Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £11.39
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access

Last time I looked at Wayward Souls, at least a year ago now, I felt it was a game of no in between. It was soft, until it was very hard. It was hellishly dark, except for when it was brightly lit. Overall, it felt oddly arbitrary. Well, it’s been over a year, how does it shape up on release?

Not… Really. A lot of my criticisms remain completely unchanged. The dark levels are super dark, and then… Oh look, lots of brightness. Bosses remain, on the whole, easier than the actual enemy encounters, incremental abilities remain… Frankly unimpressive, and the procedural level design… Well, it appears to be using some pretty loose rules, which make the difficulty even more variable than it usually would be.

Sometimes, you will find the exit right away. And, apart from gathering coins, maybe some items, there’s no real reason you can’t just take those stairs, with most characters. And there is always a teleporter near the exit. Teleporters, as an aside, apparently work in some sort of sequence, perhaps discovery? But it’s not “select a place to go”, it’s the somewhat tedious “Teleport, nope, teleport, nope” until you hit the “Yep” you were aiming to go.

Which, considering teleporters can generate right next to each other, not just in the example given… Well, that makes it more annoying. Speaking of that, there can be big ol’ branches in the dungeons which… Don’t lead anywhere, or at least, don’t lead anywhere that’s useful to you. Oh, a healing fountain. Very close to… Two healing wells. After two fights I’d aced. Huh.Well, er… Thanks for having no confidence in me, level generation?

Each class, as you’d expect, has their own quirks, their own abilities. The mage is… Well, to call her a glass cannon is somewhat disingenuous. More a glass .22, if anything, because everything in her arsenal is either reliant on mana, or spell inventory. Whee. The rogue, meanwhile, has the backstabbing you’d expect, and a dodge that passes through enemies that… Honestly, seems too fiddly to do just right for the gains. Oh dear, you overshot, just a little? Enemy turns around. Of the four I’ve unlocked so far, Warrior has been, of course, the safest, vanilla bet, and the one I’ve gotten farthest with, but…

Overall, I feel like the buy in, in terms of skills, how long you play to get abilities, what you find in levels… It’s frustration versus reward, and, for me at least, frustration wins. The first area is dark and drab, and it’s going to be a lot of what you see for the first few hours of the game, and… It wears.

The Mad Welshman appreciates an adventurer’s life is a hard one. But he mostly plays games to get away from that.

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Content Warning: This game involves domination/submission, a tentacle encounter, hard oral sex (facefucking), some degradation, one light mind control element, and a trans-lesbian encounter. The game also presents these content warnings as an option before play, and it is recommended you read them beforehand.

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Big ol’ Content Warning! Although this game does take an interesting and nonfatal approach to its kink (hard vore, aka “Person gets eaten, and not whole”), it does involve the aforementioned fantastical kink, and, as a result, gore, sometimes heavy gore, although no depictions of this are in the article. You have been warned.

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Source: Supporter copy
Price: £11.39 (Soundtrack £5.19)
Where To Get It: Steam, Itch.IO

When you can build an entire, multifaceted procgen RPG out of dice, you pretty much know you’ve got it in the bag. And Dicey Dungeons is… Exactly that. It’s a game where yes, there are only D6s involved, but those dice? They go a long way, and are used in cool ways. Let’s get into this.

So, the story is pretty simple: Several adventurers are participating in a game show run by Lady Luck herself. A deadly game show, in which the winners take home a prize of their choosing (Disclaimer: Prize may in fact be an asshole genie wish), and the losers? Well, they get either death, or a lifetime of servitude in Lady Luck’s dungeon game show. Aesthetically, it’s got a great cartoony style, some synth beats that, to put it bluntly, fucking slap (Yes, technical term), and everything is very clear and understandable. Nice.

Mechanically? Well, let’s pick a few examples, both among equipment and characters. The game starts with the Warrior, who gets three rerolls a turn. This, honestly, isn’t bad. But I’ve had a lot more fun with the Robot, whose gimmick is that they don’t actually have a set number of dice, only a total they can’t roll above, their CPU count. Roll above it, and all abilities you have left become useless, Roll exactly on your CPU, and you get one of three special abilities in addition. It’s a tense game of chicken with the dice, and I love it. Especially since there are items, unique to the robot, that can play with both CPU count and the jackpot range, and one item in particular, the Ultima Sword, does double damage on a jackpot.

Meanwhile, there are abilities that seem useless unless upgraded (and even then, some aren’t great.) But, with certain other items, they become more useful, and, with the Inventor, whose gimmick is they have to destroy at least one item (more on that in a sec) for their special ability each combat, they’re a damn good way of keeping what you want to keep.

Anyway, each character’s arc is divided into 6 “episodes”, and only the first is the default experience. After that, Lady Luck starts introducing gimmicks. Nasty gimmicks that fit her charmingly mean spirited demeanour, like the Inventor having to destroy more items (but getting more in return), or doubles being destroyed (making certain items completely useless, and possibly doing you out of certain results you want.) Thankfully, each character is introduced whether you win or lose a run, and the further episodes are unlocked once you’ve got the hang of the five main characters (there is a sixth, but… Well, spoilers)

I wouldn’t really say the game is endlessly replayable, but, honestly, it doesn’t have to be. It’s got a lot of content, it’s easy to learn and middling to master, and its colourful cast, writing, and aesthetics are enjoyable as hell. Definitely worth giving a go, and I would say that this is one of those good first introductions to RPGs with some procgen content (Y’know, roguesortakindamaybelikes.)

The Mad Welshman would probably make a great D6. Would be hard to read black numbers on a black dice though. Ehehehe.

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £18.99 (£25.25 for Supporter Edition, £7.59 for upgrade to Supporter Edition)
Where to Get It: Steam

Other Reviews: Release Review

Iratus: Lord of the Dead has, very often, been described to me as “Darkest Dungeon, but you’re the villain.” This isn’t, on the face of it, a wholly inaccurate statement. But it is, in many respects, its own, shambling beast. In a good way.

So, as you might expect from the title, you are a necromancer. One who almost managed to conquer the world, until those pesky heroes shot you down. For a long time, you were locked in a casket (Normally a prelude to insanity, but, let’s face it, that’s Tuesday to a necromancer), but now you’re free, and… Have to escape a four level dungeon complex that was built over your tomb.

Good thing you can create undead, huh?

So, combat wise, yes, the game is quite similar to Darkest Dungeon. You have four slots, they have four slots (not always filled), and you have class abilities based on what undead you are. Where it begins to differ, however, is that units have three potential base damage types instead of two. Beyond the “Magic” and “Physical”, you have… “Dread.” And this is where the comparison mainly comes in, as some units specialise in causing sanity damage to enemies, who, after a certain point, will either have some form of insanity (although sometimes, that is a benefit in disguise), or are inspired (get a buff, regain all their sanity, very annoying.) Mixing and matching the two for maximum synergy is highly encouraged, especially as… Not everything has sanity. Lookin’ at you, Golem that wrecked my Dread based party the first run through.

Beyond this, there are only a few similarities. Buildings exist, including the healing building, for sure, but they cost minions as well as resources. Your minions aren’t hired, they’re constructed, from parts of your enemies, or bits you dug up. You can make better parts, spec into spellcasting (I haven’t done this, having too much fun with brains, alchemy, and DREAD), refocus your minions using two choices of ability change per ability, and the dungeon itself is procgenned, sure, but it’s a map where you know roughly what’s ahead, ahead of time (Although enemy composition was, until the most recent updates, a mystery.)

So, in short, it’s got a lot of depth, and the game even has little things to help you recover from losses (brains, for example, automatically level up an undead to the same level as the brain, allowing you to quickly get units of comparable strength to the ones you lost onto the field), and I don’t really have any complaints mechanically. Similarly, aesthetically, the game is pretty clear, the music is suitably ominous and villainous, the soundwork is fine, and Iratus… Well, Iratus’ snark game is on point. Okay, maybe one gripe: Every female minion is of the big-breasted, eerily attractive variety. But mileage varies on that gripe, for obvious reasons.

So, what we have here, essentially, is a pretty polished turn-based strategy/roleplaying hybrid, which I quite like, and seems to be well on track to being a fine release.

The Mad Welshman always appreciates villainous snark. It expands his own repertoire, for the next heroic break in of his lair. So much tidying up afterwards…

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