14 DAY TRIAL // 
Rogue's Tale is a new roguelike from Epixx, adding to the forever growing ranks of small scale dungeon crawlers that seem to be inundating the indie scene.
Your main goal is to tread through the dungeons beneath the World's End Mountains, making your way through Frostmourn Keep and eventually overthrowing the current king, taking his place.
The goal is much easier said than done, as you'll soon find out, and there is not much more as far as establishing an initial setting goes, which is a shame, because games that look like this usually enthrall their user base with convoluted and rich stories.
Although the game is advertised as a single-player turn-based dungeon crawling game, it's not as much a dungeon crawling game as it is an exercise in frustration. A nerve crawler. Steely resolve and unshakeable determination are the only things you need, until you learn the game's ways and get lucky enough at times to get some of the heritages, permanent additions to your character that might help you in future incarnations.
The game punishes you for all kinds of silly stuff, like walking. You can walk into an unseen trap and die. You can of course use a combination of buttons to search for one before each and every step, but I thought that we invented computers so we would have access to automation. I have enough trouble escaping the deathly grip of gravity with my frame intact in real life, thank you very much.
And then, the character progression system seems like it's ripped right out of some fantasy Monopoly clone, with no foreseeable direction and seemingly random and not really exciting perks. Sometimes, I kept my initial skill points hoping that I'll stumble upon something a little bit more interesting or useful.
Which is the another big problem with Rogue's Tale, it seems to be in the business of selling hope, a business which is already in the firm grasp of other organizations.
Everything is random, including the "trainers" where you can spend your skill points, in something that feels an homage to the bad design of early '90s role-playing games where you had to take out your trusty journal every time you wanted to bash something upside the head and take judicious notes of your surroundings.
For instance, once every few levels, you get a skill point which you can trade for a new ability. Out of the list of disappointing snoozers that marginally aid you in your progress, I chose an ability that gets +D3 instead of +1 modifier from STR for big weapons, whatever that modifier thing means, as there is no formula for players to educate themselves on.
The ability didn't do much, except get some extra damage out, which is actually better than I make it sound. But the problem was that I had to manually select the ability and then the mob I was applying it to, instead of just bashing into them with the directional controls as usual. It had no cooldown or other resource cost, so why didn't it just replace my normal attack when using eligible weapons? Why does it feel like managing a spreadsheet and not more like playing a game?
You don't always get to distribute points when you level up. And you don't really know what to improve. If you want to play a mage, you first have to get good enough at melee so that you can afford to learn all the useless arcane skills that do nothing whatsoever before you have any chance of taking down anything more menacing than a snail by way of your esoteric powers.
That is of course provided that you manage to survive enough to do that, as what with the game being so random and imbalanced, chances are you'll fall into a trap and die, fall into a trap while engaging a random monster and miss all your attacks or simply encounter a hybrid between the Hulk and Hulk Hogan, at which time you'll quickly realize how ill-equipped you are to deal with anything even remotely hulkish.
Having a game be difficult is one thing, but having it be completely unfair is another altogether. Usually, games that are this open-world, in the sense that you can get into trouble while taking a simple stroll, also have some way of getting your level high enough someplace else in order to be able to face the monster you first encountered.
But in the case of a random dungeon crawler with maps this small, a single imbalanced enemy can spell your doom. It does seem a little like the old days when maps had fixed dimensions and you had to do some glorious backtracking that would make them feel bigger, in a brilliant move from the developers to get the most out of the limited space they had.
The only thing is that, when you do this in a regular progression role-playing game, it's okay, because they're usually meant to be beaten. Roguelikes are designed to kill you, or at least to offer you scenarios where a mixture of hard-earned skill and dashing flair can net you some nifty rewards that will help your progression.
Rogue's Tale seems to be content with just killing you, presenting little trace of an intended progression path. While other games that draw their inspiration from classic retro titles do usually end up having a "right way," several sub-optimal ones and a couple that will get you nowhere fast, this game lacks a general sense of proportion that will help you hum its tune after several delves in its deadly dungeons.
Although Rogue's Tale boasts classless character building, it's only classless if you can truly pull everything off from the beginning, and I don't see any damage or control spells, nor any abilities befitting of a cunning rogue.
The graphics are of course outdated and rudimentary, but that's not really a problem, as there are many games that pull off stale or archaic visuals by compensating in other areas such as detailed environments or unique artistic direction or gradually offering you a story that's the equivalent of a novel during a playthrough.
The many bad design decisions encountered while playing the game make it seem more like a private experiment than a full-fledged game intended for a real audience. It could have been a nice game to spend some time with, with real retro appeal, but it just needs to rethink the way it approaches some gameplay elements.
Difficulty is good when you can have some control over it, and running around with a Kaiju chasing you is only fun when you have someplace to run to. In its current state, the game seems like it lacks a general direction, appearing like several ideas stitched together more than the result of a design process, as well as having its gameplay marred by serious balance issues.
