Sproggiwood

A cutesy roguelike. Decent but not great.

On Normal difficulty, it is a very short game. You should have little trouble rampaging through the levels, especially if you repeat some levels with the classes you unlock and get the extra gold. It has some amusing mechanics like the magic doors that appear late in the game and whenever you use a Scroll of Wonder. Those get you things like pastel sheep and mirror farmers that throw teleporting pitchforks.

On Savage difficulty, the game is subject to the usual roguelike nonsense where information is hidden and not everything is possible. The difficult is not necessarily unreasonable, but it can become a war of attrition in which the game may not give you any health refills, or where the equipment that will help you get through a level will get you killed against the boss. Savage difficulty does create some truly interesting situations by mixing up what the monsters do, like having exploding monsters fire in all eight cardinal directions instead of just the usual four. Sometimes those interesting abilities become a problem, because you may run into a combination of them that you cannot beat with your class and equipment, or even escape. And because it is a roguelike, that is randomized, and one of the game’s explicit goals is to defeat every level with every class on Savage difficulty.

That constitutes half the achievements in the game. The other half is basically “play through the game on normal difficulty,” plus a couple of oddities.

It is hard to get angry at the usual roguelike nonsense when it is hidden under cuteness. There are still times when randomness is more important than your decisions, but I found that I did not care as much. That led me to asking whether I actually care, and why would I play if I don’t care? And done with Sproggiwood.

: Zubon