New release: Famaze

If you’ve been reading this site for a long time, you may remember me mentioning Oryx and his highly popular roguelike sprite sets back in 2011. After years of enabling roguelikes from other developers, it looks like Oryx has finally stepped up to the plate with a roguelike of his own!

The game in question is called Famaze. Which makes me wonder: is this game, in fact, f-amazing?

Well. It features some very nice art by Oryx, and has an original soundtrack by Disasterpiece. So those things are good.

Beyond that, though, I admit that I wasn’t overly taken with it based on a brief playthrough. Famaze takes the spatial dimension out of combat, minimizes the player inventory almost to the point of nonexistence, and separates the spatial navigation and graphical representation of the game world into two distinct panes (which means a constant choice between either seeing an attractive representation of the game world, or seeing where you are actually going).

Still, it’s hard to complain too much about a free game, and Famaze is as free as they come. Famaze isn’t even embedded in a page: the SWF is simply made available as a standalone file to be played in-browser or nabbed from Oryx’s Dropbox. Try it out here.