Demise Talks Roguelikes

Winning a 3 rune game is often a tough idea for new players, who are swamped with trying to learn the controls and various enemies they need to defeat. This article should serve as a resource that will provide a framework to follow.

The order of winning

The general order for winning a game goes something like this:
* Dungeon until Lair
* Lair
* Dungeon until 15, then Orc (can switch between the two to taste)
* Return to Lair. Complete either Swamp, Shoals, Spider or Snake. Which one you do is based on preference, resistances, build and equipment. Each branch will be covered in depth later.
* Complete the other option in the above step. This puts you at 2 runes.
* Go to Vaults, down to V:4. Do not touch V:5 yet!
* Go to Depths.
* You now have a choice between Slime, Abyss and Vaults:5. If you survive this step, congratulations.
* Zot 1-4
* Zot 5. I put this in a different step because you should treat it like a “boss floor”.
* Orb run

At some point after depths, you can choose to go to Crypt and/or Elf, keeping in mind that entering these place increases your chance of dying (not always, but the point is that you just shouldn’t do it unless you’re going to die without more stuff).

Lair Branch Checklist

Here’s some stuff to help you figure out which branch is the right one for you to go to. They are listed in order of importance.

Swamp

* Something to fight against Hydras. Spells, blunt weapons or flaming edged ones.
* rPois
* Flight (can be replaced by good positioning)

Spider’s Nest

* Good positioning
* rPois
* Clarity
* Something to kill Scorpions (decent killing power)
* Sinv and/or invisibility for Ghost moths

Snake

* Very good Combat ability
* rPois

Shoals

* Flight
* Repel Missiles
* Invisibility (trivialises this whole branch if spammable)
* Magic resist
* Healing (These guys HURT)

Generally, you can expect fast, light attacks with poison in Spider, slow heavy attacks in Snake, mixed attacks in Swamp and fast, heavy attacks in Shoals.

Vaults

Vaults is a somewhat more difficult version of the dungeon. You will rarely die there until you meet the Vault guards: Ironbrands (Red), Convokers (Yellow) and Sentinels (Blue). Being marked by a Blue guard, having doors closed on you by the Reds and being heavily swarmed by the Yellow’s summoning are all instantly dangerous. Yellows are countered by killing them very quickly, Reds are countered by isolation and Blues are just straight annoying: Run to the exit or a corner and be ready to burn consumables if things get too tight.

Vaults 5 can be difficult for a 3 rune game because of these guards. Having a blue one mark you in V:5 is often a death sentence without cancellation. There is almost no feasible way to fight through an entire alarm period with a mediocre character. You will need to burn multiple teleports and pray to whoever you’re worshipping that you get out of it losing just a few potions. The Red guard, or more accurately the threat of them existing makes it extremely risky to stairdance the initial ring of vanilla guards. In addition to this, you will see the regular Quicksilver Dragons (which remove buffs on breath including teleports), Titans (smiting and lightning bolts) and the odd (Ancient) Lich.

Equin is a game that I was given a key to try out as a veteran content creator for traditional and modern Roguelikes. It’s a very slim roguelike (compared to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and other expansive projects) with pixel graphics, meaning you can pick it up the majority of the gameplay in about 10 minutes. The combat is more than your typical bump-to-attack movement, which changes the dynamic of the game somewhat.

There are a few things missing from it that will make a roguelike veteran cry though. Non diagonal movement I can accept, but the lack of a text log to annotate through the game’s actions, or the fact that your tile is completely unrelated to your equips, or the lack of a map makes this game HELLA confusing at times. This combined with the claustrophobia-inducing small screen size (especially on higher resolutions, you’re seeing around 10% of what you’d see in a regular roguelike) can make for some very disorienting gameplay.

On the other hand, there are also some very neat ideas, like auto-killing trash mobs by the time you’re stronger than them, or the way it transitions into an RPG when you enter combat, and the various things you can interact with intuitively. It also has boss fights, which are pretty cool, with a real sense of reward after beating them. The game itself is very streamlined, and you can master the majority of combat and movement within the first 20 moves of the game. The tight control scheme (only 2 buttons and the orthogonal movement keys) makes things intuitive: I’d find myself wondering if or how I could get something done, then I’d remember there are only two buttons and one of them was literally “do anything context-sensitive”.

Oh, and if you have an arcade stick or controller support, it runs perfectly, which was a very fun novelty for me.

Overall, I think the game has quite a few good points, but it could easily take a lot of ideas and mechanics from any “large’ roguelike to immensely improve the user experience without making the game more complicated. It doesn’t do anything particularly unique, but I enjoyed it for what it was and I think it’s a decent on-sale pickup if you’re into roguelikes as a genre. It legitimately grew on me over the course of my playthrough, and it’d be fun to do at least one completed run with each class. Given that the game is 3 dollars (cheaper than a bottle of Coke), I’d say it’s probably a very easy to justify purchase.

My final score would be a 6/10, and I mean an actual 6 and not a “this is a crap game” 6. It’s decent, but it lacks the uniqueness to separate it from other single-dev indie projects. I look forward to seeing if the game is updated.