Another Review

Another review, this time from Game Set Watch's wonderful column @ play:

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/06/column_play_2009_7drl_winners_1.php#more

Premise: There is something of a story here, but honestly I didn't pay too much attention to it. No, Nyctos is basically a random dungeon crawl just like mother used to make. One with an interesting, ultimately infuriating, lighting simulation.

First off: they stole the title screen music from Castlevania's ending screen. All the music seems to be swiped from 8-bit games, in fact. Castlevania was so hard I bet they thought no one would notice....

In the style of the standard of the genre, Nyctos is a game of exploration, resource management and combat in a series of increasingly-dangerous dungeon levels. Much more attention has been paid to the surroundings than usual; there are a number of things in the game that can be examined with a keypress that have no game function that I can discern, but are there as "dungeon dressing." Monsters, the first time a member of a species is seen, bring up a page of descriptive text. It is a welcome detail that other authors could stand to pick up on.

The combat isn't greatly challenging, at least what I saw of it. The game is one of the few seen this year to offer a full experience system. It even provides for player-selected stat gains upon gaining a level.

Let me move on to the game's primary feature and, to my mind, its downfall. Astrisks found in the dungeon represent potential light sources. The dungeon can be quite dark if they're not lit when they are come across. Shift-'L' while standing on one lights it (or lets you light something in inventory), and 's' (unshifted) snuffs one out. Although the darkness in most areas is annoying, and may even force you to turn your monitor brightness up, the light effects aren't bad. Annoyingly, some walls look just like dimly-lit floor spaces. This sometimes causes confusion, but it's not particularly common.

Worse is the fact that all light sources, the ones that I found at least, have a limited duration while on. The player begins with a torch, and can find more sources in the dungeon. The game is unplayable without a light source, it's just too dark. You can't even see your character's '@' symbol without a light source. Torches last a good while, but only provide one or so spaces of light, and I had to strain a bit to see even in that. The radius extends some way beyond that, but only dimly. In a way that's worse than the normal route of just not displaying things out of sight, because the player himself, sitting at the monitor, can strain to see things far off.

It'd probably be less annoying if a torch provided more light. Lanterns can be found once in a while and they provide another space or two of light while they last. There are braziers in some rooms that can be lit, and they provide a great deal of light for a while, but don't last very long and seem to be too cumbersome for transport. There is a scroll of illumination that provides a good level of light for a pitifully short number of turns, and a scroll of light that creates one permanent, but stationary, magical light source. All these drawbacks and caveats mean that, for the good majority of the game, the player will have to put up with torchlight for his illumination needs, and that gets old fast. It doesn't help a bit that the game doesn't "remember" places outside of his sight range, so he must put up with the low illumination even when navigating places he's already been.

Verdict: The game's attention to detail is admirable, but its star feature, the lighting system, seems to be more aggravating than atmospheric.

I actually really liked this review and believe its criticisms are spot on. Many other reviewers didn't read the manual and missed important commands like Shift-L, but John's review is based on an educated stab at the game with a full understanding of its controls and a very good intuition for its goals.

Good catch on the Castlevania rip-off.

As @ Play's review notes, the main feature of the game, the lightning system, gets tedious really, really fast. I believe this is primarily a function of how skeletal the game is. My ultimate goal for light in the game is kind of like food in crawl or perhaps corruption in ADOM. It should be a resource to manage, with mismanagement leading towards death, but its presence in the game shouldn't be overbearing to the point where dealing with it is not pleasurable.

Some things to come and tweaks that should make it less annoying, even as MaxyB begins work on item construction modifiers and monster abilities:

• A more gradual transition to pitch black
  
• Fixed ambient light sources (phorphorescent lichen, fungi, etc)
• Larger light radius from items (compensated with larger rooms perhaps)
• The addition of fire (using torches to start brief, bright fires by burning corpses, scrolls, wooden items, fire breathing monsters, etc)
• More comestibles (potions of bioluminescence as an example).

I should note that John never found scrolls of shining egress. That's a good example of an item implemented to solve a problem (namely, where the hell are the stairs).

Ultimately, however, finding yourself at a low level with no light should be a guaranteed death. Making the lighting interesting, tactical, but fun is priority number one.