Champs of the Bocca is a fairly easy dungeoncrawler/roguelike featuring a couple of heroes and villains setting out hand in hand to defeat monsters and get back a shiny object! Made for the McBacon Jam#2!

The gods in this world had a shiny shiny object, but someone was jealous of them and this object was put into a dungeon only transversable by humans to spite them, and now everyone's lost interest in these gods. So on to retrieve the shiny object! Thankfully, heroes (and villains) for hire are easy to get off the street, and so you have a tag-team of two going in there. Choose from 8 characters, with 4 of two side.

The story is really a means to get the game starting. There are all kinds of names and titles, and none of them really matter. The label hero or villain is without further meaning, you even team up.
This is a demo still - lacking many features it aimed for, and as such will not receive a star rating and change over time.

The first thing to note is the fully customized aesthetic and music it features - specifically the character designs are varied and very interesting. An old female voodoo-magician, a chubby woman, a boxer, the pretty seductress as well as knights, old priests and thieves. I find the male side a little bit more "standard" and dull, but it's still very solid.


Just look at her!

All good so far bare one thing .. the description says little about their ingame capabilities or spells. Instead, they refer to the gods and what I frankly couldn't care less about in a dungeoncrawler.
The boxer is one of the few characters having the spell "heal" from early on - it doesn't work as of yet, but if it would, it is a viable asset.
The priest wields a katana and has a high damage output .. but no healing spells. (far more attack than the boxer, by the by, unless I am blind to numbers)
This may be considered a twist or not .. but not knowing a thing about what characters do or can according to their description makes any proper team set-up impossible. Thankfully(?).. or sadly .. these differences are not as noticeable as in other games. They've got slightly different base stats and maximum hp. Max HP has little impact as a single enemy will not get you down by itself even with a lower HP character - and the heal you get with a potion is flat. The base attack does. The priest is my personal favorite.

There are a couple of bugs this build has - the heal spell for any character is missing an audio file, so it crashes your game if you try to use it. Resetting your run, so ignore the spell. (Audio/SE/Item3)
There is no way to save your game manually, there is, however, an autosave once you enter major areas of the dungeon. If you die, you die and are done. You may continue with the dead character removed (and possibly rescue them, as is planned, although I couldn't check that myself)

There are apparantly three major areas, but somewhere in the second one you encounter a missing light file, crashing the game - loading the autosave brought me the same crash for the same missing file (Graphics/Characters/!$Light1)
There's also a typo for one character in the menu, as the thief is spelled out as theif.

But let's get into the meat of the game

Battles and Potions

The game starts out brutally difficult, with characters barely holding on before you got any proper leveling up. There are no healing items to start out with. Two enemies and you are doomed for death unless you found a potion before encountering the next. And later the characters then become ridiculously overpowered fighting through hordes of enemies, stacking money, potions and enjoying the dungeon scenery.

The layout is simple - you've got a few different types of enemies, 6 in total (may be more in the last region), with the starting places starting out with three of them. There are spiders, some shell monsters and snakes. Later joined by mouses, ghosts and statues (strength in that order).
Mouses and ghosts move, the others stay still until you attack them (run into them or press the button in front of them), and are usually placed in front of chests or pathways, so you will have to defeat them in order to procceed.

When you attack you enter an automatic battle mode - you normal-hit one after another (you, enemy, you, enemy) until either of you dies. You cannot open the menu to use items, spells, or to swap members during this battle. BUT you can use shortcuts for it, as I later on found out .. please please please have that noted somewhere. Skills do not fall under that system, apparantly.
If one character dies .. the other simply takes over while the other perishes (no resurrection possible). You cannot escape a battle if you realize the enemy is stronger than what you can take on, either.
Thus the only tactic to use is .. attack, wait until you win, heal up and kill another.
There are some spells that are not yet useable using non-existant fury, as well as the heal spell that crashes the game. Losing a character in no way sets you back, bare the visual impact.


Cute spiders.

There are only three items, only one of which is actually useable. That being potions. And you will need many of them.
Then there are bombs that have an animation, but do not blow up things (strangely, the animation is not on the tile you stand automatically on the boulder next to you) as well as red keys not serving any function whatsoever. They will probably find some use later .. for now it's just a fight for heal supplies until you get strong enough.

Merchants sell potions and bombs, and once you've reached one, you can safely stock up on potions and potions alone.
Before that, you need to carefully plan your routes as not getting to treasure chests : read not getting to potions means certain death. If you don't find any treasure chests near you .. then you face certain death. If you got weak-hitting characters .. they likely won't survive the first three enemies.
If you can make it through the beginning hurdle - you are pretty much safe.
Possible additions would be the use of offensive items in battle - even bombs (think binding of isaac), and maybe some escape rolls at the start to get to new rooms if the one you start in is out to kill you. Equipment is already there for future updates.

To sum it up - battles are .. dull and while they offer tension early on, they do not offer any challenge as there is no way to influence anything. They are also a little slow as there is always a small pause between the action, the display of damage that has been done, and the next attack.
There are a few shortcuts for certain abilities (s being bombs, a swapping team members and d using potions), but only the bomb one is explained. Would love to have that written down somewhere briefly. Also - if you use the potion shortcut it will return from fullscreen to windowed mode, when it shouldn't. A small 100 window also pops up, distrupting the general aesthetics.

The Dungeon

The dungeon itself is randomly generated, and you are traversing deeper and deeper into it. The generation has a few standard layouts at its base, filled with slightly different chest and enemy distribution - you can notice the pattern very quickly, and while it does not impact the enjoyment greatly, it can make it difficult to discern which areas you need to go back to in order to find the stairs down. There are a few unique or unique-looking maps to it every now and then, but they are far inbetween.
There are many enemies in there, making traversing most floors without fighting any nigh impossible.

The Beauty

The graphics are superb, simple, easy on the eyes and make paths and very easy to navigate in, too.
While the layout itself is kind of repetitive, it does remain charming. Later areas are a mere color swap, as it seems, which may be expanded on.

The sound-design is simple with the only odd one out being the sound for a chest opening being played while picking up red keys.
The background music similarily suits the atmosphere .. but is quite dull over time, with nothing to stand out, and nothing to make it really memorable. The later background music is a little more upbeat and I enjoyed the transition.
It comes down to a grounded simplicity - to which I hope more additions will be added.

In short - this game offers a solid base to what it's supposed to do.
Yet without any mechanical additions, this will be a very, very dull game.
Either have better ways to influence the flow of battle, or give way to more costumization and party-building.
For example, the person in the backline could give a passive boost to the one fighting. There are also games featuring tag-teams like Izuna 2 where you could perform a special attack if both are alive and if you battled enough (filled a gauge), often affecting the entire room you were in.
The fact that enemies are for the most part stationary also means that you will procceed every room in pretty much the same way. And end up repetitive in its nature.

I hope to see this shine as a little gem in the future.