Hack, Slash, Loot(HSL) is a single-player turn-based dungeon crawler for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Take control of a lone hero and explore sprawling dungeons, fight dangerous monsters, and most importantly, plunder valuable treasures.

It isn’t at all clear from that bare-bones description exactly what it is that sets HSL apart from the roughly gagillion-and-a-half other roguelikes coming out right now. Luckily, Adam Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun has taken care of that for us. According to him, the thing that makes HSL unique is the game’s simplicity:

It may well be the simplest roguelike I’ve ever played, with actual visual approximations of the things you’re looting, hacking and slashing, a point and click interface, and no inventory to manage. There’s equipment in abundance, but it’s a case of choosing what you want and leaving the rest on a dank floor somewhere.

Oh, and there’s no leveling up; you can only improve by getting better equipment. Which probably makes this not-an-RPG. But my guess is that most people will still think of it as a proper roguelike, so I’ll allow it.

Have a computer that runs Windows, MacOS or Linux? (I certainly hope so.) Have $10? (I hope that’s so, too.) Want to buy this game? (Oddball probably hopes so.) It can be yours for the price of $10. Buy it here, or grab the demo (W/M/L) for a substantially cheaper $0. Finally, as is our custom, we present you with a trailer so you can see what you’re getting yourself into:

Peace, justice, honor. Society is at a pinnacle undreamt of by mankind of old. The king reigns over dozens of tribes peacefully, justly, honorably. Grievances are few, and dealt with swiftly and openly. Everyone is content, the people love their king, the nobles serve the people, and society advances…

Such is the tale told to naive children, the illusion that keeps the poor common folk from seeing the horrible reality. Their world is crumbling. A corrupt nobility props up a vain and cruel king, who in turn sends young soldiers to vicious pointless wars. Every corner of the kingdom is aflame, the great royal army streched thin, facing enemies that fight like ghosts. The tribes of the kobolds, elves and orcs see the kingdom tottering, failing under it’s own weight, and sieze their chance at vengeance.

Amidst the chaos, people whisper rumors. Rumors of conspiring cabals, of a great ‘plan’, of a foreign invasion. Some say that a war is coming, some say that a revolution is arising. But the wise know better. Sages and holy seers look at the wheeling stars in their slow precession and see that the great cosmic clock will soon strike midnight. The artifacts of the ancient ones hum and resonate in anticipation of… of something.

In this desperate landscape, there is a place, a forgotten forest with it’s forgotten people. From this lost corner of the world, strange broken rumors have drifted out, hardened scholars have returned changed into blathering prophets. They speak of ancient stones, magic beyond the comprehension of mortals, and of a mysterious castle.

Jeremy is currently developing the game for iOS, OSX, Windows and Linux, with an iPad port planned for the future. The game is $2.99 in the Apple App Store and free for other platforms. Jeremy has stated that he plans to move the free version to a pay-what-you-want model with a minimum payment of $0. Here’s a trailer showing off the game:

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.

NOTE: As of the time of this writing, Steam is discounting the game 10%, so it’s actually $4.49 a copy.

DOUBLE NOTE: According to Gaslamps’s Twitter, DoD is presently the #3 top-selling game on Steam. Wow!

Regardless, the game is out for a mere $4.99 on the App Store. Here is some in-game footage, as well as a link to Alec Meer’s (quite favorable) impressions of the game on RPS to help you decide if you want to snatch it up.

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.

According to the developer, Project Zomboid will feature a massive city environment with open-ended, sandbox gameplay; a dynamically changing game world; co-op multiplayer; and “advanced item crafting,” as well as “Starvation, illness, loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, insanity, trust issues.” Sounds like a blast!

Here is a video showing the engine in action:

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.

Avadon has had a remarkably short development cycle since its  announcement in May of last year, which makes Vogel’s remarks that he spent “an unusual amount of time on it” a little comical. (Avernum 6 was released for Windows just a few months prior to the announcement of Avadon.)

Eschalon Book II is the second game in the Eschalon series by Basilisk Games. Eschalon is an isometric, nonlinear wRPG reminiscent of Fallout and Baldur’s Gate. It does almost everything well, but there are a few areas where the game fails to live up to its promise.

Let’s talk about the things Eschalon does well. First of all, Eschalon is beautiful. The visuals all hang together perfectly, the scenery is vivid and lush, and all sorts of neat little environmental details really help the world come alive. Plus, everything you would expect to be animated is animated. (I’m looking at you, Avernum.)

Eschalon’s music is also very well-produced and atmospheric. It’s generally pretty unobtrusive, which is nice, since you’ll be hearing it a lot. On the other hand, it’s not very memorable.

The Eschalon game engine is simply superb. Everything is turn-based, but if you keep moving, it looks positively real-time. Hunger, thirst, gradually degrading equipment, changing weather and day/night cycles make you constantly aware of the passage of time. Eschalon feels like a survival game at times–it’s thrilling to play an RPG where your character faces a real risk of starvation if you don’t plan ahead. Darkness has noticeable effects on visibility and on your ability to successfully hit things in combat. You’ll need to stock up on torches to get much done underground or late at night.

The engine plays to Eschalon’s strengths: namely, exploration and loot collection. The world of Eschalon is huge, and once you get Cartography, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself compulsively traversing the wilderness in an attempt to simply map it all. I found myself wanting to put extra points into Cartography even when I didn’t really need to, simply because of how satisfying it was to watch the mini-map fill up with color.

The world of Eschalon contains many unmarked secrets. Wandering around, I often found myself stumbling across hidden caves, obelisks, bandit camps, and nests of unfriendly wildlife, to say nothing of abandoned chests full of loot. Occasionally, I would be led back to one of these places with a side quest later in the game, which I actually found disappointing: it was much more satisfying to find something no one else knew about, even in the fiction of the game world.

I have only two complaints about the exploration and survival aspects of Eschalon. The first is small but not insignificant: you can only view your Cartography maps as an auto-scrolling mini-map for the current area. You cannot create your own world map, or even pan the auto-map for whatever area you are in. This rarely has any impact on the gameplay, but it does make it hard for the player to look back on his or her mapping handiwork, which in turn cuts down on the satisfaction of having explored vast swathes of wilderness.

My second complaint is the fact that the main character evidently suffers from some kind of food-related learning disability. He is unable to recognize a potato or a cabbage without outside help. You literally have to take him to a magic store and pay money in order for the store clerk to tell him that the potato he is holding is a potato. Even worse, you can’t just tell him to eat the damn potato without identifying it, and once it’s been identified and eaten, he won’t recognize any new potatoes if you happen to find another one.

The only way your character is going to recognize staple foods is if you create him with a high Intelligence score. But the only characters who actually use Intelligence for much of anything are wizards. Which leads me to conclude that it is an act of magic in the world of Eschalon to know what a cabbage is.

Intelligence snafus aside, character creation in Eschalon is robust. Characters are eminently customizable, with a half dozen races, religions, and classes. There is also a full array of skills to choose from ranging from weapon skills to foraging, schools of magic to lock picking, dodging to cartography. Each religion functions like a Fallout perk, in that it comes with one advantage and one disadvantage (though you can always opt for Agnostic, which confers no advantages or disadvantages). Players who like tinkering with character stats will delight in the large array of options at their disposal here.

There is only one thing conspicuously missing from the skill list: pick-pocketing. There are so many chests scattered around the world that this doesn’t matter much for purposes of making money, but there are certain instances where it matters quite a lot for purposes of good role-playing. A good thief character ought to be able to simply lift items off of NPCs rather than having to bargain with them (or kill them).

Eschalon is competently written, with pleasant if rather unremarkable prose. NPCs you meet in the game will converse with you via dialog trees. However, there is an unfortunate paucity of memorable characters and dialog alternatives to color your interactions with them.

You have no Charisma or Personality stat, so there are rarely more than one or two ways a conversation can go. Most conversation trees give you two branches at a time: one “I’m ending this conversation” branch, and one “I’m continuing this conversation” branch. That’s mostly it. Consequently, the hand that guides conversations forward never manages to stay out of sight. You will always know that you are talking with a “Give a Side Quest” or “Advance the Plot” marionette. For a game so plainly about exploration, the inability to meaningfully explore other characters is a major oversight.

This stinginess with dialog options extends to the quests. Just to be clear: the non-dialog-driven quests in Eschalon are nicely non-linear, with multiple ways of achieving the same objective. Entering Port Kuudad, for instance, can be accomplished in a wide variety of different ways, few of them immediately apparent when you first arrive at the outer gates.

But once you start talking to NPCs, all this non-linearity goes out the window. Eschalon reprises one of the problems that plagued the original Baldur’s Gate: encounters that always devolve into fights no matter what you say or do.

Worse, quest-related dialog in Eschalon only supports one objective at a time, leaving you no room to manipulate the characters you’re dealing with. The game, in fact, affirmatively forbids you the opportunity to say one thing and do another. If you say you’re going to do something in conversation with a character, the game will oftentimes actually rewrite the quest in your quest book so that you can only complete the quest in that fashion. You cannot tell a lie. It’s like you’re playing Lil’ George Washington.

While I found the linearity of in-game dialog disappointing, it wasn’t bad enough to sabotage my enjoyment of the game. That honor was reserved for something else entirely: the learning curve. I played the game on Normal with default game settings. I played four different games this way, each with a different character. My conclusion? Eschalon Book II is balls-hard for the uninitiated. I’m talking billiard balls dipped in titanium.

To begin with, it is surprisingly easy to create an utterly useless character. I started off trying for a Cleric, typically a versatile, well-balanced character in wRPG tradition. “Yeah!” I said to myself. “A good melee fighter with healing spells–I’ll be self-sufficient and powerful in no time!”

Um, yeah. I began the game, left my cottage, and was promptly attacked by a giant rat. He immediately bit me, transmitting some sort of loathsome disease. Troll Syphilis or something like that. It cut two of my primary combat stats down by 50%. “Okay,” I thought, “I’m a priest. This will be easy to deal with. Where is my Cure Disease spell?”

Um, yeah. I had none. I didn’t even have a healing spell. All I had was something called Flesh Boil, which just sounded like a particularly nasty symptom of Troll Syphilis. So with my combat skills down lower than Verne Troyer doing the limbo, I only barely managed to survive the very first encounter in the game. I made it to town, slept, and bought some healing magic. “Okay–now I can heal myself. I’m a legit cleric. Time to try combat again.” It wasn’t long before I started fighting some black molds and needed healing. “Great!” I thought.  “Time to invoke the divine powers of healing!”

Um, yeah. You don’t get divine powers. In Eschalon, “healers” are basically just crummy wizards. I was carrying a sword, and the somatic requirements of my healing spell meant that I needed to have my hands free. So in other words, my disease-ridden “healer” couldn’t even use a basic healing spell on himself without disarming in the middle of a crowd of monsters.  I decided at that point that he actually deserved to die, and I left him to the care of the black molds.

My fighter fared substantially better. At first. But by the time I reached the second town, the quests required me to take down monsters way beyond my poor fighter’s ability to kill. I took a job to kill a sentinel plant, which looks like a giant spiky corn stalk. I figured I would walk in with my sword and walk out with creamed corn, but no: instead, the corn creamed me. I just kept swinging and swinging and missing and missing. (How does a corn stalk dodge a sword?) And then I was dead.

There is a continuum in game battle systems between luck and skill, randomness and determinism. Chess is 100% deterministic, the outcome of a match 100% decided by player skill. Games like Fire Emblem add randomness into the equation, turning the proceedings into a game of risk management. There can be a lot of strategy in risk management. But there have to be enough mechanisms under player control to stack the odds in his/her favor.

Most games with randomized hit/miss/damage accomplish this feat by giving the player a party to control. Eschalon’s cousins Baldur’s Gate and Arcanum do this. Avernum does it too. You have different characters with different abilities, and smart positioning and use of their respective strengths will usually triumph over bad luck.

Eschalon does not have this going for it. You are one character. Tactics consist primarily of using different combat stances and deciding when to use potions or run away. But for the most part, whatever your character’s hit percentage is, that’s it. You’re stuck with that and whatever the dice give you. And unfortunately, the way the game is balanced, characters spend so much time missing, they should be on the back of a milk carton.

I just know people are going to show up here and comment that I suck at combat in Eschalon. I mean, okay, I did die over and over again. But there’s nothing to suck at. Oh, sure, maybe I could have given my character a bow to take ranged potshots with. But that would have been a minimum of three skill points I’d need to take away from my sword skill, and even with me pouring all of my offensive skill points into swords, I could barely hit anything for the first 10 hours of the game. It would have just been me accidentally hitting cows and passerby with arrows, then drawing my sword in time to start a fresh batch of missing everything I swung at.

Wizards don’t get off easy, either. Their spells always hit, which is a godsend, but the early spells don’t deal much damage unless you jack up their level (and associated mana cost). And once enemies close the distance with a wizard, it’s time for the bookie to pack up and go home, because that fight is over with. Absolutely ensuring that wizards die constantly is the fact that it is nearly impossible to use hit-and-run tactics in Eschalon. This isn’t Fallout, where your move distance is determined by your character’s speed. For every space you move, enemies move one space. You can jack your character’s speed up to 30, and this will still hold true. (I checked.) So enemies will always maintain distance with you when you run away, unless you manage to interpose some obstacles to mess with the game’s pathfinding AI.

I finally managed a playable character with my second fighter, a blunt weapon user named Bash-ette. I rolled as close to straight 14s as I could get, then poured every single point I could into two stats and two skills: Strength and Dexterity, Blunt Weapons and Light Armor. I found and completed every single side quest I could in the initial area, leveling up and pumping all of my new points into those four skills and stats. I was level 6 by the time I made it to Everdale. I was just barely able to survive the quests in that area.

I now believe that I could create a non-combat-centric character and survive–maybe even do well. But it took about 20 hours of play time for me to figure out how that could possibly work (hint: run away from everything, save up your money, and try to get into Port Kuudad so you can buy combat training and complete all those quests you skipped from earlier). This will appeal to some people: this is a game that rewards patience and repeated playthroughs. This will turn off others: it takes a long time to reach a level of familiarity with the game world that permits even a single successful playthrough.

The verdict: 4/5. Eschalon Book II is enthusiastically recommended for patient players who don’t mind dying all the time while they figure out how to survive in the game, and cautiously recommended for others who don’t mind playing on easy.