Linux Games: Dungeons of Dredmor

Thanks to the Humble Bundle i’ve discovered also this nice game: Dungeons of Dredmor.
It’s a classic Rogue-like game, you have to move your hero in 10 level of dungeons where you’ll fight against terrible monsters, to get new equipment, skills and fight the big bad Evil guy, from the official site:

Long ago, the Dark Lord Dredmor was bound in the darkest dungeons beneath the earth by great and mighty heroes. Centuries later, the magical bonds that hold him in place are loosening and his power grows ever stronger. The land cries out for a new hero, a powerful warrior or a mystic wizard like those spoken of in the prophecies of yore.

What they have, unfortunately, is you…

Nothing new on the story side, what make Dungeons of Dredmor so appealing it’s it’s comic style and the humour that the authors have used in the whole game.

Character Creation

Character creation is as simple as choosing a new game, difficulty level: “Elves just want to have fun,” “Dwarvish Moderation,” or “Going Rogue Because Losing is Fun” you can choose also to enable the “permadeath” option, so if you get killed you cannot reload and if having or not smaller maps. And then you just have to choose your seven skills out of a choice of 34.

Gameplay

Dungeons of Dredmor aims to a cleaner, less cumbersome interfaces which may be more intuitive to players not experienced with roguelike games; traditionally, these games are incredibly complex, punishingly difficult, or visually simple (the majority of roguelikes consist entirely of ASCII graphics).

The game features many staples of traditional roguelikes; procedural map generation, turn-based gameplay, permanent death. However, it also employs a streamlined user interface with hand-drawn sprites and backgrounds, a mouse-and-keyboard control scheme, and the option to turn off permanent death.

In order to complete the game, the player must find and defeat Lord Dredmor, the game’s main antagonist. To do so, the player must traverse many levels, progressing only by finding staircases leading further down into the dungeon.

The stats. First you have six main ones: burliness, sagacity, nimbleness, caddishness, savvy and stubbornness. These stats affect your secondary skills as well as affecting how many hit points and mana you have. Next come the eighteen secondary stats like melee power, block chance, armor absorption, enemy dodge reduction, visual sight radius, haywire chance (critical hit with magic), smithing level and so on.

In addition to the stats there are sixteen different damage types and sixteen different resistances for those damage types.

Sound and Graphics

Dungeons of Dredmor has the classic Roguelike gameplay with the sweet, refreshing taste of point-and-click interfaces. No longer must you press CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-x to drink a potion, there are keyboard shortcuts that you can use to select things from your “quick inventory” or spells, but all can be done with your mouse.
I usually prefer to use the arrow to move around and the mouse to do other actions.

The aesthetic of the game is definitely geared towards the cartoony and the humorous, both of which the game pulls off exceptionally well.
Sound: The sound affects are present but are nothing special, the classic squeesh when you kill something. The thing that really stands out is the varied but somehow always fitting music that plays in the background.

Skills

One of the things that i really love of this game are the starting skill that you can choose for your character. The player is able to choose 7 skills upon starting a new game. These are the skills the character will have for the duration of that characters life, new skills cannot be learned, and the ones chosen cannot be changed once in game.

Whenever you gain an experience level you gain a skill point, which can be used to advance one of your skills. Skills have 3-8 levels of advancement.

Skills determine starting equipment, offer stat bonuses and buffs, and can grant spells that can be used by the player.

Warrior skills:
Swords • Axes • Maces • Staves • Dual Wielding • Shield Bearer • Berserker Rage • Unarmed Combat • Deadshot • Master of Arms • Smithing

Rogue skills:
Archaeology • Burglary • Archery • Thrown Weapons • Tinkering • Alchemy • Fungal Arts • Artful Dodger • Perception • Assassination

Wizard skills:
Blood Mage • Golemancy • Fleshsmithing • Mathemagic • Psionics • Necronomiconomics • Viking Wizardry • Astrology • Promethean Magic • Magic Training • Ley Walker • Wand Lore • Vampirism

For a complete description of the skills and their evolution tree i suggest to read the site http://www.dredmorwiki.com

Conclusions

This game is really funny, at the start it’s easy to die but i must say that try out different skills and combinations of them it’s one of the best things of this game.
You have also many choice in the game, there are sidequests and there is a complete system to build potions, forge armours and weapons and so on, you just have to find all the recipes that are scattered around.

So in short, it’s a great and funny game and i really suggest to give it a try.

The game normally costs $5 but for another 3 days you can buy it at the Humble Bundle site, so what are you waiting for ?

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