Nyctos 7DRL Review

Cymon's game decided to review all of the 7DRL entries this year. You can find all of this reviews here.

Nyctos got a fairly decent review. The full review is reproduced here:

I suppose somewhere there’s someone who complained that there aren’t enough really rogue-like roguelikes programed in python out there. For that person there’s Nyctos. If you haven’t played any of the roguelike canon you’ll be lost because Nyctos uses the standard roguelike key layout for item management, navigation, everything and doesn’t provide a readme to help you get started. I haven’t played many roguelike games for very long so I was forced to learn by keyjamming. I guess I could have looked it up, too.

Nyctos has a standard cRPG story: Isolated town in the middle of nowhere unlocked an ancient evil and the daring hero played by you has shown up to descend the depths and… yadda yadda yadda. I don’t mean to sound flippant here, but the story really isn’t the hook of Nyctos.

What Nyctos really does well is showcase its engine which provides gorgeous visual effects, including a speech bubble message system to highlight the action, and sound. Nyctos is not mute, and that’s a good thing in a sea of silent 7DRLs. I don’t know if the engine was produced as part of of the 7 days or if the game leaned heavily on an engine that was made outside of the challenge so as to get as much focused development. The latter seems more likely due to the monumental task building a game like this from the ground up would have been.

My criticism of Nyctos is that it didn’t think much of player new to the roguelike genre. I would ask for the courtesy of a help screen with a “Press ‘?’ for help” placed anywhere. Also the only place you can see is within your line of sight, meaning that most of the screen most of the time is a vast expanse of blackness. For showcasing an engine it’s a bleak thing to look at all that blackness. Finally, the game doesn’t seem to like it’s own ‘X’ button in windows. If I didn’t use the keyboard to quit I had to use the task manager to kill a frozen application.

If you’re a hardcore fan of roguelikes then Nyctos is right up your alley, demonstrating what time and advanced programming languages can do for the genre. If you’re not you may be better off passing on this one.

I think this review actually does a decent job of what we're shooting for with this game. I'm not interested in a RL that's terribly friendly to newcomers like DoomRL. Nyctos is tailored towards RL veterans who are already familiar with games like ADOM and Crawl. It's unfortunate that the reviewer did not read the online manual, since not knowing how to activate the torch is kind of a gamebreaker. However, we have taken most of his suggestions into consideration and the next version of Nyctos will feature in game help and less blackness on the screen.