It’s… it’s a roguelike?
Challenge Accepted
It took me a few tries before I got the hang of it. The first time, I got all the way to the last boss and had pretty good equipment, but couldn’t figure out how to damage him. It turns out the “concentrate” command is pretty crucial to your success, but, to be honest, I had really glossed over the instructions and never bothered to use it my first time through.
My next few runs weren’t so lucky, but on attempt five I managed to defeat the game (on easy) by fighting the last boss with a basic pattern of “concentrate/attack, concentrate/attack.” By then I was pretty used to the encounters that would be most problematic in easy mode and knew how to plan accordingly for them. I was also lucky enough to find a dimensional anchor so the sorcerer couldn’t teleport out of our climactic battle.
I like Roguelikes!
I guess my personal feelings in this regard will make it hard to score the game; it’s so different from the more traditional IF offerings in the contest. If I was trying to be more objective I would say it’s really quite fun, but the commands you need to win could stand to be explained a bit better. On the other hand trial and error is kind of the point of this sort of game, and if I did win on my first run I would’ve been surprised. I can’t say whether or not I’ll return to the game now that I’ve unlocked normal mode, but I might, just to see what else it offers.
If you want some generic advice for winning: as far as I can tell, the most important thing is to be able to defend yourself well. Also, being able to hit reliably is, in the long run, better than being able to hit hard. I actually won using the nunchucks, because they have a bonus to parry. I never encountered a truly detrimental scroll; that might mean that there simply aren’t any, or that I was just lucky enough not to find them. (The worst scrolls I found were the Scroll of Shadows, which really doesn’t seem to do anything or just has a very low proc-rate, and a Scroll that, upon reading, told me YOU HAVE LOST THE GAME. Ha ha, now you too have lost the game. It’s okay by me; I don’t really play it. But it was a funny little touch.) I DID encounter a cursed item, a crown which subtracted from my Defense, but I wore it anyway because it boosted my Willpower more than it subtracted Defense, and, dammit, there’s a mind-control slug to defeat.
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