Roguelite

Jan

2019

Crawl

Record-Breaking Opening – Crawling Finish

When I’m not worrying about the misshapen lump on my shoulder, I often wonder if escape room enthusiasts exist. I know most everyone will enjoy trying an escape room once in their life. I imagine a good majority will still get a kick out of their second, third, and fourth times. By the eighth escape room, will a person grow tired of the similarities between rooms? At what point does the escapist realize they have a fetish for unlocking rooms in complicated, inefficient ways?

Crawl could be considered a video game escape room. You have to escape a dungeon full of rooms, but instead of puzzles, you’ll encounter monsters and traps. A standalone run can be completed in less than an hour. I can safely say the first 15 runs are spectacular. By the 20th, however, things become all too similar, and you’ll long for another source of escapism. Both escape rooms and Crawl grow stale and repetitive, but can we blame them if we’ve binged on them for far longer than what’s reasonably expected?

What is it?

Crawl plays much like my Saturday mornings. Your character regains his senses in a strange place surrounded by even stranger people, and it’s up to you to slaughter all that gets in your way and discover the exit to your hellish prison. It’s all a top-down dungeon crawler, and you have a basic attack, a rechargeable special, and passive items. You get stronger by killing monsters or by buying items in the shop. Once you reach Level 10, you can fight the boss and, ideally, win. Most likely, you’ll die before you even reach the second floor.

The run doesn’t end at death, however. Your spirit will rise from your corpse while another spirit regains its corporeal form. Your murderer now fights toward the exit just like you did, hoping he can escape and leave you sealed in your tomb. To wreck his schemes, you will have to set off traps, create slimes, and become the monsters yourself. If you kill him, you are reborn to begin the cycle once more. Only one can survive, and your enemies will stop at nothing—even controlling the boss, itself—to ensure their victory.

Up to three other players can act as your opponents, or you can go solo against computers. Each run typically lasts between 30-45 minutes and features procedurally-generated floors, ending with one of three bosses. Each of you will choose an ancient god at the start which bestows special attributes and provides you three monsters to summon. These monsters, in turn, can be leveled up and transformed into increasingly powerful behemoths. With all this variety, each run can feel like an entirely different experience, especially if you struggle with dementia.

What’s good?

Crawl welcomes newcomers without alienating veterans. The tutorial covers the basics of the game fantastically, and the controls are simple enough that newbies won’t be clawing out their eyes accidentally. Your human and monsters only have two attacks/abilities, but learning how to exploit your strengths while covering your weaknesses takes finesse and practice, thus catering to dedicated gamers.
The core gameplay is ingenious. You will rarely have time to breathe as you jump between surviving as the human and killing as the monster. With 66 traps, 61 monsters, 11 gods, 40 weapons, and many more items, each run will pose new challenges and ways of playing. On top of this, Crawl is one of the few games which appeals to any number of players, as long as that number is between one and four.
Once again, the game design is a smooth, inventive work of art, much like butter sculpting. The developers programmed a risk/reward system that prevents any one player from balling out of control. As a spirit, you may not gain levels, buy from the shop, or challenge the boss. However, your monsters will accrue experience (thus evolving more quickly), and you can wrack up gold by damaging the human. Even if a player is hoarding shop items and experience, you just need to reach the portal to the boss first and defeat it.

What’s bad?

The unlock system putters to a drip near the end. After your first few runs, Crawl treats you to about three or four unlocks, be it new monsters, gods, traps, or weapons. These features then liven the next run. After a set number of runs, the unlock rates drops to two per round, then one, then occasionally one. This system zaps the game’s momentum and highlights the following issues.
It needs more. This may sound strange, considering Crawl has a crypt full of monsters and weapons, but you’ll test all of them by your tenth run (excluding the few things you still have yet to unlock). Sure, I’m criticizing an indie game that already has a buffet of content, but Crawl only serves brunch whereas other roguelites have all three meals and a soft-serve ice cream machine. Without ample variety, Crawl has a set shelf life around 10 or so hours.
It needs more. The game has a great soundtrack, solid room designs, and a unique aesthetic. However, songs repeat too frequently, rooms can reoccur within runs, and floors reuse similar color palettes and textures. I recognize not many cultists are musicians or interior designers, but when the Cult of Thirsty Masochists looks the same as Ph’lotor’s Grim Groupies, I may not join either.

What’s the verdict?

Crawl offers inventive gameplay which will satisfy fans of dungeon crawlers, roguelites, or couch multiplayer. If you enjoy all three, Crawl is a Mecca of good times. It lacks an expansive amount of content, but this won’t hinder if you don’t play the game obsessively. As it is now, it experiments with video game genres to craft a wildly fun Frankenstein’s monster. If it had the same amount of content as the Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, Crawl could have been genre-defining, an immaculate angel which other games strive to become. Here’s to hoping we don’t have to resort to Satanic rituals to ensure Crawl 2 happens.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 8.5
Time Played: Over 15 hours
Number of Players: 1-4
Games Like It on Switch: Enter the Gungeon; Full Metal Furies

Scoring Policy

Oct

2018

GoNNER

Pronounced Like You’re Screaming Most of the Word

Today, children, we have a brief history of the roguelike genre. Inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, traditional rogue-likes focus on turn-based combat, procedurally-generated levels (typically dungeons), and permadeath. The likes of Rogue, Hack, Moria and other games you’ve never played established the genre. Games like the Binding of Isaac and Spelunky define the “rogue-lite” genre (or “roguelike-like” for my stutterers out there) which infused roguelike concepts with platforming, beat-em-up, or FPS gameplay. Although different in presentation, each roguelike/lite poses a steep challenge, requiring players to learn gradually as they die. And that, children, is how the genre led to the Education Genocide of 2015.

Like many others in the genre, GoNNER embraces several traits of a standard roguelite while experimenting with others to twist the definition of the genre. With its emphasis on high scores and simple gameplay, it even plays more like an arcade game compared to other roguelites like Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon. In this sense, GoNNER does away with many of the archetypes that muddy gameplay and reduce accessibility. In doing so, however, it limits its own potential, presenting an experience that’s refreshing but ultimately fleeting.

What is it?

GoNNER follows a droplet of water, Ikk, who goes looking for a fantastic gift for his beloved land-whale-friend. As is standard for a water-whale romance, Ikk must kill waves of enemies (à la the run-and-gun side-scrolling platformers of old) across four procedurally-generated worlds. Along the way, he will find new weapons, heads, and items to aid his massacre. He will also die, over and over again because that happens to water droplets.

As Ikk, you begin each run by customizing your loadout. Each head provides a different amount of health as well as a passive ability like a third jump, hovering capabilities, or explosion immunity. Next, your guns range from rocket launchers to shotguns to your standard pistol and serve to alter the gameplay the most. Lastly, you have your activated items which can give you an additional jump, temporary invincibility, or even an extra life. Shops are sprinkled between worlds, allowing you to change your loadout, but most players will find themselves most comfortable rocking their original gear.

Your weapon will clear out the majority of your enemies, but Ikk takes inspiration from Mario and can stomp creatures to death as well. Using both methods can be key in stringing kills together, and these combos reward you with more points, ammo clips, and purple glyphs. Glyphs prove to be invaluable later in your runs because with enough of them, you can respawn, ensuring your death doesn’t result in a game over. It’s like how rich, sick people use their money to buy organs off the black market.

What’s good?

GoNNER is one of the most stylistically beautiful games on the Switch. The game begins in monochrome, but vibrant blues, reds, and yellows later seep into the black background. Walls and floors are only visible if next to you, an enemy, or an item, and they appear and disappear based on everything’s movements. This effect creates a world that is constantly in flux, shifting and dissolving in response to your actions. If you achieve a high enough combo, the music intensifies, enemies become harder variants of themselves, and all visuals become a trippy multicolor masterpiece that tastes like rainbows. Achieve an even larger combo, and the world devolves into a stark black/white jittery metal album cover.
GoNNER makes the paradox possible by being an easily accessible but difficult game. You don’t need to read an entire Gamepedia website to understand what you’re doing or how to improve yourself. Dodge better and shoot better; that’s it. Although GoNNER won’t break you like Crypt of the Necrodancer or Darkest Dungeon, you’ll still encounter a sizable number of game overs before you complete your first run.
The daily challenge mode brings needed variety. It forces you to adapt to a random loadout and trek through unfamiliar level layouts. For those searching for a higher difficulty, this mode kicks you into the wilderness with nothing but a loincloth, a broken can opener, and two expired cans of Whole Kernel Fiesta Corn.

What’s bad?

In streamlining the roguelite genre, GoNNER severely limited its own content. It sprinkles secrets and unlockables throughout its stages, but you can find all of these in less than 10 hours. Compare this to the Binding of Isaac which still holds surprises after fifty hours of playtime, and GoNNER looks somewhat emaciated.
Due to the limited content, the game also grows monotonous quickly. Your items, heads, and weapons dictate how you play, but this is where the variety ends. Despite being procedurally-generated, the levels don’t change enough for runs to feel unique. As you attempt to edge closer to completing a run, the early levels blur together, becoming a sludge of mind-numbing running and gunning. Hi-score chasers and speedrunners will feast on this action, but everyone else will eventually tire of the tedium.
Difficult games usually punish poor plays, but in GoNNER, a well-intentioned but ultimately messy damage system offers cruel and unusual punishment. Based on the head, you have a set number of hearts, but when you take damage, your head, weapon, and item are flung from your body. As a defenseless water droplet, you must pick everything up once again to continue the fight. If you’re damaged again while headless, you die. Because enemies tend to swarm your body, you’ll often be utterly obliterated or down two hearts before you can escape. Fun, I tell you.

What’s the verdict?

For those who have read my Neurovoider review, my opinion of GoNNER sounds much the same but a bit less positive. GoNNER is a good game, and its art style and combo-focused gameplay offer a straightforward rogue-lite experience which can appeal to newcomers and veterans alike. However, the game does not stand among the best the genre has to offer. If you have burned through all of the other games I’ve mentioned in this review, then you can certainly place GoNNER on your docket without regrets. For the rest, you have some rogue-lite history to cover first.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 7
Time Played: Over 5 hours
Number of Players: 1
Games Like It on Switch: Enter the Gungeon, Tallowmere