GameCyte

Last April, Caravel Games released The City Beneath, the third major release in their wonderfully clever Deadly Rooms of Death game series. DROD, a series known for its brutally difficult puzzles, has raised the bar with each release, delivering harder and more challenging tricks and traps to its puzzle-hungry fans. Prior to TCB’s release, series creator Erik Hermansen made no apologies for the game’s growing difficulty, going so far as to say the new title was “not really for new DROD players,” a game which “requires patience and intelligence from its players.” These patient and intelligent players, as we discussed with Caravel’s Mike Rimer, are always craving even greater challenges, and as Mike mentioned at the time, Caravel had just such a challenge in the works: DROD RPG: Tendry’s Tale. Now, with DROD RPG having launched on September 12th, it has to be said; Caravel knows what its fans want. The DROD team has taken its beloved franchise in a very new direction, offering a slew of new features and surprises for its fans, while at the same time unapologetically pushing the difficulty level to perilous new heights.

This is not a use of the review cliché, “If you liked the prequel, you’ll love the sequel!” No, this is a warning. Play the old DROD games before you attempt DROD RPG. Do not let this be your first entry into the series. DROD RPG will take new players and eat them alive.

DROD RPG is a very different direction for the series; for starters, as per the game’s title, you do not control the story’s longtime protagonist Beethro Budkin and his Really Big Sword. Instead, players are introduced to Tendry, a dedicated soldier in the Stalwart Army, last seen fighting an ill-fated battle against the mysterious Underground Empire in TCB. Also indicated by the title are a number of RPG elements now added to the gameplay — hit points, a small handful of statistics, power-ups and items, locked doors and associated single-use keys, and a persistent world.

The rest will be warmly familiar to DROD fans — the handmade 2D top-down graphics, the bizarrely charming characters with outlandish portraits and amusing voice acting, and the surprisingly well-fleshed-out lore that pervades its story. Longtime DROD players will be eased into the series’ new features through the use of old staples, including the familiar move-and-rotate grid system, door-opening orbs, disappearing platforms, and a healthy supply of roaches. The series’ look remains strong, the graphics are both amusing and foreboding, and a special mention must be made of DROD RPG’s music. The score contains a few familiar pieces from games past, but also some exceptional new tracks; if Tendry didn’t start snoring whenever you left him standing still, there are moments when you’d want to just stop and listen for a while. Still, it’s a DROD game through and through, and Tendry can expect to run into old faces and many references to the series’ prior events, provided he lives that long.

The persistent world is the key factor in DROD RPG’s puzzles and progression: In prior DROD titles, if one set the overarching narrative and level maps aside, each deadly room of death could be taken as a standalone puzzle. The room had a challenge, and one or more solutions, and a player could either beat it or leave it and come back later, knowing the conditions and challenges would be exactly the same. The opposite holds true in DROD RPG; every item, enemy, and obstacle is completely persistent, as are Tendry’s hit points and stats, making every room unique to the situation at hand. An ill-placed enemy can pose a powerful threat at first, but if Tendry can find a different path and return later with more HP and better weaponry, that same enemy may be fairly inconsequential. It’s possible to kill enemies in different orders, before or after finding power-ups, or only kill some of the enemies in a given room, or spend a picked-up key to open one of multiple doors. As the game wears on, one begins to realize the true challenge of DROD RPG: Every single action that Tendry takes will have consequences for the rest of the game.

This doesn’t sound like different fare from a typical RPG, at first — fighting enemies, powering up, maintaining a positive HP number. The catch in DROD RPG, however, is that there is absolutely nothing random. Every room is guaranteed to be laid out the same way every time you enter it; every enemy will be in exactly the same place, every item, every locked door, every power-up, every cutscene and triggered event. The enemies do not charge at you as in previous DROD games, they keep their carefully maintained places up until you decide you’re ready to fight them, and there are no random encounters. Even the fights themselves leave nothing to chance: Every creature in the game, including Tendry, has an ATK stat and a DEF stat. When Tendry starts a fight, he deals damage equal to his ATK minus the enemy DEF, and then the enemy does vice versa, until one or the other is dead. The game goes so far as to summarize a potential battle up for you — right-clicking on any beast in the room will tell you the expected damage you will take, and the gold you will receive.

This, in turn, makes DROD RPG sound easy. With the outcome of every battle known in advance, it’s a simple matter of beating your foes in the correct order, right? Sure — in the same way that the original DROD is a simple matter of moving from point A to point B. DROD RPG’s puzzles are a product of the game’s merciless level design, the same way DROD has always challenged its fans with devious rooms and forced players to find the optimal route. The difference, again, is that your moves and their consequences stick with you. When you start playing DROG RPG, you’ll find yourself quickly and easily adapting to the new gameplay, and understanding the math behind the battles. You’ll hack your way through a few roaches, knock down a few doors with the keys you’ve found, and feel like this is the kind of game you’ll find your way through without too much trouble — right up until you play yourself into your first corner.

It takes a moment to dawn on you, at first. You’ve come to a room where you don’t have enough keys to open the needed doors, or you’re too low on HP to survive a path-blocking monster. Surely, you think, there’s another way — a secret path, or an extra health potion or key to let you pass. After 20 minutes of retracing your steps and poking uselessly at an absence of hidden doors, though, you come to the full realization that you are actually completely stuck. You used up too much HP on the way in, and the door back the way you came is irrevocably locked. There are no more potions, no stat boosts — you literally cannot progress any further in the game. You have taken a misstep somewhere and placed yourself in a dead end, and while there’s no “GAME OVER” screen, that’s exactly what’s happened. You lost. I hope you have the kind of patience that Erik mentioned earlier, because this is going to happen a lot.

This is really the most dramatic shift from the previous DROD games, and it’s probably going to put off a few people. In DRODs past, yes, there were maddeningly difficult rooms. There were times when players would tear their hair out, gnash their teeth, and declare impossibility, but there was always a comfort: It’s just one room. No matter what happens, you can hit the restart button and try again, knowing that whatever the solution is, no matter how esoteric or unlikely, the answer was within this room. This is no longer the case in DROD RPG, where every action is a potential dead end waiting to happen. Every time you run into an unavoidable yet unbeatable foe, you will need to question every move you’ve made. Was it worth it to lose 100HP earlier for those attack power-ups? Should you have used one extra yellow key in order to dodge those two roaches instead of using it to pick up the two green keys? Did you need those 30 greckles to open the money-locked door on the last level, or should you have avoided that fight? Slowly but surely, it dawns on you: The entire length of DROD RPG is one big DROD room. There are possibly a few solutions, some more efficient than others, but every single level — and, since there’s no “reset” between levels, the entire game — is one big puzzle, challenging you to find the right order, the hidden tricks, and the one perfect sequence of moves that will allow you to survive. When every HP and key spent is a HP and key you might need later, it forces you to play very, very carefully — and even that won’t be enough.

To top it off, a great number of rooms in DROD RPG can’t even be beaten by simple math alone. Though the bulk of DROD’s gameplay hinges on knowing which enemies to fight and when, the diabolical room design from the Caravel team is in effect, forcing players to consider options they may not even realize at first. Through clever manipulation of the game’s many room hazards, including moving and vanishing platforms, secret passages, single-use items like invisibility potions, and even closing a door that you’re standing on, a creative player can dodge even more potential wastes of HP. If you thought DROD RPG was making the RPG part extra-hard to make up for the lack of DROD’s typical room-based puzzles, think again.

I’m going to come right out and say it: DROD RPG is an unfair game. I would go so far as to suggest that it is impossible to beat on the first playthrough, simply because a successful navigation of the levels requires perfect preparation for future events, while the game deprives you of any future knowledge. You can be as careful as can be, avoiding any irrevocable decisions for as long as possible, but eventually you will find yourself at a crossroads, faced with a choice between, say, two different unlockable doors, or two enemies of different strengths. You can look at any room on your map to re-assess the situation there, as long as you’ve already been there at least once, but that’s not always possible. Perhaps there are more keys behind one of the doors, or perhaps one enemy guards an item which will make the other enemy inconsequential (while selecting the wrong one will mean you have to fight both anyway). Without any way of knowing what the true repercussions of your choice will be, you’re left with no option but copious amounts of trial and error — and, when you inevitably do reach yet another dead end, I hope you’ve been keeping copious notes on your decisions thus far, because you may have just screwed up in the last room — or you may have made a critical mistake over twenty minutes ago. Which reminds me — I hope you saved early and often.

Ordinarily, the phenomenon of playing oneself into a corner is a major design no-no. It’s what industry types call a “progression stopper,” and its presence in a game is frequently grounds for immediate rejection by several publishers. As such, it’s really unexpected to play a game that uses it as its primary game mechanic. This is a double-edged sword if ever I’ve seen one: DROD RPG is, as mentioned, the wrong game to use to entice newbies to DROD. It can be incredibly frustrating the first few times you try it, and the enormous amount of backtracking it can require when you realize you made a wrong move half a level ago is easily enough to drive away players who don’t know what they’re getting into.

For hardcore DROD players, however, DROD RPG is your greatest challenge yet. I personally tore through all three of Beethro’s big adventures, and after spending several hours with Tendry, I’m terrified. This is a game I am going to need outside resources to beat. I don’t mean consulting FAQs or forums, I mean it’s time to break out the pen and paper. I don’t see myself beating this game without designing an actual map and taking notes, for Pete’s sake, and I haven’t had a game do that to me since 3 in Three. I hate this game. Not because it’s bad, but because now I have to beat it, and that’s probably going to kill me.

Puzzle fans, your game has arrived. Remember to take bathroom breaks.

DROD RPG: Tendry’s Tale is available now via direct download for PC, Mac, and Linux.

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