Full Circle
I mentioned back on the main page that I found out about this game through a blog post about how difficult classic RPGs were. The post wasn't about just any difficult RPG, but the granddaddy of them all, Wizardry. The blogger had a pretty clear bias against RPGs, this game included, and I fully understand. Wizardry is a long and venerable series, but like Dragon Quest, it's most direct descendant (which was inspired by the creator getting to play it on a trip to the US), the games are known for their difficulty. I remember trying out the NES port many years ago, and getting half my party wiped out in the very first encounter. I've also tried some of the games that iterated on Wizardry's formula, such as Might and Magic and The Bard's Tale, neither of which were any more forgiving. In the former, I had half of my starting party wiped out or paralyzed early on, so I had to create backup party members and level them up before I could start curing them, and in the latter, which I've only played for about half an hour I have to heal and restore my magic charges after nearly every encounter.
A few months after reading the blog post, I found that something called "Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord" had been released on GOG. The exact same subtitle as the first game in the series. I was wondering why none of the earlier Wizardry games had ever appeared on GOG (while the entirety of the contemporary Ultima saga is readily available there)
While for some reason, it took up one and a half gigabytes, and takes around two minutes to boot on my machine, the game did not disappoint me. This really is a remake of the first Wizardry game, tossed onto GOG and Steam with little fanfare. Yes, stealth release a port of the single most influential RPG of all time, why don't you.
The plot's what you would expect from a game made in the medium's infancy: an evil wizard stole the king's jewelry, so you need to make your way to the bottom of a dungeon filled with increasingly deadly traps and monsters to get it back.
While the bare-bones premise and unforgiving difficulty was acceptable for a game originally released in 1981, standards have changed in the intervening decades. There is simply no way that gamers in 2023 would tolerate the same brutal yet simplistic first-person dungeon crawler design that made a splash four decades ago.
The quality of life enhancements are obvious from the moment you start the game: you start with a premade party of six. When you enter the dungeon, you are met with a rather in-depth tutorial narrated by the premade party, as well as a minimap. No more breaking out the graph paper!
Another addition is the inclusion of actual background music, an arrangement of Kentaro Haneda's soundtrack that was originally composed for the NES port.
Yet even with these additions, the game still lives up to its reputation as the popularizer, though not the progenitor, of the tough-as-nails dungeon crawling RPG. Over the course of my playthrough, I have seen a number of party members die--and make no mistake, bringing back dead party members isn't a matter of popping a Phoenix Down and going on your way: you need to head back to town, pay the temple to resurrect them (with increasing cost and a risk of the body being turned to ash instead), then manually add them to your active party. It reached the point where every single stroke of bad luck, like say, a party member being poisoned, or one of my party's mages exhausting their limited spell charges, was followed by a mad dash to the dungeon entrance to recover.
I got as far as the fifth of the dungeon's ten floors before deciding that I had seen enough of the first Wizardry game as I needed to. Though there's nothing stopping me from going back to it after a few more updates, or when it finally leaves Early Access.
There are still a few more games that I wish to discuss that are thematically relevant.
The first one is Yolk Heroes: A Long Tamago. While originally released on Steam and itch.io in May of 2024, it received a mobile port in fall of that same year. Also, I just realized that the subtitle is a pun on "a long time ago."
Anyways, the game starts with the fairy queen foisting a child upon you, the player, without your consent. You have to raise it Tamagotchi-style before sending it out into the world to defeat whatever dark lord is terrorizing the land. It's essentially Dragon Quest, but an idle game.
The game is unfortunately rather tedious, despite its admittedly charming Game Boy-inspired aesthetic. While you can engage in minigames during certain activites to get them finished faster, they mainly consist of simple button-mashing prompts that fail to be engaging for long. This is especially true for quests, in which you alternate between pressing the two action buttons to move your hero along a linear path, while running into a monster literally every five steps. And if you leave the game idle right when you start a monster slaying quest, expecting your hero to just coast through it, more often than not you'll return to find your hero fallen at the hands of a monster less than halfway along the path, or worse, at the starting point.
Last up, Luck Be A Landlord. From the title alone, you can see how it would be a good fit for a writeup of a game about someone trying to pay their rent.
The premise is as simple as they come: you owe rent to your landlord. However, the only method you have of earning money is a slot machine. This seems like a really on-the-nose metaphor for today's economy. Or maybe earning money with cryptocurrency. I believe that I first played this after trying out fellow tangentially gambling-themed roguelike Balatro on mobile.
To make money, you use it like...well, a normal slot machine, and after each spin, you can choose a symbol to add to the reels. The real draw of this game is the various interactions that can occur between slot machine symbols. For example, cat symbols will consume neighboring milk symbols, coal symbols will eventually turn into valuable diamond symbols after enough rounds, and rain symbols cause neighboring flower symbols to drop more money.
Oh, and every few rounds, you get helpful items to reroll your symbol selection and remove unwanted symbols, given by someone who addresses you as Comrade. Subtlety, thy name is TrampolineTales.
Unfortunately, I'm not particularly lucky when it comes to keeping up with the landlord's demands. Eventually I find myself facing an insurmountably high rent payment, running out of the items needed to remove unnecessary symbols, and with the symbols I do have unable to synergize effectively, resulting in a very quick failure. Message received, I guess.