Thursday, August 25, 2016

Hyperrogue - Initial Thoughts

About The Game (From the Steam Store Page)

You are a lone adventurer in a strange, non-Euclidean world. Gather as much treasure as you can before the nasty monsters get you. Explore several different worlds, each with its own unique treasures, enemies, and terrain obstacles. Your quest is to find the legendary treasure, the Orbs of Yendor. Collect one of them to win! Or just ignore your quest and collect smaller treasures.

The twist is the unique, unusual geometry of the world: it is one of just few games which takes place on the hyperbolic plane. Witness a grid composed of hexagons and heptagons, straight lines which seem to be parallel, but then they diverge and never cross, triangles whose angles add up to less than 180 degrees, how extremely unlikely is it to reach the same place twice, and how the world seems to be rotated when you do return. All this matters for the gameplay. The game is inspired by the roguelike genre (although in a very minimalist way), works of M. C. Escher, and by puzzle games such as Deadly Rooms of Death.

Previous Playtime

0 hours

Expectations and Prior Experience

First of all, thanks to PAS for this game, it looks like a real head-trip. Seriously, the screenshots are all these intense abstract geometrical patterns that kind of look like dungeons and kind of look like the sort of nightmares you'd get after you spent all day looking through a kaleidoscope. The unique art direction alone makes me eager to give this game a try.

In fact, it's almost enough to make me forget that it's a roguelike, a genre I've had issues with in the past. I'm anticipating a lot of frustration with Hyperrogue's basic gameplay. A lot of dying and then going back to square one and sweating over reaching absolute perfection in a randomly-generated map so that I can be allowed to advance and see the next iteration of the game's freaky geometry.

Unless the game is unexpectedly easy, it's all going to come down to my ability to maintain a detached attitude. Luckily, I'm feeling pretty chill right now, so I've got high hopes.

1 comment:

  1. I've been looking forward to reading your thoughts on this game! It's a lot more like a puzzle game than a roguelike, kind of a complicated game of Chess.

    I've also been somewhat dreading this moment, because I'm not sure it can possibly sustain 20 hours of play. If you get to the point where there's no joy whatsoever, you have my permission (whatever that's worth) to wrap up early.

    -PAS

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