Game-related ramblings.

Tag: Transcendence

Roguelike Updates: New Crawlers and Redder Rogues

Readers who are unfamiliar with rogulikes may wish to read my introduction to the genre, or some of my Roguelike Highlights posts. Also remember that you can click on images to view larger versions.

One of the two updated roguelikes I’ve been playing is somewhat timely: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup reached v0.14 a mere three weeks ago (and is now on v0.14.1 with some bugfixes). The other is not: Red Rogue (which is actually a roguelike-like) reached v1.0.3 over a year ago (and I even mentioned it an an earlier Roguelike Updates post), but I hadn’t gone back to try it until recently. And then I found myself drawn in once more, playing it far more than I expected and being impressed all over again. I decided it was worth adding to my original post about Red Rogue with my more recent thoughts on the game.

Read on for details on these two, plus a run-down of other updated roguelikes.

Roguelike Updates: Axe And You Shall Receive

Readers who are unfamiliar with roguelikes may wish to read my introduction to the genre, or peruse the various Roguelike Highlights posts. Also remember that you can click on images for bigger versions.

Just because I spent four months playing nothing but indie platformers doesn’t mean that the various roguelikes I’ve covered on the blog have stopped updating. It’s time to catch up with the latest developments! The biggest news for me was the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup v0.12 (it’s now at v0.12.2 with a few more bugfixes). While the nickname for this release, “High Vaultage”, refers to the redesign of the Vaults dungeon branch, I was actually more interested in another change: axes now hit up to seven targets around the wielder with each attack. This presented an excellent incentive to return to a race/class combination that I’d dabbled with before: the deep dwarf berserker.

Roguelike-like: Transcendence

[Click on images for larger versions.]

Recently I’ve discovered a few games that are clearly influenced by traditional roguelikes, and manage to use roguelike elements in a completely different genre with some impressive results. Transcendence is one such game, and it also happens to be completely free.

It’s a weird mix of styles. On the surface it appears to be a top-down space combat game that controls similarly to Asteroids, but features the kind of free-roaming, explore/trade/fight/upgrade gameplay popularized by Elite and continued by the likes of Freelancer and the X series. But play for a little while and you’ll soon see that Transcendence takes just as much inspiration from roguelikes.

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