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I dream of electric dolphins. What?
This game is awesome. I hesitate to call it a roguelite but it’s not quite a roguelike either–something in-between. You’re in space-somewhere and the space-plague has broken out. Now you’re off to find the space-cure before things can get anymore space-pear shaped in the pit of some apace-mountains where no one has ever come back from alive before. Sounds promising.
I played this game with a controller, so I’m not sure how the keyboard interface holds up, but right off the bat I could tell that it avoids one of the easiest pitfalls of any roguelike–a confusing HUD/control scheme brought about by the need to display lots of information on-screen all at once, while simultaneously offering the player the ability to perform many different kinds of actions. SotS:TP simplifies a lot of the normal kinds of interactions you find in rogeulikes in ways that make sense without entirely dumbing down the experience (it even has clean menus–a shock for this genre!).
That’s where some of the lite-i-ness comes from though, as gameplay is straightforward. See a chest? Hit the A button. The game lets you know if it’s locked, what you need to use to unlock it, what skill is used and what your percentage chance of success is. See a computer? A broken crafting station? A box? Same thing. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly makes playing involve a lot less mental interaction. Combat is much the same as well. See an enemy? Keep pushing the attack key. You’re probably equipped with a ranged weapon, so your character will just shoot at it until it dies. Graphically, enemies are varied but functionally they seem to come into two types–ranged and melee, with the latter being the more common by far. So, similar to the chests, combat is fast, straight-forward and doesn’t require too much finesse since you’re probably not even going to get hit.
I’m not trying to say that winning this game is easy (it is a roguelike after all) just that playing it is easy. It’s for this reason I set it in Tier 2, which was pretty hard to do. There are so many cool things to do–tons of items with interesting descriptions, a slew of stats to modify and focus on when you level up and a moderately interesting world full of weird monsters. Best of all were probably the classes–4 humans and 4 aliens (more if you pay for the DLC). Aside from stat changes they all have unique starting equipment and voice-overs for various tasks within the game. I might have chosen the best class for my first run–a dolphin race called the “Seeker” class. I have no context for what the heck it was, but it spoke with a male/female duo voice, had what I can only describe as inverse scuba armor (to breathe air) and a spear that was loaded with shotgun shells. I’m going to say that again–my spear. I put shotgun shells in it. And it exploded when it hit. Git gud sun.
In spite of all these positives, I felt mechanically it was just a little too straightforward. I could see myself easily spending hours playing this–but to what end? I’m not sure if I would really be growing as a player or as a person. I would just be memorizing the enemies, the traps, the items and the classes which is something I can and have done in any other RPG/Roguelike. This will certainly be one that I want to look at later but only when I can justify not playing something more wholesome.
