Endless Abyss

I played "Endless Abyss" a while back, and with the title, layout and looting abilities, it seemed more like a poor roguelike. Replaying it, it actually plays like a minigame - and a fairly enjoyable one at that!

It was made for a challenge event creating a full game utilizing only a single screen - and this is what it does.
You run around in darkness, with rooms being connected by red tiled pathways, and once they vanish completely out of sight, or you traversed more, it is filled with a differently sized room, new enemies/chests or very rarely a shop (you can only sell). You fear enemies and are searching chest after chest for treasure.

The basic layout of rooms remains - as in, three rooms in the top row, three in the bottom row, always interconnected. But the size and content changes.

Now, you start out with 6 healing items and three hearts - you lose one every time you touch an enemy (with a little bit of invincibility time it seems). You fight automatically, but your goal is to collect as much gold as possible, not to fight as much as possible.
You can kill enemies, but they respawn too easily, and your healing supply is too limited - so you in fact try to avoid them as best as you can.
And needing to avoid them combined with not knowing what the next room may bring - there may even be no enemies at all - and the limited sight of view actually makes for tension as you go through the game.


so many items .. the list continues on and on

There really is no main incentive, you find many useless items - and very rarely healing supplies. Sadly, you always use the first item in the row of many (the one you start out with), and you cannot use any of the many weapons you find at all, sicne they do nothing.
So if you use up your healing supplies - and actually manage to find new ones - you will not be able to use them until you sold off every other item in your possession. You can sell them in rare shops popping up as a dollar-symbol on the ground, but you cannot buy healing supplies in return.
I really would have loved to have a scoreboard for the highest gold, so you can feel like you did something.

The sounds are simple and only appear when interacting with the shop and chest - the message pauses the game for a second until you move or press any button. If you use spacebar, with which you use items, you will consume your healing stuff, so be wary of that.
There sadly is no music, the design is really simple and practical rather than pretty. There is a lot you could add, from actually throwing or using items, or leveling affecting you, to highscores actually counting your gold (I was short below 30k on one play), to having more use for items and the selection of what to use, to a variety of enemies and interactive elements.

Still, this is solid in how the layout works, how you avoid enemies and collect stuff. If you view it as a minigame of avoiding enemies and sneaking around .. it works fairly well!

I will be the first to admit that this is fairly bare-bones, but I still had a lot of fun with it.