Book of the Old Reviews

A surprisingly solid game. The preview videos give you a pretty good idea of what the game is like, so check those out if you haven't already. Is the game worth your time and money? If you like what the preview videos look like, and you like roguelikes, then yes. If you want some more details, then continue reading. So what is this game then. It's a roguelike where you explore stages with a few randomly set up hand-crafted rooms in each of them, and deal with the encounters in these rooms. These encounters are most often combat oriented, with some trap avoidance, bonus boss', and "other" types in there to break the monotony. There's also nice risk vs reward thing going on between trying to keep at least 50 coins on hand for the maximum room clear interest bonus vs using that money to buy cards or card slots to get stronger and actually survive the next encounter. What kinds of rooms you encounter in any given run is determined at home when you make an exploration plan and set out. As far as I can tell, the game is set in and around a castle/manor, and different areas have different levels of pollution, those being light, moderate, heavy, and chaos twisted. On top of this you can select normal, hard, crazy, or nightmare for that exploration plans overall difficulty. When you clear a room, most of the time you open up an altar. From that altar, you can get new cards, and equip and re-equip the cards you already have. With the exception of the level start shrine, all of them have a tendency towards one type and color of card, as shown by the light they emit, and the symbol hovering in said light. This doesn't guarantee that an orange shrine with a puppet on it will always spawn either type, but you can always spend 2 coins to re-roll the 5 cards offered. So what are these cards you ask? They're your equipment. It's what makes you kill gud. Every card has a different type, color, and its own active and passive abilities. Every color has a set bonus, as does every type, so you have to mix and match colors and types, since there are only a handful of cards that share a type and color. The set bonuses do all kinds of different things, like increasing how many bullets you fire per shot, making your bullets explosive/toxic/bouncy, or summoning autonomous stationary shadow turrets etc. So besides having set bonuses, the cards also have levels, and you power them up by buying more of the same card. Buy 3 of the same card, and they combine into a level 2 variant. Get 3 level 2's and you get a level 3, which is where the upgrades stop. You get up to 4 active slots, and 6 passive slots, for a total of 10. While equipped the cards type and color are always active, but as you might have guessed, the slot type determines if the cards active or passive ability is activated. Thankfully the game has a card manual you can open whenever by pressing C, so you don't have to remember every card by heart, and can more easily plan around what shrines you should be rerolling. Now, seeing as the game is a roguelike, you lose all your cards when you die. Now let's talk progress, as in the stuff you keep even after death. Beating bosses gets you loot to be used in the home base, and collecting lore pages gets you other bonuses like more starting money. The loot can be used to create and upgrade a different type of item. These items give larger straightforward bonuses like more damage or health, but you can only have one of these in use at a time, so that's another choice you need to make for yourself. Then there's the grand daddy of video game progress, beating stages to unlock more stages. It's a simple system. You beat castle floor 1, you unlock floor 2. Beat basement 1, unlock basement 2. It's a challenging game, and I keep making it more challenging for myself by being too miserly, but I'd still recommend it to fans of the genre. That should be everything that needs mentioning, but if you, the reader, have further questions, ask away.