As soon as you load up Runers, you might feel tempted to start a new game. Your character enters a dungeon at its first basement level, with the aim to journey further. Simple enough. The first room is empty and feels pretty safe. You have time to practice the controls, then you can step through a door into the next square shaped room on the map. Within the next few minutes, the word “dead” will be plastered across your screen.
Runers, developed by Let’s Get Kraken Games and published by Mastertronic, is a roguelike game. If you haven’t come across one before, a roguelike is a short, procedurally generated game that ends in either your permanent death or the game’s completion. Before starting Runers, you must choose a race, a class, and a starting spell. After this, you will have to take what the game offers you or claw your way through hordes of enemies with nothing but your pride.
Perhaps the most frustrating part about Runers and its difficulty level is that its style doesn’t represent it for the torture it is. The graphics are very simple and old-fashioned. Some enemies have interesting designs, but for the most part the basic visual style feels less quirky and more cookie-cutter fantasy from the ’90s. The music doesn’t do anything to improve on this either, with only an ambient backing track to accompany you on your gruelling adventure. It serves its purpose, and switches in important fights and events to a faster pace, but aside from its transitions, it fades into the background while you get stomped to death.
What sets Runers apart from other roguelikes is that, although you will randomly be given runes – elemental powers – throughout each floor, it is up to you what you do with them. Runes can be made into spells of one element as soon as they are collected, or can be combined in sets of 2 or 3. Doing this requires combiners, which are dropped by champions (strong, glowing enemies) and bosses, or sometimes offered at intervals like levelling up or changing floor. Once created, runes can also be added to existing spells to power them up further.
After discovering what a combination creates, it will be pointed out to you from then on. In a sense, this makes the game less random as it is played, eventually turning the 280+ unknown spells into a recipe book for destruction and success. It also encourages you not to rely on the same spell that helped you through one playthrough, as another, more effective spell could be hiding in amongst the hundreds of unknowns.
It’s worthwhile to remember that Runers isn’t about flicking through your repertoire of known spells and creating what you want; it’s about creating what you have to. Resources are scarce, so you can’t tailor your loadout for specific rooms or bosses. If a room warns you that it contains an event (e.g. protecting a section or blocking enemy spawn points), you will have to make do if none of your spells are well suited to that situation and possibly miss out on the reward.
As well as events, there are other types of rooms that can be found in each floor. Aura rooms will lower one of the player’s attributes or elemental affinities, such as weakening your water rune level or increasing the character’s density. If a character has managed to specialise themselves, such as by carefully selecting bonuses at each level up that work in tandem with their race, these levels can knock a temporary dent into their build. For the most part, these rooms feel like a needless addition, as they don’t change the game’s pace as drastically as an event or boss room.
If you don’t feel like you’re making any progress after a handful of playthroughs, there’s always the challenge mode for you to try instead. Challenge mode missions act like an extended tutorial, but using the standard roguelike method of forcing you to hit the ground running. Some demand you avoid enemies or missiles for a period of time, while others ask you to cleverly make use of a spell you’ve discovered. Strangely enough, they serve as a much better tutorial than the tutorial itself, teaching you the skills to you’ll need to reach the 10th floor down.Â
As you delve deeper, the bonuses you have accumulated over time will start affecting how you tackle each room: a character with high move-speed could circle enemies, whereas a melee character with high knock-back could charge directly into them. The potential for variation is enormous, and it’s interesting to see where each playthrough takes you. However, due to the perma-death mechanic, most playthroughs will end in an early death, and won’t give your character much time to specialise and set themselves apart from the horde of other adventurers you’ve sent down. Especially when learning the ropes, you will likely rely on a setup that works well in the early-game, making it feel less random and more repetitive.
To make matters worse, some of the spells you can start with and create are more demanding than others. They require precise targeting, while others require a well positioned character. Translating this from keyboard and mouse often proves complicated, with fingers having to slip around from the movement keys to ability and spell keys. As each game progresses, and more spells are added to the player’s arsenal, it becomes increasingly difficult to cast each spell while simultaneously manoeuvring the character and their spell-cursor.
Your two basic spells are equipped to your mouse, making them easy to fire off whenever you need to, but any other ability is more difficult to cast in the heat of the moment, and can often end up firing off-target. After a while, it can feel like you’re missing a hand that should be focusing on timing spell casts, so the other two can focus on character control and orientation. Give it even more time, and you’ll likely get a cramp in your wrist, or your thumb, or any other part of your hand that’s overcompensating for your lack of extra limbs.
What’s Good:
- Huge array of spells available
- Number of possible character-builds is great
- Quicksave feature (between floors) makes it easy to play in short bursts.
What’s Bad:
- Controls are clumsy and painful
- Very high difficulty level, even for a roguelike.
- Early floors feel repetitive due to limited combinations.
- Visuals are lackluster
Runers is a very difficult game. Due to its procedurally generated nature, luck can be a large factor in your success, or failure. Some playthroughs will be a breeze, until a fiery, Catherine-wheel-breathing spider stomps you into the ground. Others will throw all they have at you before you’ve combined your first rune.
It’s fun, but is missing the charm of other roguelikes, like The Binding of Isaac or Don’t Starve. If you’re up for having your pride crushed and your game-playing abilities questioned, it’s a good game to drop in and out of. It probably won’t blow you away, but at £6.99, it might be worth a try if you’re a fan of the genre.
psychobudgie
Gah, it is not a roguelike and neither are the two examples you give. They have some elements of a roguelike but are not one themselves. Dungeons of Dredmor is a roguelike, as is Nethack. Stop calling everything roguelike just because they are procedurally generated!! Think of the children!!
Sam Paterson
According to the steam page of both Runers and Binding of Isaac, they are roguelikes. If that’s what they describe themselves as, who am I to second guess them?
I’ll agree that Don’t Starve isn’t a pure roguelike, but not all games slot perfectly into a category. Don’t Starve has elements from the survival and roguelike genres, and I felt it was apt to bring it into the discussion because of its stylistic choices, rather than its strict genre definition.
psychobudgie
They are wrong. Just because the developers/publishers say it is so doesn’t make it so. If that was the case Gearbox wouldn’t have to rely on Borderlands to keep their heaps of crap list down.