UNIVERSE PRISON Reviews

This game is very brutal but I love the art and the gameplay loop. I hope I can actually beat it some day.

This game is awesome. Very unique character and enemy design, unique concept. I usually play until i get to the level where it randomly deletes one of your characters. I'd love to see more from the developer.

This game is just too random. Even the in-game manual straight up tells you that you might have to restart because your seed is too difficult. This is flaunted as the game being "difficult," but there is nothing difficult about the game giving you unwinnable RNG. That's just cheap. You start as a random hero with a random assortment of items you can pick up. You are tasked with progressing to the last floor of the dungeon and defeating its boss. The problem is, your hero is already damaged and near death when you spawn, likely with little SP to spare on skills as well. I have literally been spawned where I am forced into a battle right away without being able to explore for more items and my character gets one shot. The game is basically nothing but turn based JRPG style battles. You can see and attempt to avoid enemies, but I found that enemies start to follow you and they're incredibly hard to avoid because they teleport towards you. There's also these black "blobs" and rings on the map that initiate a fight if you run into them. They will cut off pathways or hide items underneath them. The exit is always surrounded by one of these, and they tend to contain more difficult fights. You have a time limit to reach the exit of each floor. The timer slowly ticks down 1 point a time outside of battle. In battle, every action takes 10 points. Running from a battle costs you 100. You only have something like 800 points. If it runs out, it's game over. The thing is, the game lets you save before every floor. You also start with one save item in your inventory that lets you save anywhere. If you die, you can restart from your last save with all your previous knowledge of the floor (as long as you have a good memory). I don't really like this aspect because replaying a floor isn't exactly fun, but it's the optimal way to play if you want to squeak out maximum efficiency. I also think it goes against the spirit of being a roguelite. Did RNG cause an enemy to crit you three times in a row? Just reload the floor. More characters can be recruited from certain nodes you run across. You must first defeat the character in battle, which rewards you an item you can use to recruit them afterwards. From what I've seen so far, these are usually pretty difficult fights. Congratulations, you defeated and recruited a new party member...except, they start at 1 HP and level 1. You better have a way to heal them and protect them while you grind them up. On top of that, XP is now shared, so your XP rate is slowed. Harsh. Finally, the game has some more cosmetic issues as welll. The English is not great. You can probably tell from the description of the game on the store page. Overall, I can read and understand most abilities, so it hasn't been hindered, but the translation is a bit rough. The default game volume is also very loud. You can change the BGM and SFX volume, but the problem is that these settings are tied to a single character's save data. Any time you create a new character, you have to go and change the config settings all over again! Considering this is a roguelite, you'll be doing that often. Hitboxes on the enemy and the black "blob" sprites I think could also be better defined because I often accidentally initiate a combat I didn't mean to because I thought I was a safe distance away. All this adds up to a game I cannot recommend. I see some real potential in this game, but it's unfortunately not fully realized. The game confuses difficulty with cheap RNG, and that's its biggest sin. Given that this is a bit of a slower paced and repetitive game due to the nature of turn based combat, this adventure quickly becomes a tedious and frustrating experience. If you want a similar in style game that I think does a better job of being a dark fantasy turn based style roguelite, check out the game called Buriedbornes on mobile devices.