Some Playdate action here from solo indie dev Sam Charchian's Labyrinth. It's a modern take on the classic dungeon crawler genre, with roguelite and RPG elements.
Launched in May 2024, this one takes great advantage of the Playdate's unique charms, offering a very immersive and enjoyable time of it that rewards your perseverance.
Go Crawl Some Dungeon's in Labyrinth
Charchian was inspired by retro games such as Wizardy, Ultima, and Rogue from the early days of video games.
In particular, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981) was highly influential on landmark series such as Final Fantasy.
The mix of RPG exploration was pretty stunning for the time, launching as it did on the likes of the Apple II, Commodore 64, Macintosh, and various other home computers.
The adaptation of this to the little Playdate console shows how far the industry has come in 40 years. The fact this complex little game can appear on the tiny screen, looking glorious as it does, is quite the marvel.
Labyrinth's goal? Well, you have to gear up and head off on a perilous quest into a dungeons with many, many levels.
There's a lift at the top level, where your player can power-up with the local blacksmith or sell goods to a monster dude. Like this!
Then it's into the dungeon you go! You use the Playdate's crank feature to work the lift up and down levels, then you go off exploring the environments.
You must use your map to help navigate rooms, during which time you'll encounter baddies. Then it's time for fisticuffs! Should you be victorious, you get swag and you can return to the service to power up and delve deeper into Labyrinth.
Quite simple in premise, but the game is intricate in its little details.
All the levels are randomly generated and packed with monsters and loot, but you must manage your inventory system carefully. There's perma-death here (the roguelite genre bit), meaning you must start over whenever you die.
That adds a perilous edge to proceedings. You really need to choose your fights carefully! No messing around here.
Labyrinth may be a diddy little game on first appearance. But as with so many Playdate games, it offers a huge amount of pick-up-and-play replayability. It looks great! Sounds great! And it's addictive. Double thumbs up from us.
No comments:
Post a Comment