Carolyne

Carolyne is an hour short dungeon crawler made for the 2-day do something challenge.
It features a third person dungeoncrawler with movement grid and other nifty features, but an encounterbased standard RPG battle system.
Your party of four is raiding a tower in the search of someone handsome.


Now I'm pumped!

Carolyne in itself is a fastpaced game and has a few roguelike elements in it.
Death will not render a gameover, but send you back to town. Once you leave the tower - be it willingly or unwillingly - your party's level will be resetted to level 1.
Should you die, status upgrades, skills you can only learn by spellbooks remain. Items should be cleared as well, but it apparantly is not 100% working, or it just keeps specific kinds of items such as equipment. (your class-accessories and whatnot).
If you leave by your own will (which you can do at any and all staircases), only your level will fade, so I recommend you do that.
Either way, it means you leaving the tower will set you back by a lot and press you to continue further once you have leveled up a bit.


Oh red. Sweet red.

It is aesthetically very bland .. with only about three enemies per area and playing through similar-looking areas all over, this is not a feast for the eyes.
The music is pleasing but mild and will stay in the background for the most part.
The forest area has a small technical flaw, as you can walk over almost all edges. It does not affect gameplay, but is noticeable.

The Town

In town you can rest in the inn, buy potions or equipment and have a little bit of a chat. Granted, the town is a place for one or two jokes, some references to the maker and has little value in the game. The town itself is built after Diablo 1's wellknown Tristram, and you can even see a sage next to the well.
The mapping is bland, the pub master is the same person as the armorer (including dialogue, face, and items to sell).

The equipment offers is a random selection based on .. I have no idea. When I had a lot of money he offered more expensive and actually useful wares, so I imagine it is based on that.
There are many weapons such as the cestus (ohh, diablo!) which are simply .. useless. They may have status effects, but reduce your attack damage by 40% or more and will simply destroy your battle prowess. Given that you start the dungeon with lvl 1 and thus reduced stats already, you want flat battle power.
Rods are out as well, but more on magic later.

There is a wide variety of weapons, but I found the iron hammer to outweigh almost everything else. It's fairly cheap and easy to find, too.
Some armor is not balanced, as a buckler has the same defensive capacities of an iron shield, but is cheaper and available to 3 instead of 2 characters.

Armor is rare to find and I advise to buy it as early as you can and not lose it. It will quickly raise your defense enough to take little to no damage from the most common enemies and save your ass whenever you enter the tower (without armor, your characters are often onehitted by even the weakest of enemies).
In fact, I have not found a single armor piece in the dungeon. I have found strong accessories, weapons, tons of potions and scrolls, but not a single piece of armor. Once you have a good set of armor for everyone, the game is a breeze.

Be aware of one fact: this game is marked as complete, but the game is buggy. After the one and only bossfight you will not be able to continue playing as you will be stuck with a white-screen.

The Tower
We all love towers, and we all love dungeons.
Once you enter for the first half or more of the game you will see the first floors of the tower time and time again.

What is confusing at first is how the stairs work - on each level there are stairs up and down.
The stairs up lead to some extra areas, also your ultimate quest area, a magical forest, and a rat den. If you use them while in such a special area, the area either continues (in the case of our quest area), or you stay in the same area, but are teleported to a different standpoint on it.
It is quite a shame that these areas look so similar to one another. I loved the forest and I would've loved to see more diversity in the "special areas".

The stairs down lead down the tower or back to the tower.
What really is confusing is the way the floors are numbered, as you suddenly skip from F3 to F10 and back to F2. If you keep going down, you will get to the top ones again.

The dungeons are randomly generated with random pathways and a couple of rooms with enemies and/or items lying around. You will pick up said items by walking over them and you just save them up as there is no item limit, either.

Although the enemies appear on map on a design reminding us of Mystery Dungeons, Izuna, Shiren The Wanderer or Chocobos Dungeon where you defeat enemies on map, they serve as touch encounters. Thus there are only few enemy groups per map which will only very rarely block your way. Also, you have a high chance of fleeing battle and as the number of enemies is random, you can simply flee and retry until you have one or two enemies to fight instead of 5 or 6!


The visual HP loss with level ups is tremendous!

And here is where a huge balancing difficulty is making its way. What purpose does the dungeon design serve for the battles and vice versa? That is not to say that these two different approaches are not compatible per se, but they certainly are unusual and need to be set up well.

What usually accompanies such a dungeon system is:

A: an item limit.
Magic scrolls, different kinds of items and potions are goods are lying around freely, but must be used well. You can't keep hording potions for that difficult fight and often times weapons or armor can break as well, so you are forced to keep a spare or find ways to repair them.

B: item flexibility
You cannot only use items, but you can also throw them for damage or additional effects. Often times there are items that are harmful when consumed, but can be a handy throwing material.

C: tactical use of corridors
As you fight enemies on the gridfield, all enemies must be present at once. That alone means that more enemies are on the floor and thus can and will block you.
It also means that you must fight in a way to stay clear of too many enemies.
// Fight in a corridor and don't get surrounded. Get the first hit.
Some monsters are slower than the hero (like turtoises), others are faster like bats which needs to be taken into consideration.

D: Items or spells use time
Using an item or using a spell means monsters can attack, get closer to you, or even surround you.

None of these can be effectively used. And you can even flee from enemies, unscathed. Fleeing from battle will leave the enemy group frozen for a little while.
What could utilize this more would be being hindered by enemies - you could either flee a few steps into a certain direction (the opposite one of which the enemy is facing. Etrian Odyssey utilizes this to some degree), or even allow surrounding monster to get closer to you while fighting, giving you a different setback for fighting carelessly. As it is, even while you are surrounded, you can still heal yourself up between battles without worry.

What the random encounter fighting style utilizes is often:

A: Party Building Skills
You create your own party setup with different playstyles, strengths and weaknesses in mind. And/or you can skill them independently and go for different abilities even on the same class.
It also allows for visual party costumization.
Also: different rows allow for weak characters to take less damage and be targeted not as often! Crucial for mages or characters with weak defensive capabilities.

You can build teams that are great for exploration, but weaker against bosses. Or you can go for boss-slaughtering combinations that need a few turns to be set up well and are thus not as versatile on the field.

B: Mana conservation // long term thinking
In contrast to dungeon crawlers where you have to keep using your items and concentrate on surviving the floor you are on, these dungeon crawlers force you to plan longterm exactly what supplies you are taking with you. Items on map are scarce and you fight monsters trying to conserve mana for possible strong foes and in order to continue as long as possible.

C: Exploration!
Maps are seldom if ever randomly generated. It is your task to keep on fighting and discover what exactly is there - as far as you can.
The wonder of what awaits you is a huge factor, just as the satisfaction of treading on what you couldn't reach before.


And here is what makes this so difficult - you have a limited range of party costumization. You do have the ability to change classes, but the basic spells are limited and weak. You cannot change the tide of battle with different combinations. Buffs and debuffs are at your disposal, but are very useless if you could be defeating that enemey during the time you are buffing - especially against enemy groups. Taking out enemies before they can get you is crucial.

As you have no rows to place your characters in, you cannot abandon defensive capabilities.
Mages simply have no place, although healing spells can be a nice addition. Even with having gathered magic shards for one character alone (thus a huge mag buff) the usual magic falls flat compared to simple autoattacks, but uses a very very limited resource - mana.
As you start each run with lvl 1 - you also start with the mana resources of someone of level one! The starting mana and health pool is very low, so you start with either 6 or 3 mp. And each magic spell would need at least 2 mana.
There is no way you can make that work.
Ethers cannot be bought and can only be seldomly aquired with the help of magic circles you can use as .. a random effect? They spawn similar to items.
They sometimes exchange potions with ethers, very handy.
There are traps as well .. all kinds of traps. They may harm you, poison you, send you to the next area and whatnot. But they are so rare they make little difference.

The party profits the most from your equipment, no doubt. You can also find status upgrades (+1 power e.g.) and will eventually make your party grow stronger. Without equipment, you will not be able to acquire many of them however, nor will you be able to slay enemies. So the only real tactic is to gather items, leave the dungeon, sell items, buy equipment, and THEN start crawling that tower.
As your monster companion cannot wear armor, make sure to give him as many defensive shards as you can so he won't be a oneshot early on.

The dungeon system itself utilizes little of strengths it could have. Finding items is awesome, but most of the items and scrolls have little use. You find plenty of return scrolls, which you will never ever need as you won't get surrounded, nor have no means of returning without it.
You can use potions well as your healing capabilities (except those you may learn with luck and use this rare resource called mana) don't do anything. They heal about 1-7 health, and we're talking 7 health on a 100 health guy.
There are spells with a death chance, and that is all they are good for. They may instakill the only boss in this game as well, but for normal fights they do little damage and rely on luck to get any kills.


So how is the battle part?

Dungeon Crawling is not primarily about the act of grinding.
That is not to say that it can't be fun, but it is using your resources to the best of your capabilities. Grinding is something you do along the way or something to make up for lacking strategies or abilities. Say, if you don't have that spell yet you need to pull off your awesome combo.

In this case, there is no other way but to prevail without any way of properly defeating the enemies. The only possible way to move on is to escape battles until you get only a single enemy or to avoid enemies altogether until you have gathered enough equipment.
Defeating enemies is the one thing that has the least benefits for you. You will need a couple of levels (say, lvl 3) to gain better base stats and a nice health and mana pool, but you won't gain much from it after that. An hour of grinding the tower left me at lvl 7. You can get shards randomly, but only with a nice luck stat and so seldom that searching the floors is much more worthwhile.

BUT!

The interface, the battles and everything else is very smoothly without any timeconsuming animations or game-over cutscenes.
Which means that you can find your way quickly and easily, and also can continue right away after a loss.

Even if there is much room upwards to be had, the crawling itself quickly became fun and it is fairly rewarding to see your work pay off.
There is a wide range of different spells to learn and skillsets to get (not to mention the different "class"-types you so rarely find, I only got a slime one for my monster), a variety of weapons and the magic forest has some hardhitting enemies in it which were quite fun to battle.


In conclusion

I think Caryolyne is a very solid base for future dungeoncrawling, playwise it is smooth and fast with a wide variety of items.
But it definitely needs more tactical options, an indepth party system or more focus on the item usage. Different weapons are nice and all, but if you already have a good one, everything else becomes useless.

You could easily make this into a "traditional" third person dungeoncrawler, but for this hybrid a gameplay middleground has to be found.
Movement obstruction is important, so there could be more enemy groups to block your ways, but which will disappear once you have defeated a number of them.
Monster numbers should be set the moment you enter the stage, so you can't work around them.
Mages should become viable by gaining ways of working against the MP problems. Such as the mage thingie allowing you to gain MP for each kill you make (but disable any healing magic), or for each floor you traverse. And perhaps by allowing a different row. Magic needs higher base damage as you are limited by mana as it is and should not be able to cast it every turn.
Ailments are easy to be healed as you have a cure-all healing spell. One way to do it would be to limit its health properties to just some ailments so you still need to watch our for antidotes or other healing items.
As a sidenote .. let the bestiary contain only the implemented monsters. Having 7% at the end of it is fairly unsetteling.

Even with all its obvious flaws - Carolyne has been a lot of fun to play for the little while it lasts. Those who are on the fence with dungeoncrawlers should stay away, bot those who are looking for a little game to sink some time in might consider this one.