A real lack of recent games: Enter the Gungeon

There's this super weird thing about using this blog as a writing exercise in that sometimes I just, uh, forget to finish up a review and never hit that publish button. Or I go back to a game after the review is done and feel like it should be re-written but can't find the energy.

I finished ETG several months ago. Finished with, that is to say, since it is a roguelite.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to roguelite design. Some of my favorite games in recent memory were roguelites, but most of them I find rapidly tedious and get sick of very quickly. They're plagued by forcing you to repeat the first level endlessly and even worse have this sickening unwillingness to program in any amount of conveyance. They're built around the idea that fun is something you need to work for and knowledge is something you acquire through repeated, repetitive play throughs. It's pretty easy for the latter two to turn into pure tedium.

The moment I saw Enter the Gungeon, hereby shortened to Gungeon, I was certain it was a game I wanted to play. For a while I waited on the game to show up in the humble monthly bundle, as I have a sub rolling ever still and humble puts up most Devolver Digital titles sooner than later. But it went cheap on the humble store and they'd given me credit for a referral so I decided the time was now!

I'm pretty certain I'll end up with an extra key sooner than later, it's probably in this month's bundle, knowing my luck.

Regardless, Gungeon is presented as a roguelite dungeon crawler fused with a shmup and a twinstick shooter with cool boss battles; the results lean a fair bit more toward the former than the latter, though this game certainly co-habits the design space you'd put Nuclear Throne and probably several other games I haven't played in. It has a few more buttons that Nuclear Throne and leans harder on the roguelite looting side than gaining XP or gaining loot, with various results.

It also loves puns and loves guns.

Witch cards will drop: Tower of Guns

Roguelites, which is a pretty vague half-genre description, spread to many different full genres and do many different things to those games. To my surprise, one of the genres that seems most easily adapted to roguelite behaviors is shooters the list of ones recommended to try is pretty short. I mean you have this one, Tower of Guns, and then you have that other one Ziggurat. Then I don't think much of any have come up as worthwhile.

You'd really think roguelites would prosper with FPS gameplay, given most if not all of the core elements are so easily transitioned over. Random drops, leveling, random events, levels assembled by quasi-procedural nonsense, FPSes can do all of this and maybe actually do it in fun ways. I don't know, maybe there's a literal ton of them, but I can think of like two indie FPS roguelites that don't fall on the list.

It's a little bit annoying that I keep running into roguelite games while doing this streak of reviews, but Tower of Guns I simply had installed from weeks or months ago and had forgotten about it. Recently, I picked up a used geforce 960 GTX, so I was looking at shooters I'd forgotten about and realized I actually had more than a few currently installed. Which is, you know, kind of silly. So I loaded this up and gave it a whirl.

Actually, though I guess I'll find a copy of Ziggurat eventually, maybe the reality is the problems with Tower of Guns highlight why FPS into roguelite is a bit difficult. Guess we'll see whenever that shows up in a bundle or whatever.

Witch cards will drop: Steredenn

I spent way too much money in October (hint: Chicago is expensive) and now I need to get my ass in gear for the Christmas sale! And what place does one take one's ass for the Christmas sale: That's right, grinding on cards. While I idle most of the cruddier games that have cards, there's a ton of good, or at least good looking games that can be short reviewed for fun and cards. And everyone loves selling cards.

One advantage to playing a lot of games is getting to see the filtering of ideas, or even hypothetical parallel evolution. That is to say when designs are not influenced by each other, but rather arrive to the same design conclusion independently. It makes gaming feel a little less like closed individual systems and more like ecosystems of ideas, which almost makes it feeler grander in the way art likes to be played as. We're all aware of basic copying, of taking a basic "thing" from one game or a basic genre, like platformers in the 80s and FPSes in the 90s, but the more subtle cues and design hints make for a more interesting way to see games made.

And to mock their short-comings.

Steredenn has one of the oddest little names I've ever seen. Google's best translation is from Breton and it translates into Star. So the game is basically named Star. It's a simple name for what is ultimately a pretty simple game.

Anyway, Steredenn is a shmup of the side scrolling variety, built from the higher end level of pixel art where style and aesthetics are both emphasized. If the game has much of a story, well, I didn't notice. Instead - as games are wont to do in the modern indie paradigm - the game is a psuedo-roguelike, or roguelite, or something I'm tempted to call rougelite since we've fallen so far from the original design that boy is my face red.

Rougelites kinda drive me batty. Ha! Get it?

A convergence of everything I hate: Crypt of the Necrodancer

No, not really. But we'll get into that.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of those titles that gives you the "why didn't anyone think of that sooner" sort of feel to it. One of those weird mashes of two genres that feels entirely obvious, yet somehow, isn't all that common. The weirdest thing is how visually evident the combination is, how just looking at an eight second video of this game almost entirely explains what you're seeing in action. Even the title feels completely obvious. They changed one letter from what is so well tread it is a trope at this point.

Essentially, it combines a mediocre roguelike - that's not a complaint, there's limitations because - with a rhythm game. The rhythm component follows the beat of the soundtrack. I'm not exactly certain how the story works, but it sounds like you're just as enthralled to the magic of the dungeon as everything else inside.

The game procedurally generates relatively simplistic dungeons, has a huge variety of spells and items and floods the screen with monsters who just like you are enslaved to the beat. Everything moves with the beat, or in my case, mostly doesn't since I am completely terrible at either exclusively this game or rhythm games. I'm not certain which.

But either way, this game is something of an experience for me.

Shootember: Nuclear Throne

Shootember was traditionally a month for shooters, but this game involves more shooting than most shooters, so I think it's fair to classify this one under Shootember.

Nuclear Throne was $10, or rather, at the peak of the humble bundle a couple weeks back, though I mostly picked up said bundle for it. I've being eyeing Enter the Gungeon for a while, and it is often mentioned that NT here is either a spiritual predecessor, a game you should just buy instead, or a game a lot like it. You can pick whichever harsh or positive statement you like, I've heard them all. NT has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam, and I've heard lots of good things about it.

I was a little reluctant, which we'll get into, but bundles with multiple quality games are just hard to resist. That's the rub of Humble bundle, isn't it? Buying a bundle of seven or eight games for $10, when you want maybe three of them, but $3.33 doesn't sound so bad for them individually...

It's especially enticing when rumor has it the developers of this game stated they would never put the game on sale, or something to that effect. I haven't touched the rest of the bundle as of writing this, but that's generally how most humble bundle experiences work for me. I play two of the games and forget about the rest.

Little spaceship adventures: Mysterious Space

There's this weird feeling I get sometimes when I wonder about how children growing up nowadays interact with video games and imagining what they'd want. Not in the sense of them imagining the games they want to play, since the hype pumping media handles that, but what they imagine when and if they imagine some hypothetical game. What spills from their imaginations, now that gaming is pretty unrestricted in what it can do.

As a child, I imagined a lot of the things that are now common place. Open world, overworld maps, exploration and procedurally generated, these concepts all seemed "the future" and they slowly came to pass. Now that we're here, well...

They're pretty great. Anyway, Mysterious Space is, I think sort of the game I imagined as a child. Admittedly this is a very budget little indie title, nothing exotic or exciting about it, but it does have that sense of wonder to it. It is basically a game about a little spaceship, adventuring across the stars, or more in particular flying down to planets and exploring them for precious fuel.

Oh, and yeah, Mysterious Space is essentially a roguelike or roguelite or whatever I'm supposed to call this basic set of mechanics. They are grafted onto a simple space shooter, but the combination actually works really well, as opposed to my general feeling toward rogueLs.

This game doesn't have the brutal fatigue that sets in, nor the unexplained mechanics you just try to figure out desperately that the game maker assumed you'd read a wiki on. It's very easy to figure out what you're doing in this game, which is a plus and a minus at once.

Roguelite space platforms: Shattered Planet

I don't have a long history of playing roguelike games, but I do have a basic understanding of them. Ye olde venerated classic "Diablo" is actually - to what I imagine most people barely seem to recognize - based around roguelikes generations ago. I want to say it was based on "Angband", but I could be getting my history wrong. That's a dungeon in the pre-LOTR middle earth lore, if you don't know. A lot of the elements, like fog of war and unidentified items, owe their origins more to those games than the ARPG genre that later ran off with them.

ARPGs, of course, are generally more forgiving and built around smoother gameplay, but I don't think we're supposed to talk about that.

Shattered Planet cleaves closer to the earlier roguelikes. It is a turns and tiles based game, centered on exploring the eponymous shattered planet. The game makes quiet references to the idea that some scientific disaster tore the 'old Earth' apart, but within most of the game you will rarely see any real script on the topic.

You are, or rather you are a line of, clones sent down onto the planet for the purpose of exploring the planet. The game smoothly folds that element of the roguelike concept in, but a lot of the other stuff ... Let's say doesn't quite come together.

Dork Quadrant: Weird worlds: Return to Infinite Space

Continuing on through my trek through my back log is Weird Worlds, which is ... Actually nothing really like the other games in this subset, neither having cards and in spite of the awesome looking title screen not actually having much shooty space action either. I fire up games to see if they run - a habit from darker ages when steam would install a million tiny files before hand - and watch the title screen to make certain I get that far before moving onto other things.

This game's title screen kinda lies, you know. It looks like there's going to be rigorously most shooty space battles, and on the most part ... Well we'll get into it.

Weird worlds: Return to Infinite Space is essentially a 4X game through the filter of having 1.5X instead of the full four. Unlike the other four in this so-called Dork Quadrant, it doesn't really involve being a topdown or side-scrolling shooter, and is instead a pointy clicky space map game. It reminds me a lot of playing Master of Orion Two, looking both visually similar and borrowing a couple elements, though this is not to say that the game is that deep or that uncreative.

Merely that if you're familiar with taking a space ship and exploring the stars on a 2d map with little distances between them, you'll probably find this game almost eeriely familiar.

Platformines: Turrarrrrerria

Platformines is a greenlight game released in the Bandai Namco bundle that I bought to get my hands on the new Pac Man game. I'm not really sure what to make of the game based on its title or its cover, but it is essentially a Terraria game by way of extreme simplification and 16-bit graphics instead of whatever the usual is.

The game is a platforming, run and gun treasure hunt by its own admission. There are four kinds of loot: A limited selection of guns, a limited selection of hats, gems and valuables. You run around randomly generated sections of the huge, huge map looking to complete your digger to escape the horror of the mines. And they are horrible, though I'm not really sure how you got there and even less how the giant titted saleswoman got there either.

The graphics are, as I said, 16-bit pixel are. They're smooth and pretty good looking, the game is easy on the eyes and relatively clear to sight. The game has an obnoxious fog of war element that is on the most part just a nuisance and doesn't add much. There was a potential here for human enemies to cast light while nonhuman would not, but like everything else the game is just explicitly lazy and there you go. Terraria had lighting, it was a big part of how its engine ever looked good, but this ... does not.

Enemies come in a variety of forms. Most dangerous are people with bazookas, since although you suffer friendly fire damage from your bazooka, they can happily walks on all hazards and slam themselves in the face with rockets to seemingly no negative effect. Most of the other enemies are floaty nonsense, or hazards you can't damage, most of it pretty boring. The one interesting element is they have a variety of AI routines, so they might be more or less aggressive, or more or less willing to jump around, stay still, etc. It is actually sort of neat watching the different AIs run around each other, but there is actually basically no reason to pay attention to the enemies. They are almost uniformly better to just avoid, and pick off the dumb ones. There is damage on touch (because this game is lazy) even on human enemies, but there is no knock back, so you really can and should run through everything.

Loot is extremely boring, I think it might closely resemble Borderlands, which I've never played. There are four guns - though you never use the pistol, so basically there are three guns - which have a variety of stats. You get drops, and some of them have better stats. Everything else you take back to the saleswoman in the hide out and process into gold or credits or whatever dollars. You upgrade your bag and your health though her, that's the entire loot system. You can use gems found in the wild to heal yourself, which once you have the bag space, you should always hold on to do.

The game builds random levels, and in this regard, it reminds me less of things Terraria or on the other end of the spectrum Rogue Legacy, and more like the random map generation from HoMM3. Things are just sloppy and ill put together, which a lot of irritating dead ends and this creeping realization that anything that looks interesting just isn't worth interacting with. Going through a maze to find 2 bags of gold just isn't worth the risk of doing, or the time, or anything else. The hazard platforming is intentionally sloppy, because it is built with RNG it doesn't really bother to behave in any organized fashion. So the hallway of knives or traps basically just goes off at random, so trying to chart your way through it like you would a normal platformer doesn't work.

Basically while I like the tileset, the game is just so lazy about its level design. There is no real feeling you're going into a harder or easier area, and teleporters to go back to the hideout are always completely randomly placed. Usually they're in like, the ceiling, and you fall out of it and immediately take damage. I feel like if you re-worked the routine to make for somewhat more epic looking terrain, the tiles and graphics would add up to something interesting, but as is the game is incredibly repetitive and too zoomed in.

I had to turn the music off. It is bad. It's especially weird in that the visuals are clean and smooth, but the music feels like an agonizing random mess. Maybe the music was generated by a routine as well. It wouldn't shock me.

Anyway while I wouldn't say platformines was outright terrible, it is pretty mediocre and handicaps itself at every turn. The loot system is more limited than it should be - more gear could easily be done, but instead all of you have is hats - and the routine used to build levels doesn't make anything cool. As Terraria has light in the dark, Platformines has an awful fog of war system and range issues and just everything to make it extremely monotonous.

Basically, while the game is fun to tool around with for an hour or two, you come into the realization this is it and there's nothing new or exciting. If you look at like, Terraria, the world map has regions where you go 'dang that's creepy' and you find treasure you actually want. This game, well, you basically should just past everything hard and skip to each of the nine finish game items.

I eventually gave up, not because it got too difficult, as it remains about the same the whole way through, but because the map kept choking off any progress and after twenty minutes of getting no closer to the next item I just got the feeling the rng might just be total garbage and moved on with my life.

Roguelike fatigue: Dungeon of the Endless

The Endless line of products is sort of amusing to me in that it was the Steam Holiday Auctions that really shifted my focus onto them. I wanted to do one completed auction, just to get the achievement, but on the most part most games seemed like people were bidding on them with a day or two to "the sale" with an amount of gems worth more than their sale price.

I mean, just as an aside, but if you ever wanted to see that psychological issue f2p games exploit where the conversion of currency causes individuals to lose track of the value of a dollar, wow. Watching people spend $12 in gems on a game that is going to go on sale for $5 in less than 24 hours is impressive for seeing that particular mechanism in action. It wasn't like you couldn't just immediately sell the gems for $12, the market was the same number of mouse clicks away!

Anyway so the one game that did seem to be a reasonable price ... Wasn't this game. It was Endless Space: Emperor Edition, or Gold, or whatever which displayed the wrong item and with the DLC price included was a pretty reasonable amount. So I looked it up and realized they'd apparently made three games, sort of, in the shared universe. That's really cool, but apparently Dungeon and Space are the weaker titles to Legend...

But I ended up with this game, because it has some sort of weird arse coop set up and I think a friend bought it for me to play with them (I think?) while I got Space from the auction. I haven't even unpacked space yet, since its been wall to wall games this year, but I'll get around to it probably after I finish off Dungeon or more likely get sick of Dungeon.

Dungeon is especially interesting, though, because when you peel away the pixel graphics and the excellent audio you're left with the guts of several games connected to a roguelike skeleton. It is actually really weird, the game hybrids elements from tower defense to the point it almost feels like a Heroes of Might and Magic game, or a city builder, and there's some weird ideas I feel like came out of horror even.

If I was going to give it a genre, I'd peg it into "Roguelike flavored quasi-reverse tower defense" and then just keep talking because that tells you nothing...

Card to Kill: Legend of Dungeon

Legend of Dungeon is a game I believe I acquired through a bundle and played entirely for the cards. In fact, while I'm not 100% certain, I'm pretty sure I straight up own two copies of this game and got cards from both. Must have been a pretty good deal. This is going to be a short review, which will be pretty obvious, pretty quick!

What surprised me about LoD is that I installed it and fired it up thinking it had art assets in line with the artwork on its cards, which is how you say "not the good". Actually it might be conveyed as 'ugly' and I'm not really sure why... Instead, I was surprised to see a super retro looking game that reminds me of long lost days of fiddling with my cousin's commodore something like two and a half decades ago. The game is not quite 2d, but it is close, with a brought forward pixelated 3d style that I really dig on. The game looks fantastic, and the screenshots don't do it justice, since it looks really slick in motion.

The game itself is essentially a very stripped down dungeon crawler. I'm not absolutely certain as to the story, or frankly, even the goal as I didn't bother to play the game enough to finish it. You enter the dungeon, which divides into levels. There is no real unified style (as best I can tell) within given levels, but it does mark your descent and it seems to grow in difficulty the further down you go. You basically look for apples or loot, and battle various infinitely respawning monsters lovingly rendered in the weird retro 3d world.

You hit monsters. They, as far as I can tell, seem to operate mostly around the generic retro 'body touch hurts' system, though they do seem to have attack animations as well. Once you hit monsters, you collect XP globules and eventually level up which ... Does something? I can tell you gain +10 health, but beyond that, I can't really figure out which number means what in the damage system. Chalk it up to not paying enough attention or the game not explaining itself well, your choice. I lean more toward the latter, but hey, what is text when you can put in bare minimum effort?

You can also acquire loot, which has basically the saddest inventory system I've ever seen. You can't pick between items, you just desperately flip through them, with one item becoming equipped and it isn't your weapon. You can pick up all sorts of wacky stuff, including spellbooks that summon monsters or allies, and piles of kittens which you can toss down to ... Like, it's a kitten.

I guess it is supposed to be retro or whatever, but the inventory system is a tragedy and I can't be arsed to figure out what the different stat numbers are supposed to mean. Numbers change when you put different loot on, but other than moving slower or faster it takes too much empirical testing to nail it down and snore. Bored now, throwing my character in lava.

The lava looks really good. What is it with retro style pixels displaying lava best?

The game's music and audio in general is excellent. If you want to pay a dollar for an amazing chillout session, this game will give you some great chillout tunes to just relax to. I mean the dopey, who cares gameplay doesn't get in the way of just hitting zombies with an old rusty sword while listening to some nice ambient tunes. Ahhh. It's not bad for a bit.

On my first runthrough of LoD, I hit the 'use' button and was killed or something by one of the patrons of the bar at the top of the dungeon, then when I went to the dungeon, I got one shot by a snake. Neat?

On my second runthrough, I got down to like level 6 or 7, and then was killed by a giant swarm of warlocks. And by that I mean, I encountered like 12 of them, turned around to see one of them and thought 'I can take one of them if 12 of them spawn at a time'. I could not.

On my third runthrough, I got down to level 3, which apparently had no exit after ten minutes of flipping through the doors. I wondered if maybe the game had like, dead ends or something. I eventually ended up all the way back up to the tavern, which wasn't where I wanted to end up. Then it wouldn't let me leave the tavern anymore, so after a minute or two of fiddling with it, I just reset the game. Most of my playthroughs worked essentially like these two. You wander around for a while, and then something vastly more difficult than the general door to door enemies kills you.

Frankly, Legend of Dungeon is a lazy game. The music and art assets are soothing, but the completely lack of inventory management, explanation of the statistics or what things do, or basically anything beyond trial and erroring you way through the game is irritating. Potions, for example, have specific color/names combinations but you don't really know what they did. Usually they make you barf, which is great, but the non-barf ones don't explain themselves, and neither group is re-labeled by the game into what it does.

So I guess I'm supposed to write down the stats of the items I'm re-equipping, because it doesn't compare or doesn't display it in a visually easy to determine way (I think it does? But I'm not sure) and it doesn't tell you what anything does.

If you want to just start a new game, then go punch some bats and listen to the excellent ambient score, it is an excellent game. But beyond that it is a slow paced, lazily built game that expresses all of the low-points of modern "roguelike" design without ever really stretching into anything else. There is little depth to the gameplay, and it comes off as clumsy, imprecise and just rather sleepy. I feel like this is all rather intentional, which means if it sounds like something you're into - great - but otherwise, I'd give this one a pass.

Perhaps some of these elements are 'features' keyed to being 'retro styled'. But like I said in the Shovel Knight review, retro does not make your design unassailable. If your features suck, they suck, the end. Ultimately, this game is very close in most elements to Hero Siege, but doing almost everything shared worse. I wish Hero Siege was done in this engine, and not much else.

Great art and great music though, and the engine is pretty great for the retro feeling. Its a shame Legend of Dungeon is, to be honest, roguelike. If it was an actual down to the bottom properly crafted game with some fixes to the ridiculous inventory, I think it would have been great. As is, like I said, if you can get it cheap the first few playthroughs are some wonderful chillout.

My Wallet's Heart is the Cards: 99 Levels to Hell

Actually, that is a bit dishonest, since this year Steam handed me like $25 for gems and some TF2 item I'm not even sure as to the reason for existing. But cards make up an even greater pool of my steam wallet, and this game has ... Or had, who knows when anyone will read this ... relatively valuable cards. It actually pooped out a foil, which is nice! I've gotten two foils this month, which is half the foils I've ever gotten after grinding out hundreds of cards.

This is a short one, because there isn't really a ton to 99 Levels to Hell. The game is an odd mix, in that it is both a twin stick shooter and a platformer, with some sort of procedurally generated roguelike nonsense going on as well. I'm not entirely sure on that, it feels like the levels are vaguely different, but who knows. In terms of gameplay, the game really is what it very much sounds like. I don't know that I like the twin stick shooting when applied to a boxy platforming world, it is sort of reminds me how frustrating it could get when taking aim in Terraria. Because platforming is often a very boxy, precise concept and twin stick shooting is messy spray and pray, the game has some weird dissonance going on. You are expected to aim down a lot, which doesn't work all that well. It is actually sort of funny - in the early levels, the scariest thing is a rat in a hole, because while you can just walk on by actually hitting the rat in the hole is brutally difficult.

Visually, the game resembles on at least a spiritual level Hero Siege, which I reviewed a couple months ago and quite liked. There's a lot of shared, happy to be immature, blood everywhere, don't worry about the tone style to this game that helps it get away from the fact the art assets are pretty basic stuff. I would say it is a step down from Hero Siege, but still in the same vein. It doesn't look like pixel artwork so much as just MS paint artwork, which isn't quite as satisfying though that might be nostalgia booting me around.

Enemy design is nothing special. Bats, floating skulls, robots, the like - The bosses are sort of novel looking, but the art frankly isn't the product of much talent, and when they get as big as the bosses do, welp there's your lot. The bosses are pretty cool in actual execution, though. Except the bat boss bugged out and jammed itself into a wall when I fought it...

The game also has traps, which it shares with Hero Siege, but unlike Hero Siege it doesn't seem very consistent. Some of the levels, the traps will kill monsters, other levels they don't and its just kinda wonky. The traps are visually distinct, but the game likes to 'ah-ha!' moment you with them, which is not nearly as amusing as you'd think.

The only real bad side to the visuals, if you don't mind looking at them, is the game's lighting issues are a little weird. The game is supposed to be dark, since you're digging your way to Hell, but it ends up feeling a bit too dark and some stuff is very hard to make out. Especially egregious are power-ups, assuming you can see them, it is hard to figure out if you actually want a power-up since you only have a weapon slot, an upgrade slot and an on-use slot.

As an odd treat, 99 Levels has surprisingly solid audio direction. I don't know if its the product of a kit no one else on the planet thinks to use or the guy behind it just knowing how to make properly matching audio, but it has a good solid snappy style to it. There is some amount of music, which goes loud angry guitar when things get intense, but mostly it relies on ambient noise to make it creepy. It works, and well, which really kinda contradicting the visuals.

Anyway, is 99 Levels to Hell any good? It comes off as fine, but it feels like a low budget title through and through, and the gameplay actually does manage to get pretty irritating in parts. The platforming isn't snappy or precise, and the whole twin stick aiming thing is actually rather annoying when paired with the boxy levels. The levels honestly feel a bit too small and a bit too dull for the shooting and platforming, it feels like they would have done well to be larger and had a bit more panache. Maybe some minibosses, or some less passive floaty goofballs enemies?

Basically I'd say this one is category pass, but if you see it in a bundle (which is where I got it), it's not a bad one to install for an hour or so of goofing around. I had fun with it, but much like Hero Siege, you get to a point where re-starting just feels like too much effort.

Long Card Road Home: Risk of Rain

So platformers, roguelikes, let's talk these elements again. Because we didn't already discussed roguelike platformers back with Rogue Legacy, which is probably the game I've had the most fun with this year. Oh, and retro style graphics, those are a thing nowadays too right?

It's like a fucking holy trifecta of "this era's indies" or something. I mean seriously. This is entirely A Thing. If the AAA shooter slash "open world" is the top of the scene right now, then retro style platformer with roguelike elements is the bottom. Or the middle. The bottom is anime games. What if we took a novel ... ok .... and added vaguely animated pictures?!?

Anyway so, Risk of Rain is a retro styled, roguelike platformer hitting all of those bases and hitting them hard. In fact the retro style goes further back, giving it more of a visual style from the atari era, but with far far more pixels on screen. The basic story is you're on a spaceship, it crashes, and alongside it crashes a bunch of junk on the ship. You can loot and use this junk, which is where half the roguelike elements come in. Also levels.

On the other hand, as opposed to other platformers, this is a shooty platformer, although it relies more on cooldowns and placement than pure button mashing as opposed to the obvious comparison, that being Megaman. I always sort of wonder why there aren't more Megaman clones in this era, but I think it comes back to the same reason there aren't Sonic clones - It is much more difficult to do.

I haven't actually played a true roguelike in recent memory - I plan on playing TOME this year, after getting through more of my card games in time for the summer sale - but I am under the impression that the cooldowns system is more from roguelikes than I think. Regardless, RoR is a ... shooty platformer roguelike with four abilities per class and tons of items?

Or something?