the sense of accomplishment you get from, you know, accomplishing something. in minecraft, that "something" is often as simple as finding a new cave, forging a new plate of armor, or just climbing a mountain and checking out the surrounding landscape. often, though, this new breed of procedurally-generated, "open-world" game seems to assume that exploration for the sense of exploration is enough. but it's not. and desktop dungeons realizes that, and shrinks each dungeon adventure down into almost a puzzle-like, single-level encounter that, at the end, you either win or lose. the overworld map and all the game's unlockables make certain that you never lose a sense of the game's scale, but the small levels make sure you're always getting the feedback that makes gaming fun.

mysterious castle, on the other hand, is like a not-quite terrible girlfriend when you're 16 years old: generally i'm unhappy around it, but it offers me something that i can't see to get anywhere else. in the metaphor this "something" would be sex, but in reality, i'm not entirely sure what it is about castle that's so absorbing. it is a game that was originally made for tablets, as is pretty obvious from the tablet-y (but still effective) interface. exploration is a bit more random in this game, but ultimately unsatisfying, because the game so badly wants to hold on to the roguelike aesthetic of "super-difficult, only for maniacs" that it sort of ruins itself. and with that, after about 2000 words, i've finally realized the thesis of all this shit that i'm writing. genre cross-pollination is well in good, in general and in games in particular. but i'm starting to think that making all games a little bit like roguelikes is not a great idea. the genre's qualities are very niche, and they're not something that transfers well. desktop dungeons works because it's a dungeon-crawling game with RPG elements, but it's self-imposed constraints (of scale, of time) make it more of an RPG/puzzle game than an RPG/roguelike. castles is troubling to me because it's actually really visually interesting, the battle system is efficient and intuitive, and fighting/looting is fun. with, say, a leveling mechanic, it would be a neat little RPG. instead, because it's interested in grafting roguelike elements onto its structure, it's something much less fun. every enemy encounter is a new terror: are you going to randomly meet enemies against which you can triumph? or are you going to meet enemies that slaughter you no matter what you do? either of these can happen at any time, without warning. and, because there's really no clear way to make your party stronger, faster, better armored, etc. (aside from random loot drops), there's never a real sense of progression. sure, i eventually got to the point where the absolutely easiest enemies in the game couldn't really effectively destroy me instantly because my new armor was too awesome. but then i just ran into a group of 20 of them instead of a group of 5 and they mutilated me. mysterious castles is like icewind dale if you took out the ability to level up and just threw the player in one of the game's dungeons randomly with no regard for how well-prepared they were. 

so basically, i think i'm perturbed by everything suddenly having to be roguelike because all that really seems to mean is "really difficult" and "devoid of ludic rewards". i'm no inexperienced or lazy gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and so while it's possible that i'm just bad at games like dredmor and castle, i think it's much more likely that they're just bad games. they might be good [insert something else], but i don't know what. 


that said, i keep coming back to castle for some reason. there's something about the graphical style and the battle system that makes me keep thinking that if i can just get strong enough characters, the difficulty will taper off and i'll be able to enjoy what would otherwise be a really excellent little RPG/dungeon crawl. but i'll probably just quit in rage again 20 minutes from now, braining myself with my own water bottle and screaming obscenities that haven't been invented yet.