The Legend Of Rogue Amulet

"The Legend of Rogue Amulet" (LORA for short) is a short thirdperson roguelike/dungeoncrawler. You start medias in res in a little dungeon and fight for as long as you can, then perish leaving only your topscore behind. Or beat all levels, maybe.

There is no story, no sentence said or done, and sadly no control help, either.
With an unusual layout, this would have been very helpful.
Looking through the gamefolder, there are two files with a story and ending portion, sadly they never appear in the actual game. The story is thus that you are a game developer trying to create a roguelike. You are on to find a legendary amulet that enables you to do so.



The story is playing with the fourth wall here, but sadly a little crudely written, so it appears as somewhere inbetween intentionally cheesy, or serious, which makes it less fun as it could be, since it is all rather illogical.

So on to the actual game you so.
The aesthetics are fairly simple, with standard and mostly intuitive enemy and icon design.
The controls are a little bit clunky and something to be found out via trial and error for some part.


I, uh, wouldn't be too keen on the writing.

You access your inventory where you can equip new stuff with the usual spacebar/enter (there is armor, weapons and boomerangs). They are all self-explanatory, only the weapon you carry determines what spell you can cast. Their impact on dmg are relatively low, but they can affect the sword-attack animation's speed and your defensive capabilities. Boomerang speed seems to do little different, but more later.

tab - open inventory
ctr - use boomerang
shift - cast magic
spacebar - attack with sword
enter - pause/unpause game
esc - exit game
(thankfully with pop-up asking you if you want to)

Armed with this trial of error knowledge in mind .. you start medias in res in the middle of the first floor of the dungeon. If you do not react in the first 5 seconds you will, most of the time, die instantly.
You move in real time, and the first enemies of the stage will continously, directly move towards you. Health is reduced multiple hearts at once, and you hear one "ouch!" for every taken damage every now and then - damage can be taken quickly and repeatedly killing you without noticing what hit you.

After you anticipated the fact you will be surrounded by enemies, you will then retreat behind one of the many walls and objects. Enemies are scripted to behave exactly one way.
Slimes will move towards you, always. If they hit blocks or edges they will keep moving in that direction, unless you move in a direction that frees them.
Bats wait until you come closer (you can still hit them with ranged attacks before that), and can then fly over objects moving directly towards you.
Magic guys cast a magic fireball hovering towards you directly, often in curves. If you hit the magic attack, it will disappear. They start casting even when you can't reach them just yet and fairly quickly. They remain stationary - the only exception being casting a spell, like a tornado, where every monster comes charging towards you at high speed. I actually killed myself after being "stuck" in a bad enemy spot, although I saw no attack hitting me once, may have been a glitched out magic attack.
They are added on top of each other each passing floor, after which come upgrades for the enemies, starting with the slimer turning it from the usual green ooze into a purple bejeweled entity behaving the exact same.

With which we come to how battling these enemies actually works. As you may have noticed, their patterns are horribly predictable. Spikes are randomly scattered across the room, and so are explosives and random destructible walls.

There are a few things - magic is obselete. The potions you see as icons are actually your mp, not potions to use in any way. I mentioned enemies charging at me through the walls while casting. Casting bypasses any walls or objects, however it has limitations passed by the mp, and it may cause you death if you are unlucky.
Swordfighting stuns the enemy for a split second - if they are right in front of you. You then stab them to death without any means of retaliation possible. However, if they are slightly on the corner of the tile, they will continue to charge at you, damaging you to which you need to retreat and readjust.
This leaves the boomerang, which is actually a deadly and quicker weapon than swords or magic (magic piercing all enemies, however). If thrown into empty space, it takes a little bit to return to you and may hit an enemy on its way back, too.
However, if you directly hit an enemy in front of you, you can spam the boomerang button and quickly defeat enemies before they close in on you.

The game as a whole revolves around singling out enemies and killing them before they can reach or touch you. There are random spikes on the floor everywhere, and you may sometimes use explosive to aid your cause (they can also hurt you if you are blowing it up right next to you). There are also a few destructible crates/blocks and a few rocks you can use.
You search for ten keys on each level - yes ten - with which you can then bring the stairs/entrance to a glow and procceed to the next floor.

Spikes being everywhere, after you killed all enemies in sight, you often need to search for a key or two you missed in a corner - dodgine and maneveuring through the spikes. They pop up and disappear with time, but it makes you procceed through the scattered pathways, and sadly, the borders are very hard to navigate - it is difficult to see if standing on the tile next to it, I actually AM safe, or running into spikes anyway. I lost more life to spikes than I would like to admit because of this. Waiting for them to go down would mean wasting minutes instead of seconds.

Thankfully, enemies drop health-regenerative hearts quite frequently. Either red restoring 2, or gold restoring even more. The battling itself is easy, you only need to be careful with many magic guys in one place (if they are in one direction you can hit the magic together with them, if they are in all directions, you will have trouble doing that). You can even hit enemies with your sword through walls.


Walls are no match for my sword swings!

However, the battling itself is only difficult in frustration - when the enemy moves despite supposedly being stunned, when you run into spikes because you want to walk next to them, or when you simply cannot walk into a specific direction for a lil while.
I don't quite know how I generated that glitch, but it sometimes happened that I was facing an "invisible wall" into one direction, and in one instance where a I was surrounded by magic guys I couldn't go down and fight them one after another. I still killed them, taking heavy damage, but it was an unnecessary risk. Later I could continue downwards just fine, too.
I played in the bigger window (the small one is really uncomfortable for me to play in), and often times it freezed, but could be returned to running by mini- and maximizing the game again.

The battling itself is "easy" and repetitive, but it still is easy to die as well if you either are not careful, or are encountering oddities, or start in a very bad spot in the middle of the floor, as taking stairs warps you somewhere in the next floor.
Equipment and leveling give you minor upgrades (you can increase your magical or physical prowess + health or mana upon level up), but the gameplay and your reaction to enemies always stays the same.

In a way it does what it is supposed to do, but you have too few interactive elements, an artificial difficulty which simply lacks any satisfaction in procceeding through the game.

I think with a little slower enemy speed and a few more elements this could become quite fun (and fewer spikes, they do nothing for battling).

As it is, it is simply not satisfying to play.