Vanilla Bagel: The Roguelike Reviews

A lovely roguelike, with beautiful "pixel-impressionist" art, witty banter, an engaging world to explore, and most importantly, it's called "Vanilla Bagel", which makes no sense and is utterly wonderful.

So far so...hard, this game does not hold your hand. It's very easy to die within 5 minutes of playing, which wouldn't be so bad except that after starting again I talk to the same people, make the same decisions...and go die again. Seems like it could get repetitive, but right now I'm hooked.

This roguelike is deeper than it seems. NPC's and villages stay the same, but dungeons, items and monsters are shuffled to create unique adventures, sometimes crazy scenes and tons of fun. Those who like challenge will find it quite pleasing.

Normally, regardless if a roguelike is good or bad, I enjoy playing it so I can learn about the elements that make it good or bad. But Vanilla Bagel marches to the beat of its own drum. Very quickly it has hammered into me the realisation that I don't want to play it.

It's a pretty good game that's marred by an unfinished feel, tedious repetition, and a complete lack of mercy on the player. But it has an impressive technical depth along with a number of interesting mechanics and engaging combat. Although there are 5 characters with unique abilities and disadvantages, one of them is noted with a caveat: "this character is untested." There are also a number of difficulty levels, although each successive level limits your character choice, but otherwise I believe that they only change your attack power and health. There are two "main" characters, a soldier and a litch, and the latter can save the game. So the game gives you a good amount of choice in this respect, although frankly I can't see myself ever playing the more challenging characters. There is a unfortunate lack of variety in weapons and attacks; you're going to be a melee character with weapons that have the same reach as every other weapon. There are throwing knives and bows, but you won't ever use them exclusively or as main weapons. Even though repetition is a fact of life in RL's, this is more dialogue heavy than others. You can avoid some of it, and you can skip through it pretty fast, but considering there's always a boss in the very first level of the dungeon, you'll be coming back to the same people over and over again. The tedium is alleviated somewhat by the quality of the dialogue and descriptions: often funny, sometimes a bit off kilter. I've brought up two salient points there: NPC interactions and that boss. First: NPC's will give you quests, which are always the same in every playthrough, but some of them are interesting and involve risk if you don't know how to do them correctly. You can only trade with shopkeepers, which involves putting money on the ground in front of them and waiting for them to pick it up, and then waiting for them to drop what you wanted. Why is this not a UI? Second: The mechanics in this game are not exactly intuitive, and you're faced with very difficult enemies early on. You are going to curse the decaying bear and the giant spider after countless 5 minute runs that end in a grisly death. But once you do figure out the mechanics, the game gains a strategic feel and each fight you win is an accomplishment. On the other hand, some of the things in this game feel like bullshit. There are rare (I think) status effects that can turn your character into an irreversibly useless piece of monster bait. I recall being corrupted with a sight radius of zero and another playthrough where I became so slow I couldn't hit anything without getting killed first. Those are progressive debuffs that require money to cure, and money is hard to come by. I doubt that it's a good game to start with if you're new to the genre; even with a curved grade for being a roguelike, this is brutal. Otherwise check it out. It took me about 5 hours to really start to "get it" and enjoy myself. I haven't beaten it yet.

I don't get it at all with this game. It is hardcoded for there to be a boss mob on level 1 of the 1st dungeon you enter. And it is 'randomly' placed. Which in my case meant it was the very first mob I met, 30 times in a row, within 3 or 4 steps of the entrance. And it killed me every time. I like rogue like games. I hate this one.

The game can be compare to adom or tome, however both are far ahead in content, balance, and replay. I asked in the forums about content patches, balance and just general questions but with no reply. Pros: 1. unique way of spending your exp on your items and skill attacks 2. decent interface and graphics 3. has sound effects but basic 4. combat has a twist, ie: fatigue, tactic stances, and delays Cons: 1. 5 races, no classes 2. no real skill tree 3. little communication from dev 4. beginning of the game to get started is always the same with all races so it gets very repetitive if you die a lot. 5. no manual or tutorial explaining how game mechanics work 6. Balance issues 7. No real spells 8. Very little range attacks It's hard for me to recommend this game because of the price vs adom, tome, caves or quad, dungeonmans and other roguelikes around this price. With the current content it should be price at $3.99. If money is not a factor you will enjoy playing vannilla bagel but no where near or as long as the games I stated above.

This game has a lot of neat concepts I haven't seen in another Roguelike, and for that it deserves some credit. However the game is very unpolished and has more than a few flaws. For example it is possible to get stuck by an enemy teleporting you on the first floor with no possible way to move. If this game still had some support or a community that could give guidance I would say this game is definitely worth it. Sadly it does not, so I'm going to have to say this game is a pass, even with it's neat concepts.

This game is a lot of fun as long as it caters to the kind of roguelikes you prefer playing. What I mean is that this game, while being very strategic with currency, elemental resists, attack stances, etc., some people looking for, say, another ADOM or ToME might be dissapointed with a lack of variety in equipment and attack methods (i.e. you will be in melee 90% of the time; there appears to be no spells in the game aside from wands at the moment). Classical roguelike elements like cursing and identification exists, and this game features a corruption system that is somewhat similar to ADOM's (albeit a lot nastier and dangerous in this game). Currently there are 5 classes (3 of which are locked for hard and higher difficulties) and they are generally pretty unique and interesting. For instance, you can play as a spirit that can't use items or talk to NPC's but possesses the ability to possess and completely control a monster that's close to death. Gameplay and strategy appear to be largely tied to the classes and their playstyles at the moment, so I suggest doing some reading (or better yet, watch a video) in order to determine if this game sounds like it'd be fun to play. Overall I'm very pleased this is an actual roguelike with strategic depth, and not a twin-stick shooter "roguelike" the genre has been flooded with in recent years. I Recommend this to anyone interested in the former, as it has a lot of potential, in my opinion. More classes and more variety in consumables would be a good start for the game to improve, I think.

I feel like this game should have been marked as "Early Access". There's a lot of potential here and some pretty creative ideas, but it has a definite "work in progress" feeling to it. Only a handful of classes and some of those marked as experimental. Combat is primarily melee with no magic avaiable. User interface and keybinds feel clunky. Game does not flow well (e.g. needing to talk to NPCs in the beginning gets very repetitive in a game where you're expected to die and start over frequently). I'm not going to refund it, though. This could turn out to be a very good game, and I want to support the dev. However, I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you accept there's a lot of work that still needs to be done.