On the battle-grid, the icon for tracking deployed skills gets obscured by smoke and flame effects, when it should be critically clear where you are using your abilities. Sometimes the chat from friendly NPCs grows overlong, replete with bog-standard light vs dark lore. Sometimes it is as forgivable as typos in the dialogue, missing spaces.

But keep clacking on those arrow keys and the facade begins to chip away. But keep clacking on those arrow keys and the facade begins to chip away.'Įven in describing it, Evertried is shaping up to be a solid turn-based biffer, if a little by-the-numbers. 'Even in describing it, Evertried is shaping up to be a solid turn-based biffer, if a little by-the-numbers. And there are passive skills, like the one that makes your dash leave behind a blot of fire, or another that gives you back a pip of life for every four little brutes you slay. There's a roulette skill that simply kills an enemy at random. You can unlock a heavenly sword that drops on creatures two tiles away, a four-way harpoon grenade that drags enemies towards it, a trap that stuns units for a couple of beats. To help, you can buy skills at a mid-climb shop. Which is not a lot once you get into double-digit floors with crowds of enemies, bonkers lasers, and less space to move around. You can suffer three hits before you succumb. But they are otherwise an essential injection of puzzlish booby-tapping that keeps you on your toes. Many of them are lost in the colourful pixel noise of the background tiles. The obstacles themselves could afford to stand out more on the board. It feels clever to use a travelling flame to snuff out a pursuing hound, or coax a charging beast into a pitfall created by a collapsed tile. The extra challenge offered by these traps is welcome. There are ice tiles to slip on, clouds of frost that make units miss a turn, podiums that shoot projectiles if you cross their threshold. There are plentiful traps and obstacles to avoid but you will also use these to dispatch fiends. Die, and it's all the way back to the bottom. You hop around or dash (moving two spaces instead of one) and kill all to proceed to the next floor. There's a bunch of different enemy types, from exploding ghost wolves to gas-spewing slimers, each with particular movement and attack rules. You are a warrior's spirit, brought to this tower to climb ever upwards and fight monsters on a big tile board.

It's a pared-back roguelike with a pixel artist's heart. In fact, there seems to be a lot missing from this tile-based timewaster, small touches that could have given its solid foundation the polish it needed to excel. That is to say, a feeling that there's something important missing.

It's a strange omission but one that is representative of the feeling this roguelike evokes throughout your time climbing its purgatorial tower of baddies. You control everything with the keyboard, from the hops and scythe attacks of your cute otherworldly hero, to the settings in the pause menu. Developer: Lunic Games / Danilo Domingues.A rough-hewn roguelike that fails to stand out

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