As a part of my not New Year's Resolutions, I've decided to go through my ridiculous backlog of games once in a while and see if the games I bought were any good. The backlog also consists of a lot of games that were part of some BlahBundle or another over the years, some are gifts, and a bunch are freebies from programs like the PlayStation Instant Game Collection. Games like Crypt of the Necrodancer.
I watched the trailers, I read the reviews, I saw that the thing won awards (somehow). It looked like it had a lot of stuff that would appeal to me, too: retro-pixellated aesthetic, decent music, rhythm-based gameplay, random dungeons, and so on. But when you put it all together... it just doesn't work, or at least, it didn't work for me.
The tutorial is straightforward enough: hop along the dungeon corridors to the beat of the music, slay enemies that are also bopping along to the beat of the music, collect gold, collect loot, find the exit, rinse and repeat until dead. Then start over.
Once you get into a dungeon, though, the difficulty immediately ramps up considerably. You have to get the cadence of the music down right away (which, really, isn't all that hard, especially after you've played a zone a few times), and then you start hopping haltingly around the dungeon trying to figure out where to go and what to do, because the tutorial is over, and you get no more help.
Hopping around the dungeon to the beat of the music gets old quickly, but you have to keep moving at all times. When you slay a monster, you get a 'coin multiplier' that keeps going as long as you keep hopping to the rhythm. If you're off by a large enough margin, the multiplier resets. If you stand still for one beat, the multiplier resets. If you try to use your shovel on a wall that is solid, the multiplier resets. If you bump into a friendly NPC, the multiplier resets. This means that if you enter a shop with three things you've never seen before, you have to keep hopping back and forth to the beat of the music, trying to read the tooltips (you turned tooltips on because you don't know what anything does yet), and trying to decide which item to buy.
Worse is if you start the level near a shop, but don't have enough money to buy the thing you want. You wander around the dungeon, slaying things, getting enough gold to buy that thing you had your eye on, and you have to hop. One beat at a time. Across the whole dungeon. To. Get. Back. To. The. Shop. To. Buy. The. Thing. You. Wanted. Before... the song ends and you're dropped to the next level whether you were ready or not. Same thing happens if the path forks and you wanted to explore both forks. If you're the kind of person that wants to fully explore every nook of every floor of the dungeon and plunder all of its secrets... well, you're going to be frustrated after a while because you simply don't have time to piddle around.
That hard limit of the song length and the constant hopping mechanic is bad enough, but you also have to keep an eye on the enemies in the dungeon. They all have tells and attack patterns that you need to figure out quickly or you'll get smacked, losing your precious hearts (lose them all, and you have to start over). It gets onerous pretty quickly, too. You might wander in a room with a skeleton that attacks every other beat, a blue slime that moves up and down on every other beat, a yellow slime that moves in a square pattern on every beat, and a ghost that can only be attacked one beat after you turn away from looking at it. You have to instantly recognize these enemies, what they do, how the room is laid out, formulate a plan, and execute it, all in the space of a beat or two, or you have a good chance of failing and having to start over.
But! You can get help! You can collect diamonds to purchase permanent upgrades to make each crawl more survivable.
When your game ends, you can head to the lobby to spend your diamonds on your upgrades. What you don't spend, you lose when you go on your next run. That means that you can't save up for something by doing a lot of short runs, but it also means that if you're a couple of diamonds short of buying something, well, too bad. You should have played better.
And that's the overall vibe I get from this game. It bills itself as 'hardcore', and I guess it is that. 'Hardcore' in this instance apparently means 'needlessly punishing'.
I get it. It's more rewarding if the challenge you overcome is greater, blah, blah, etc, and I don't mind a challenge, but if the game is only challenging because of the bizarro control scheme and oblique unexplained mechanics that you have to figure out yourself (seriously, the official FAQ for this game tells you that if you have questions about how to play go ask someone else).
If that's something that you think you'd be into, then that's great! But I don't have the kind of time that I'd need to dedicate to unraveling this thing, nor do I have the time to spend building up my game to get to the 'good stuff' down the road.
The backlog beckons.