Caves of Lore is a pretty great time. It's pretty easy to pick up and play, you get a lot out of it, and the ambience is rather nice. I will say however that some of the mechanics or puzzles may require a little lookup at times.
It's a really, really addictive roguelite with great replayability, plenty of hidden content, and soothing music. What's not to love?
Nox is a wonderful, wonderful game that probably didn't get the attention it deserved. Released in the heyday of the ARPG, when Diablo had launched onto the scene and everyone and their mother was trying to make a similar game, Nox often gets unfairly lumped into the pile as a "Diablo clone." But this isn't truly accurate. The Diablo series leveraged procedural generation to keep dungeons "fresh," and even from the start emphasized acquiring gear of better and better quality, assembling sets, etc. Many of the ARPGs of the era did similar things. Nox took a RADICALLY different tack; nothing is procedurally generated and the plot is perhaps more linear...but this allowed the developers to focus more tightly on the feel and look of the experience. The art direction is excellent; every region and environment *feels* different, and aside from a few areas (tombs tend to be the most tiresome parts, visually),things tend to be colorful, distinctive, and interesting to look at. Enemies are immediately recognizable and fun to fight. Nox is interesting to look at and interact with, and handily avoids the problem of samey, procedurally generated dungeons whose changing layouts and spawn points are the primary source of freshness. Combat is relatively fast and kinetic. As a Warrior, you'll find yourself trying to close with opponents, charging in and smashing enemies down. As a Conjurer, you'll throw swarms of summons and arrows at your enemies...and as a Wizard, you'll kite relentlessly and work to manage your depleting mana and meager health. It's pretty easy to use your abilities; the control scheme allows you a lot of control without having to stop what your character is doing. And the game is....funny. Sometimes in kind of a groan way rather than a ha-ha way, but it has a goofy sense of humor that helps keep you engaged and enjoying yourself, from the opening cinematic all the way to the end.
Look, Drova is pretty great. You're teleported to a weird alternate universe/place, you've got nothing, you're struggling to fight off rats and dying repeatedly to single wolves, and somehow, SOMEHOW, you have to get out of this mess and...what? Get home? Make a new life? Who knows? What you DO know is that you'd better earn some money, scrape together some decent equipment, and try not to get. Like. Eaten. Or stabbed. Or poisoned. Or shanghaied to work in The Mines. If this sounds familiar and comforting, you probably played the Gothic series way back when, and yes, Drova's definitely got some DNA from there; but rather than being a German Countryside Simulator, it's more of a Celtic Otherworld Roguelite. It's hard, but you can make it. Sell drugs! Sell skins and hunted animal parts! Brew potions! Make traps! Get involved in a religious dispute! Bet on fights! Drova's got options. You're a survivor, not The Hero....mostly, until you are. If you don't like pixel art this may not be your jam, and that's ok. If you really, really want to play a Mage Character.....well, I won't say there's no options, but let's just say they're probably not there for you right at the start. But otherwise it's a pretty great little RPG with plenty to enjoy and lots of dying to random gnats, cursing, reloading, and joyfully hacking your way back into the fight.
This game is a fascinating dungeon-crawler with some problematic flaws. The most interesting aspect of this game is the movement system. It's tile-based (and it takes one "move" to turn) and your enemies are just as subject to that as you are, so you will find that combat encounters require circle-strafing and maneuvering, and that backing around a corner can allow you a moment to strike at an opponent's flanks before they turn to face you. This is fantastic. However, certain fights can start to feel like strafe-fests, and while that's not necessarily terrible, It'd be nice to see environments more cleverly constructed to incentivize movement options that are not "circle-strafe" or "back away." That brings me to the environments. They are beautiful. The art direction on this game was clearly solid, although the pure dungeon-crawling aspect of the game doesn't necessarily allow the most ridiculous of environmental designs. You will see a lot of brick walls and torches, and that's ok. You won't get too terribly tired of seeing them. Then there are the puzzles. Most puzzles are not very difficult. That isn't always a bad thing - certainly a game with a food mechanic can benefit from giving you challenges that don't require hours of head-bashing to solve. However, I'd like them to be more creative and more challenging than they are. One puzzle is solved by winning a staring contest with a gargoyle head, as one reviewer mentioned, and another - a torch-position-swap - is practically given away by a "riddle" scrawled on the wall. This isn't necessarily terrible, but it stretches the suspension of disbelief a little and the riddles (yes, there are others) tend to be pretty easily decipherable. There's nothing functional about the game that should preclude making really interesting puzzles, and it's disappointing that there are very few of them. That's not to say, however, that you won't fist-pump in the air a little when you overcome some of the puzzles or find a new way to use the environment against your foes; it's just that as solutions tend to be fairly basic, it won't necessarily take you very long to figure out the answer and it won't feel like a major intellectual accomplishment, just a routine but pleasant defeat of an environmental foe. The magic problem has been mentioned - you may find yourself using a lot of antidotes when you didn't expect to, and since the scrolls don't seem to be randomly distributed...well, some Mage builds are arguably just better than others. The first spell you get will be fire-based. I'd appreciate seeing more dungeons from the developers in which some of these issues are addressed; I think the puzzle problem is the biggest one, but making the effectiveness of a mage depend so heavily on whether his build matches the predetermined scrolls you find is also a serious flaw. Nevertheless, the art is nice, the movement and combat are interesting and the general feel of the game is solid. I have enjoyed what I've played and I'd like to see more from this developer.
