“Of course, some people do go both ways.”
Sometimes I wonder just how far we’ll go into the recursive, navel-gazing abyss of games concerning–and styled after–older games. “In Merlin’s Adventure of the Schoolyard Heroes you play one of several fantasy archetypes (represented by digital HeroClix miniatures) reliving a game of tag during recess at their childhood village’s daycare–narrative psychotherapy by the great wizard, Merlin. Hiding is accomplished by angrily throwing dice around Merlin’s office. For each other player your character recalls finding, you engage in a dungeon raid with small dolls, both in your memories and with Merlin, using action figures holding other, smaller action figures.”
More often, though, I just think about the promising line-up of reasonably themed digital “tabletop” games we have now (and that I can always call up my local Dungeon Master if I ever get too close to ludic Limbo). Playtap Games have just released their first update for procedurally generated dungeon crawler Card Dungeon, and it looks to fix many of the quibbles that Owen brought up in his review.
Chief among those complaints was a non-existent mid-level save, where players couldn’t tab out during a dungeon run without losing their progress. That’s been rectified.
Features: Game is now saved at every turn. New quick move system. End of level destruction. Lots of bug fixes and tweaks.
— Playtap Games (@playtapgames) October 27, 2014
There’s a new quick movement system as well, which lets players jump immediately to locations of interest like chests and doors instead of tapping along one space at a time; as you’d expect, quick movement is only available outside of combat.
Fredrik Skarstedt, game designer at Playtap, has also provided us with some more details surrounding the end-level lava flow which version 1.2 introduces. “The lava feature came about because we wanted to push the player to move forward instead of hovering up all the loot in the level,” says Skarstedt, via email, adding that it “adds a degree of danger to the end game of each level which we heard players felt was a bit lacking in the original release.” The point, it seems, is to engender a risk-reward scenario where you can either hang around for extra cards (or a heaping helping of deadly molten goo) or just jump right out of a stage.
As far as updates go this one seems to hit almost all the points of contention, which is good news for those who were intrigued by Card Dungeon’s focus on a limited and ever-changing arsenal, but turned off by reports of dropped saves and occasionally tedious navigation. Version 1.2 of Card Dungeon is live for Android and in the approval process for iOS. The video below breaks down the new quick move option.
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