Delver

2024-12-25
A roguelite that's perfectly engaging for the 4 hour flight it took me to start and finish the thing. The packaging of the 2D pixel art paired with low poly 3D environments and some lovely little tunes really create a nice vibe.

Mechanically it's a pretty basic affair of melee combat where you kite and dodge enemies while you try to hit them before they can hit you. You can mix it up with ranged attacks via a bow or wands and all of these scale off stats that you level up as you murder pixel monsters below the ground. There is some element of skill where you begin to learn the attack patterns of enemies but pretty quickly you realize they either A) run at you B) shoot stuff at you or C) run at you with pizzaz.

Sadly I found a large portion of your success, and the reason I was able to win in like 10 runs, is how good the randomized loot you get is. In my last run I decided to try out a Magic build. Every point in Magic beefs up the amount of ammo and damage of the wands you find. Well somehow on this run I found the 3 best items I had seen in any of my previous runs and each one had a ton of Magic. Which meant I just cruised through the game one-shotting things at range with wands. Sure some element of my success was because I knew the dangers of each of the 4 levels at this point but a lot of it was because my build was kind of broken.

Given the RNG-ness of it all I don't see it as a game with a lot of meat on its bones or a game necessarily built for endless runs like a traditional roguelike. But what's on offer here is pretty dope for a couple sittings.