Scratching That Itch: Possession

This is the two hundred twenty-eighth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our two hundred twenty-eighth random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality has just taken over our physical body. It’s Possession, by Weirdfellows, and its tagline in the bundle reads:

No body, no problem.

But is the inverse also true? Mo bodies, mo problems?

Possession is a roguelike. No, not those newfangled roguelike games that are popping up everywhere now. It’s a classic roguelike, a game that is still very much like Rogue. Which means it’s a tile-based, turn-based, top-down, procedurally generated dungeon crawling role-polaying game. And that it features permadeath, so when players die they must start anew, but with a freshly generated dungeon to explore. Longtime readers may remember that I used to write about classic roguelikes quite a bit on this blog, before developers started adding some roguelike mechanics into their action games and we were all subsumed by the deluge of nu-roguelikes. Classic roguelikes are pretty cool! They’re still worth checking out, between rounds of run-based twin-stick shooters or whatever else counts as a roguelike now.

Possession inverts the typical roguelike structure. Instead of playing an adventurer who descends through floor after floor of a dungeon looking for some incredible prize waiting at the bottom, players control a spirit who has managed to break free of the netherworld, and thus starts on the bottom floor of the dungeon. They must then make their way upwards, towards the surface. The spirit is extremely fragile, and will expire if it takes any damage at all. Fortunately, players won’t be in spirit form for very long: they will use its power to possess the creatures they encounter. Commandeering different creatures with their own abilities is the core of the game, and players will need to swap bodies often if they hope to survive their ascent.

Mechanically, Possession is simpler than many classic rogulikes. There are no items to find, no skills to train, no gods to worship. Instead, the focus remains on possessing creatures and using their cooldown-based abilities to stay alive (er… stay undead?). Each themed floor of the dungeon has a small cast of creatures wandering its halls. Some are loyal to their own kind, and may not attack the player while they inhabit a comrade (unless players are foolish or desperate enough to perform the possession in plain sight). Others will battle any they come across, while still others are more opportunistic. More powerful creatures are harder to possess, and may take several attempts, so players can’t just swap bodies constantly. That’s a good way to end up body-less in the middle of a pack of dangerous enemies. But, there’s also limited benefit in sticking with one body across many battles, since health can only be recovered when killing another creature, and it’s rarely enough to stay topped up long term. The spirit has the ability to repair its host body, but at the cost of lowering its maximum health, so even this can only be done a few times before it becomes better to take over another creature.

There is a leveling system, of sorts. Each kill made while possessing a creature lets players raise that creature’s damage, attack skill, or dodge skill. But these bonuses are pretty tiny. Increasing attack or dodge skill grants a measly 1% increase in chance to hit or chance to dodge, so it’s always best to put points into damage, which (especially early on) might go from e.g. 12 to 13 (about an 8% increase). But even when doing this, I was usually trying to avoid fights, letting other creatures battle it out while I focused on finding the stairs up to the next level. Which are always guarded by a boss enemy, by the way, but I was sometimes able to get other creatures to join the fight and help me take out the boss.

I only managed to create a juggernaut creature once. One of the enemies I possessed was a blood mage, who has several useful abilities. Two of them buff its attack and defense, respectively, for a short time, at the cost of a small amount of health. But with those abilities active, I was able to defeat enemies and heal enough from the kills to stay alive, while dumping the points I earned into more damage. Eventually this snowballed and I was easily dispatching enemies, growing stronger each time. I got my attack all the way up to 100 (by far the highest I’d ever achieved), which meant it was finally helpful to put some points into attack and dodge skill. I managed to kill every single thing on that floor, and wondered if my super blood mage could take me all the way to the surface.

I was quickly disabused of that notion, falling to enemies on the very next floor. No matter how much power that blood mage gained, it could never increase its maximum health, and soon its defenses simply were no match for the opposition. Fortunately, I was able to possess a new creature (with a measly 20-something damage stat, sigh), and return to my default strategy of evading combat whenever possible, and just trying to find the stairs while other creatures fought each other. I jumped bodies when I needed to, or when reaching a new floor since the creatures there would be on another tier of strength. Careful play saw me through: I managed to reach the surface and win the game on that same run, which I think was my fourth serious attempt.

The main weakness of Possession is that this strategy seems like the only viable one. Some creatures promise interesting playstyles, like slowly amassing armies of followers, but in practice none of them are feasible for long. And with just a few creature types on each floor, I’d see what they had to offer well before finding the stairs. Fortunately, while the dungeon has ten floors, there are more than ten themes for levels, so there’s variety across multiple runs. But I still found it hard to get motivated for another attempt, because the experience of playing each floor still feels more or less the same.

That’s a shame, because I like a lot of things about Possession. It’s pretty funny, for one, with lots of jokes about fantasy tropes. One of the dungeon floors I explored was a dwarven mine, but the dwarves there were joined by elven environmentalists, who are protesting the dwarves’ destruction of the natural habitat of the lava golems. The lava golems, of course, were happy to attack elves an dwarves alike. I also got miniature history lessons about ratling civilizations just by mousing over the various ratlings I encountered during my journey, from the lowly gravekeepers to the pyramid mages to the archaeologists, and even the wrestlers. Another dungeon floor was a giant tavern, put there to serve the adventurers who are always dungeon delving in search of treasure, and naturally full of all manner of drunken brawls. Among the adventurers within were some rogues, although they’re described as looking different from most rogues. The mouse-over text informed me that older rogues argue about whether these rogues are really like rogues at all, and what it really means to be like a rogue. A bit of roguelike humor for you there.

Possession also has nice tile graphics, although they don’t scale well. The game runs in a tiny window by default, and while I was able to toggle fullscreen in the options and adjust the interface scaling to make it larger, the tiles themselves (and the mouse-over text) do not scale up. That means they’re always pretty tiny, as should be evident in the screenshots in this post. I do like the pixel art, though, and I liked the pandemonium that tends to ensue whenever groups of creatures got together and started fighting. Liquids are spilled across the floor, spells are slung, fireballs explode, beasts charge to close the distance, broken glass is scattered everywhere. There’s more mayhem than in most roguelikes, and I loved it. There are sound effects for it all too, as well as music tracks for each floor, although the music gets old quickly.

I also really liked the final encounter (which I won’t spoil), but I wish it came sooner. Ten giant dungeon floors ends up feeling like a lot, especially because the possession mechanic doesn’t provide as much variety as I hoped. It’s a great idea, promising a constantly shifting playstyle as I inhabited creatures with different strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately the creatures don’t play that differently to one another. And the smartest thing to is always to be stealthy and discreet, and try to avoid danger as much as possible. That can still be fun, but it couldn’t hold my interest across many runs.

Still, Possession is worth a try if you like classic roguelikes. If you missed it in the bundle, it’s sold for a minimum price of $10, and there’s a free demo available as well. According to the itch.io page, the demo is actually the full game, but Weirdfellows ask that players who enjoy the game also purchase it to support them. I should note that a ran into a few crashes, especially early on, but I think doing a manual save-quit for the first time fixed most of them. Another crash happened later on, but I was able to reload some convenient auto-saves and continue.

That’s 228 down, and only 1513 to go!