Baconthulhu; or James is better than us at everything

[Gizmog]

Looks like we got us another one of them "Rogue-Likes" over here. I give James credit for giving it the awesome title "THE CRYPT OF BACONTHULHU" rather than some K'hyurbi style pun like The Crypt of Rogalyke. Just as the name implies, the game features Bob The Hamster (everyone's favorite!) in the Crypt of Baconthulhu, a place familliar to all of us who've overindulged on bacon.

There's a ton of things this game does that right that that other roguelike I played didn't. For one thing, the floors are a different color than the walls which gives a bit of variety to things. Secondly, the halls are one tile wide, which might sound constricting but actually makes it way easier to find landmarks at certain corners. If the existing landmarks aren't enough you can find or buy chalk to mark the maze, and on top of that there's gold coins all over the floor so you can tell the areas you've already walked on. The fog of war is also really nicely implemented, and stays gone once you've explored an area. This serves to make the maze more interesting and keeps you from peeking ahead, but also lets you "know" an area once you've been through it. All of these together make the games eventual backtracks and mandatory exploration tolerable. Without any one of them, the game would be a tedious mess. Even then, the maps might be a bit big for their own good. My playtime clocked in at two hours and most of that was back-tracking for a fetch-quest and then re-tracking to figure out how to get back down. Do yourself a favor and mark the path on your way down, so you don't have to do it the hard way like I did.

I remember this game being way harder the last time I played it, so apparently the patches over the years of done a good job of pushing it in a more playable direction. I didn't die once, though I did a pretty good job of hording gold to buy a ton of potions to take that risk away. Combat is in the roguelike style, meaing you see an enemy on the map and push towards him to attack. Your health and stamina could be a bit more prominent, and I have no idea what the purple bar that popped up occasionally was. Other than that, it's a particularly well animated system for a roguelike.

The music gets just a little repetitive, but stays in the background enough that it never gets really in your face. It also sets a pretty ominous tone for the game, but might've been nice to get more ominous the deeper you go. Textboxes are done in the same Simlish kind of way that James has used before in Duke Stabbingmore and Escape The Wolf and that's still super cool.

What's interesting is that at no point does this game feel like an OHR Game. It's a good roguelike, not just a "good for OHR" Roguelike. You can really do a lot of wonderful things with this engine, and it would figure it'd be James who does the best job of showing us that. I'd definitely recommend it, but only to someone who doesn't mind a game that's a little too long and a little too back-tracky. Plus, you have to give it a little slack in that department since it was 2009 Terrible Games Contest entry. This is the classic PC game approach, a very beautiful and interesting kind of terrible.