The devs describe it as “an open-source, single-player, tactical role-playing roguelike and action game set in the world of Eyal.” Check out this gameplay video to get a taste for how it works:

Here’s the best part: the game is free, and in the best traditions of the roguelike genre, its development is open source. Which means that it technically isn’t “done,” and never will be, so long as people want to go in and add more stuff. But it’s currently at version 1.00 Beta 37, which I gather means you can play through the game and have a very complete experience doing so. Nab the game here.

Misfortune is a single player online RPG, in which you find yourself lost in a strange city. The story unfolds slowly through a series of short unique missions and strange events.

Two things I like about Misfortune: the art is quite nice, and you will frequently encounter text-based vignettes as you explore. You will seldom have more than one or two choices during these events, but some of them involve ability checks with branching results, which I appreciate.

The game uses a grid-based first-person perspective, and has a definite dungeon-crawling vibe to it even though you spend all of your time traversing city streets. The game runs in real time a la Dungeon Master, but you play only a single character.

Unfortunately, there is a noticeable lack of variety to the missions themselves, as well as the environments where they take place. Dungeons are generally fairly linear and simple to navigate, and lack any significant traps or puzzles. Moreover, you cannot return to areas once you’ve cleared them. I would not be surprised to learn that these missions and their associated dungeons are randomly generated. Combat literally plays itself out for you: the only interaction required of you is to click on each enemy once to target it. To put all this another way: there is no challenge to navigation, and battles are almost entirely devoid of tactical complexity. This might be a nice, gentle introduction to RPGs for the new player, but there really isn’t enough there to keep an old hand at the genre occupied.

Misfortune is free to play, though it relies on certain tricks common to Facebook games of the Farmville variety (e.g. limiting you to a certain number of missions per day and prompting you to post things to your friends’ walls when you finish quests or gain achievements). Even moreso than the last browser-based RPG I posted about, this feels like something Zynga might release. Whether that is a good thing or not, I leave to the reader’s judgment.

Still, the game is free, so you might as well give it a try. Below are some screenies showing what it looks like.

Although LoY is a roguelike, it features a basic, functional GUI and auto-mapping. Additionally, like roughly half of all indie RPGs (and 90% of indie roguelikes) currently in development, LoY uses Oryx’s spritesheets from the TIGSource Assemblee competition*.

LoY is still in development, with updates about new features and content posted on the developer’s blog. Currently, the game is playable past level 50, at which point “advanced” classes become unlocked. My initial impressions: it’s quite accessible, but it also feels very lightweight. I can’t comment on whether it gets deeper later on, however. Those curious should go ahead and give the game a try, as it’s presently free-to-play.

*A few use Oddball’s instead.

Guest Review by Tof Eklund

Monster’s Den and its sequel Monster’s Den: Book of Dread are pure hack-and-slash. As Book of Dread is half-sequel, half updated version (it includes the
original dungeon in Monster’s Den in it), this review effectively covers both games. The Monster’s Den games incorporate old-school front and back row turn-based combat as well as the sort of magic equipment, skills, and shopping we’ve come to expect since Diablo. Story in these games is intentionally nominal (you’re exploring a dungeon to rid it of evil, whaddayawant?) and exploration is simplified to a nicety, so it all comes down to inventory management and combat.

The Book of Dread is part of a RPG sub-genre intended to be picked up and put down easily, the “lunch break” CRPG. This genre’s most celebrated title is Desktop Dungeons and its archetype is probably Fastcrawl. Desktop Dungeons is very puzzle-like in its balance, with emphasis on careful exploration in a vaguely “Minesweepery” way, and while exploration is less important in Fastcrawl, that game still features locks, traps and puzzles. Monster’s Den falls at the other extreme, using its map mostly to allow the player to pick his or her battles and eschewing puzzles in favor of randomized combat and treasure.

The original Monster’s Den came out a year after Fastcrawl and may have helped kill that game by being more convenient (Flash) and less expensive (free). Perhaps the most important part of the game is selecting the characters that form your party at the beginning of the game. Figuring out how you want to combine the skills of different classes is half the fun of the game. Unlike some Flash RPGS (the Sonny games, for example), there is no Diablo II-style skill tree so you can get the skill you want most as soon as you hit level 2. Book of Dread increases the number of classes from 5 to 7 (on Kongregate – only 6 on other sites) and enables some new strategies.

Combat can be pretty intense, though focusing on one strategy tends to trump flexibility with the exception of a few skills and items that are much more effective against specific enemies (the Cleric’s Smite skill v.s. Undead, for example). Each level of the dungeon (in both dungeons) will have only monsters of one type, so knowing when to put Smite back in your Cleric’s skill set is a no-brainer.

The boss fights (1 per level) remain relatively interesting as a chance to buff up with pre-combat bonus potions and an increased chance of having to fight with a cog or two missing from your war machine.

This game’s weakness is a common one to RPGs – repetitiousness. Once one has maximized one’s equipment for a particular strategy, there’s little reason to vary it, and the lack of story means there’s no new plot to unlock. Worse, the items and monsters cycle: it doesn’t take long to see that you’re only getting the same kinds of equipment with higher bonuses, and fighting the same monsters with higher stats.

Taken to an extreme, this sort of gameplay becomes either slow and animation heavy, as with Adventure Quest and its free cousins, or automatic, as with the parodic Progress Quest or the bizarrely irony-free Infinite
Tower RPG. Book of Dread plays quickly and offers a nice range of options for customizing the difficulty and feel of the game – the “no energy regeneration in combat” option makes the game play in a very different way, but also renders a number of skills useless in a decidedly uneven way.

Daniel Stradwick deserves kudos for these games, which he created single-handed, and “Book of Dread” has remained one of the most popular games on Kongregate as it offers a satisfying hack and slash experience in a free game. I prefer my RPGs have strong, interesting stories, but here the lack of plot means that there’s little reason not to abandon a game when the grinding gets stale, and not having a story is better than having a hackneyed cliche of a story.

The game option I’m most likely to return to is the “hopeless siege” scenario as it gives you a party of 10th level characters and a single trip to the store with a decent war chest before sending endless waves of monsters at you with no chance to recover (eliminating the already marginalized exploration mechanic entirely).

Stradwick has collaborated on a Dragon Age tie-in Flash RPG and has two more Monster’s Den games in the works (the ambitious Godfall and an interim game using the Godfall engine called Chronicles). You can find info and links here. We’ll see if Godfall ups the ante in an interesting way, preferably with tiered addition of new game elements and a significant plot. Of course, if it does, it will almost certainly have to sacrifice some of the “pick up and play” appeal of the existing games.

Verdict: 3/5. Monster’s Den: Book of Dread comes out of the gate stong, setting reasonable goals, and hitting them with precision for the first half hour to an hour of play. After that, however, the lack of new elements (same monsters, same skills, same equipment) drags the game down. It’s a good “lunchbreak” hack and slash, but lacks staying power.

If this sounds like a relationship sim, well, it basically is, except that it’s apparently more about exploring and traversing a non-linear narrative with multiple endings than it is about time allocation and grinding for stat points.

Here’s a choice quote from the review:

Highly unconventional gameplay hiding behind a conventional facade, an occasional lack of polish to the system, and the game’s queer themes make it a labor of love. I can’t image what a pitch meeting with a publisher would be like for this title –- though I think there might be more of an audience for this sort of game than the conventional wisdom would dictate.

I’d post a screenshot, but you already know what RPG Maker assets look like. If you’re curious, you can nab the game free-of-charge right here.

Anyway, here is a gameplay video:

Gameplay video – Indie DB

You can nab the game Through this link, once you’re Through reading this news blurb.

…Through.

Here is a list of the games that were finished within the time constraints of the challenge:

–If Only, a short but funny time-travel RPG in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. (You’ll know if you won because you’ll get some cake.)

–Multi-dimensional Man, an RPG with Cursor*10-style mechanics.

–Retroactive Quest, a time-travel 3D action RPG rendered in pixelated style.

–Tiny Puppy RPG, a distressingly cute RPG in which you were born as (what else) a tiny puppy. You must bark to scare away other dogs and seek out your bone.

Hit the jump for the rest of the games…

Here are the others which made some progress but didn’t manage to make it in under the deadline–hopefully to be finished in the future!

–Aether Gears, a steampunk RPG in Unity where scientists successfully discover the existence of aether in the late 1880s and use it to power machinery. It has really nice 3D graphics, but not much else yet.

–Docken Quest, a 3D RPG in which you are a photographer who must travel to the past with your camera and prevent bad things from happening by gathering documentary evidence (i.e. taking pictures).

–Dwarven Commando, a remake of the C64 game Commando with axe-throwing dwarves and goblins.

–The Gateway Circle, a party-based RPG involving a supernatural alternate history of Stonehenge.

–Nexus City, an RPG about…well, I don’t know what it’s about. But Terry Cavanagh is working on it, and it looks interesting.

–Sunset Mirror, a 3D RPG in Unity involving steampunk, nazis, assassins, and time travel by SophieH of Linear RPG fame.

I think we’ve all learned something from this challenge: don’t be too ambitious when you’re working under time constraints. (Or, more specifically: 1.25 weeks really isn’t enough time to make a 3D time travel RPG.)