I seem to be writing a lot about my failures in gaming lately, and since the alternative to this post was an update on my continuing struggles in racing games, I thought that since roguelikes are designed to kill you, writing about Dungeons of Dredmor (Gaslamp Games) would be less embarrassing. (Because seriously, Tom. Beating my own time? I’m now struggling to finish a rally with both my doors attached. Shift 2 Unleashed seems to be teaching me valuable things, though.)

I’ve written many times about my love of roguelikes, and Dredmor is a roguelike for all intents and purposes. Dungeons and treasure are randomly generated, but have predictable behaviours. There is a basic quest, though you can pick up smaller subquests. The skills you improve are more important, in many cases, than simply leveling up. Food is important. Magic is very powerful if you can survive long enough. And, of course, permadeath. (Though you can turn it off, which is sort of cheating in a roguelike.)

It breaks from roguelikes in some important ways. Items don’t need to be identified – you know what something is as soon as you find it. There aren’t classes, per se – each character is a combination of skills that you choose at the beginning of the game, so a magic using blacksmith is entirely possible, maybe even viable. Food is used to heal, so there is no starvation. There are only ten dungeon levels, so there is actually quite a bit of danger in finishing off a floor before you descend further. Merchants will often offer to sell you all kinds of very powerful items on the top level, though getting the 60,000 gold could be a challenge.

Dredmor is a self consciously cute game. The monsters are cute, it tries to be self effacing in its treatment of the hero and villain, the spells and skills and weapons have wacky names. This becomes background noise after a while. It’s not that the humor wears out its welcome, as much as that it is so constant that it can’t stay fresh. Cute spell names are only cute the first time through. Compare this to something like Magicka, which was chock-a-block with stupid pop-culture references, but they always popped up in odd places and weren’t always waving their hands at you.

But I am really liking Dredmor because I am cursing it regularly. I am dying stupidly, getting killed by the last monster in a monster zoo or running out of healing food just as I decide to open one more room or maybe throwing a poison flask and then walking into the cloud like an idiot. All good roguelikes are typified by giving you memorable deaths that could have simply been avoided by turning around and going downstairs. Or upstairs. Anywhere but where you went. Your goofy looking hero (he looks like Guybrush Threepwood’s douchey older brother) will clutch his gut, wince and faint to the ground.

It’s a light roguelike, of course. There’s only so much you can do in it. This isn’t ADOM with a large universe saving plot or Dungeon Crawl and its dozens of races. It’s a dungeon crawl to the foozle and there isn’t even a great deal of monster variety. But a light roguelike with permadeath is more than enough to keep game sessions short and challenging. It will never replace Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for me, but it’s a nice diversion for now.

If I have one nitpick, though, it’s that the character never changes. If my character inventory says I have a traffic cone on my head and a broken kite shield on my arm, then my character in the game should look like that. That would be worth another five dollars for me.