7DRL Review Roundup! Fictional Roguelike

Well the 2012 7DRL (Seven Day Roguelike, or "rougelike" for WoW players) finished on Saturday, and a good large number of people actually created a working game in the seven days allowed, so I thought I'd do a review of them. I'm not guaranteeing that I won't run out of steam before I get through all of them though!

Fictional Roguelike by Tritax

Available here

This roguelike is written in Java and you'll need to download version 1.7 manually to get it to work.

Well the gimmick with this roguelike is that the screen is designed to look like the dungeon maps out of TSR Dungeons and Dragons modules. And very pleasing to the eye it is too: all clean lines and a grid, with the whole dungeon level fitting on the screen at once.

The actual game is rather simple. You have a maximum of 4 hit points but you're not actually a mage, you're a warrior I presume. There's no equipment or gold to pick up and no stats beyond the hit points I mentioned. There's only one enemy: a "k" (presumably a kobold) which you bump into to kill. You get to hold down the . key in between fights to gain your 4 hp back, and it kind of feels like bad luck rather than skill when you eventually die, as I did and you can see on the screenshot.

There's supposed to be bosses every 4 levels and a boss on the 17th and last level, a treasure to collect and ascend to the surface with. I didn't notice the boss on level 4 though. Perhaps I skipped him, as best strategy is to take the stairs down as soon as you find them since you're only risking losing by clearing the whole level.

Tritax wrote the engine for this himself, so I'm hoping that maybe next year he will build a more complex and engaging roguelike with this engine. As it stands for this year, Fictional roguelike is very nicely presented, but too simple and uninteresting.