Cyclopean Steam Charts & Stats

My first thought playing this was "finally, someone nailed it." I think I might have gotten soft locked from an ending or two because of some unforeseen incidents, however I know the developer has been working diligently on these issues with feedback. Love the soundtrack and the visuals for sure- I know that's the main selling point, but this captures that old skool storytelling style I've been itching for since I took a glance at "Vermis". It's not as dark, but Cyclopean hits a sweet spot for sure. There is so much potential for this game and I'm looking forward to what the future holds for Cyclopean!

I hate to leave negative review but I think this game suffers for poor design choices. It looks cool and 2D to 3D transformation is interesting. However, the biggest issues are lack of constraints for player enjoyment and combat. The simplicity of this all is the one thing tripping this game over. Let's start with the combat. It is essentially glorified dice roll. Nothing against that, but game focused so much on combat player needs to have way more agency on the outcome. There is no real way to alter the odds or modifiers, like there is in many other roll-based roquelikes. That dilutes the experience very, very much. Other thing I mentioned is lack of constraints that guarantee player enjoyment. I love difficult games. However, I love difficult games that are difficult for right reasons. Here I many times spawned into a map full of spider-webs that took all my health away or blocked entrance to dungeons, traders with no healing items etc. It made progression really, really hard. This all paired with lack of visual clarity on the overworld made me quit really fast, altho I love many other roguelikes, old-school or new-school. It was hard to find anything on the map really. Biggest issue however still is the simplicity of everything that is not really taken as a strength here. Everything is simple yes, but it feels complicated to enjoy that simpleness, if that makes sense. Things are obscure and behind multiple clicks, there is very little visual indicators in already monochrome game and everything lacks control - no real roleplaying aspect despite what the tags say, as you essentially spam-click "attack" button and see who has better stats. I would love to see this game actually get some more meat around it: Actual skills, agency over how to build character and more control to random elements so it feels more refined.

My first few runs failed miserably. Died alone in a mine with nothing but rags and a torch to my name. Now slowly but surely, I'm getting the hang of it - clearing dungeons and befriending ghouls left and right. This is a true dyed-in-the-wool, number-crunching dungeon crawler that rewards reading, patience and knowing when to cut your losses and run from a fight. Its difficult-but-fair gameplay is also coupled with lovingly rendered pixel art that feels like it's ripped straight from a 1980's D&D Monster Manual, and a genuinely creepy ambiance and sound design that adds surprising immersion. If you want to feel like you're truly lost and terrified in a strange land while surviving by the skin of your teeth - this game nails that feeling.

Genuinely incredible. Haven't gotten far into it yet, but the game is genuinely so great and has that nostalgic feel, down to the scan lines on the screen and the screen resolution. The interesting mechanics that are fun to learn naturally make it really easy to keep going and force yourself to figure things out. Some of it can seem like button spamming at the beginning, just attacking low level creatures and what not, but it becomes really interesting within a couple of minutes. Already one of my favorite games this year

I have no idea what's actually going on with this game but it's not fun to play. I tried 10 runs in a row and every single one of them finished within 5 minutes without me making any meaningful progress or having anything interesting happen. Barebones retro roguelikes are fine, they are not fine when the sheer volume of choices you can make or actual content you can attempt to complete is basically non-existent. I'm genuinely shocked this game released in its current state.

I love this game. It's super cool. I have some complaints - overall it's very fun, but feels a bit shallow considering the creator made this for a game jam and later rereleased it with more content, but it still feels a bit like it's a fun demo rather than a full game. I haven't cleared a single dungeon all the way but the world feels very small and I would go nuts if this game was like a vintage style but had the ambition of a massive open-world game with tons of locales and dungeons and NPCs (since most character sprites are a small stick figure sprite holding a spear, and it would be very fun to expect a tiny cute RPG and get surprised with a massively spanning Dwarf Fortress-scale experience, but I digress). Some things are frustrating more than they are scary or intimidating. You're spammed by the NPCs and in-game manual about how important it is to get a Tent because it's the only way to "rest" like you would at an Inn in most RPGs (with buying and spamming bandages being your only solution until then), but the game makes ZERO mention that you can only have ONE at a time. You can buy an entire tent for about $450 (which takes an hour to save with lots of quicksaving to make sure you don't lose your progress), and when you use it, it doesn't tell you "hey, doing that will remove your previous tent," it just removed my first tent without telling me, which was really sh*tty because I had two camps set up at two different exits of a dungeon, one at the entrance, and one at the exit on the other side, so when I exited the dungeon with 5 HP and lots of money but no tent, I just had to die and learn the hard way. If it just put the first tent back in your inventory, the player would learn that rule without wasting all of their money in a game where frugality pays off in spades once you see the trader has a really high quality weapon or piece of armor to make the dungeons much more survivable, but instead the game opts to be kind of unfair where it otherwise explains everything to you and gives you lots of information to help the player make the correct decisions, except in this one time it just says "thanks for the $450 jackass, now you know that tents have free will, don't let it happen again." The game feels like Schmidt didn't care about writing an actual story and just wiggled his fingers and went "OoOoOoOoh!!! Vague Lovecraftian horror, OOOOOOOOOH!" and never meaningfully hooks the player or builds on anything. It's just a bunch of arbitrary names and factions and mysterious location names - the story so far seems to be "there are a lot of people that don't like each other and we don't know much about each other, stay away from them. Oh, this other monster faction? They're evil, stay away from them." I'm not that familiar with Lovecraft aside from hearing it mentioned in pop culture every now and again for the last 30 years, but I was under the impression it would give you this skin-crawling otherworldly sense of dread and unease and paranoia, which so far is only provided by being in a deep dungeon with lots of loot on me as I see an NPC on the minimap, approaching it to realize it's a level 5 monster made of mostly teeth and legs that's about to pack my sh*t in as I realized I foolishly forgot to save within the last 5 minutes. So it would be really neat if there was a main boss NPC that gets mentioned from time to time and all that an NPC says is "They tremble in silence" or something to convey that this guy is a big deal and you should be scared. But instead I feel like I'm reading a series of disjointed sticky notes that Schmidt intended on tying in to one another and just forgot and said "eh it's a gamejam thing, no one's going to expect perfection." But maybe I'm not as media literate as I expected and I missed some big details despite playing with headphones on in complete silence with no other distractions. There's no guide available so far about how to make progress (aside from the initial in-game manual telling you the game mechanics and general tips), no available wiki so I know that a bone or milk or wine will allow me to recruit certain NPCs to my party but not how exactly to use them or how to give the item to recruit the character (although this is a plus for purists that miss having to just figure it out without a guide like we used to do), for now I just have to search the Steam Discussion page which is mostly just topics of people complaining that the game is "too hard" (it's not, you can quicksave every step if you want). Just little irritations like that get in the way of me feeling really immersed in this otherwise VERY COOL looking game with a creepy monochromatic DOS aesthetic with a decimated low-fidelity audio design and a dev that clearly, obviously LOVES making games and wants to make sure his players have all the information they need to have a fighting chance. I was looking around the discussion pages and he was responding to every. single. comment. without exception. Most devs will make a game and respond to nice reviewers and ignore critical ones, but this guy is a true blue creative and I'm very interested to buy more of his games if they feature a similar vintage aesthetic with ambitious big world design. Awesome job, can't wait to beat it! Excited to see what other additions or QoL changes you make. Or if you don't plan on adding more to it, I look forward to beating it and then coming back and giving my full thoughts. Take care!

cant believe how fun and good this game is. Its basically an eldritch version of oldschool ultima. complex and mysterious in a good way, no handholding, great design. love it. easily worth the money.

Terrific old-school crawl! Love the obfuscating display aesthetic, and the excellent sound effects and music. I could seriously get into this IF ONLY the dungeon sections didn't evoke a sense of motion sickness in me. I occasionally get this in older games that use a similar 3D style, but certainly not all of them. It's a great pity, because this is really excellent. Hope it does really well.

There's a lot of quality of life to bring this up to modern day standards, but it's all executed in ways that feel tailor made to piss me off. A persistent torch meter, but no way to actually use a torch other than to go into your inventory, flick through about five tabs to get to items and then scroll through to your torch and hit the use button and being forced to do this every time you're in a dark place which is pretty much every dungeon. Maps that don't automatically fill in areas you can see that also have nothing forcing you to waste actions in order to actually fill in your map. persistent action tracking box that forces you to scroll through every move action and interact action to find that discovery or intrigue text that you didn't notice. This is without mentioning how every piece of information you need to play the game is just readily available on your screen even if you need to flick through about 8 menu boxes to get there which is better than a lot of older rpg's, but for the game to not go all in on providing quality of life or keeping it from the player feels like the game is half stepping in a way that feels tailor made to piss me off. I can't find any aspect of this aggravating if you're going to make me expect your game to be intuitive but then make every aspect of the character randomized and keep me rerolling the character like I'm trying to fill in stats to start with a samurai in wizardry 6. You need to pick a fucking lane here, there are plenty of games trying to be crpg dungeon crawlers that don't sacrifice aesthetic and game feel for quality of life, they know how to work with both and if you want to hard lean into being one for one with the classics then I genuinely would be happier if you removed a lot of the quality of life, just it needs to be done in a way that feels intentional so people aren't questioning if you just didn't know how to do it like I am right now. This is without mentioning the combat which as far as I could tell consisted of only an attack button and letting the game roll dice for me while there are maybe 3 options initially for stealth. I'm not oppossed to a simple combat system, and maybe I haven't gotten far enough to unlock skills or combat options that might be there later in the game. Right now though, it makes it feel redundant to even have stats and all these pages and numbers and dice rolling if all the game boils down to when you get in combat is the question of "are you stronger than them?" and if yes they die, if no you die, and maybe there's a middle ground where you're about to die after you win. I haven't played ultima, but when I've touched wizardry, the might and magic games, heralds of the winged exemplar, and the first 3 elder scrolls games. It convinces me .... Hold on I'm just going to start up ultima 1 to see if maybe ultima was just a shitty crpg. Ok, if you were going to replicate the way ultima 1 plays where you only have attack and your stats, you need to make a lot more of the game focused around literally everything else. Story, environments and with the way you detail the first person dungeon crawling you should add more systems to that which engages the player. Most of the way the interface is designed puts the actual view of the game and whats happening on screen secondary to the tens of menus you require the player to interact with. Right now you've actually lost me so much with how you've designed your game that I feel more inclined to go back and pick back up ultima 1 right now than I do picking back up your game, especially when I then weigh this game against every other crpg party based or otherwise, and reach the conclusion that I'd much rather return to those games than whatever you have going on here. Best of luck to you, a lot of people seem to enjoy your game more than I do, but my impression of your game was nothing but negative exception being your visuals.

I have limited experience with oldschool CRPGs, nor have I read any Lovecraftian literature to date. My experience with Dungeon Crawl-gameplay, comes mostly from Eye of the Beholder on the SNES and Swords & Serpents on the NES; respectively. I never felt that was an issue however and I didn't have to spend nearly as much time as I thought, to effectively get into the mechanics; of the game. That being said, the atmosphere and feel of Cyclopean is stellar. I enjoyed every moment of trying to figure out where to go next, whether I'd survive a tough encounter against a powerful foe, or coming across new powerful gear. My first successful playthrough took a day and a half. But there being multiple endings and ways of strategizing your run, will definitely having me revisit the game. I rarely care enough to put up in the time for a review of a game on Steam, but Cyclopean really left a good impression and I highly recommend this game. Both for people familiar or unfamiliar to the genre and Lovecraft alike.