About This Game Open the gate to the egyptian underworld!Hieroglyphika is a roguelike game completely without text but with pictograms.You get lost in an ancient egyptian pyramid buried deep under the sand of the desert and full of traps and monstrous beings. Decrypt hieroglyphs to learn spells and to understand the magical nature of artifacts.GAMEPLAYFight your way through dangerous corridors down to the deeper levels of the pyramid in a turn-based fashion. Open sarcophagi or kill enemies and you will find loot. Cast the spells of the dead. Defend yourself with ancient shields. Push your enemies into bottomless pits. Or strike them down with enchanted weapons.There is no hand-holding of any kind. Figure out the mechanics and rules on your own. Be attentive and creative. Find novel solutions to odd combinations of random events. Be an explorer! 7aa9394dea Title: HieroglyphikaGenre: RPG, StrategyDeveloper:M. HankaPublisher:Liu LidanRelease Date: 3 Feb, 2016 Hieroglyphika Activation.rar Hieroglyphika is a fun, new Egyptian themed, Turn Based, Roguelike with old school sensibilities. With no item descriptions to guide you and no text in the UI, your first couple of runs will just be figuring out what you can and can't do. Your next few runs will be trying to figure out the various pieces of clothing and equipment that you'll find strewn around the pyramid and why those nasty big critters start chasing you for taking to long. Then finally you'll be making the most of what you have learnt to try and push deeper into the underground to inevitably die at the hands of a newly encountered enemy type.It's this learning process that will either keep you playing for the first 2 hours or put you off of the game. I personally loved it and am now slowly chasing the achievements for each new floor I manage to accomplish.. This is a quite clever and enjoyable game that I see as a slow-paced puzzle rogue-like (turn-based, procedural levels, random loot, permadeath).The premise: you walk from left to right, killing things, avoiding traps and looting other things until you go down the stairs at the far right and the difficulty ramps up.Everything happens in turns, order is determined by a speed stat that mainly depends on your equipped gear, and traps give a tell before they go off.The puzzle aspects start to come in to play when you find loot and try to figure out 'what does it do actually?'All aspects of your gear are visualized as pictograms and while you get all information about its effects, you have to figure out what these pictograms mean in the first place (which isn't that hard if you experiment a bit when you find something new to you).Examples: a new dress may restrict your movement to the 4 cardinal directions instead of the usual 8, but boost your speed and defence and further increase your speed when you stand in sand tiles instead of reducing it. Headgear may reduce or nullify a certain damage type \/ effect while making you more vulnerable to another type. With the new weapon you may be unable to attack now and then due to cooldowns, but it extends your reach and hit chance while dealing a damage type this particular enemy is weak against... and so on.While often things feel at first like flat upgrades to your ability to deal damage or get faster, you will come into situations where you'll have to skip some turns to swap items (each equipment change takes one turn, and spells and such start with cooldowns when freshly equipped) - and that along to changing your own movement or attack patterns give it a surprising amount of depth.Enemies come with abilities as well and may push you around (beware of holes in the floor after the first few levels), freeze or poison you and generally keep you on your toes since new enemies are introduced every level so far (made it past lvl 5 of 9).Just to extend on what kinds of things you have to keep in your mind:- your general stats: life, speed, defence, attack strength and hitchance- attack pattern of your normal and special attacks, damage type, additional effects when attacking, attack cooldowns- spell effects, patterns, cooldowns- your and your enemies resistances and vulnerabilities- traps, their types and patterns, and with your current speed, will you make it past them in time - or can you even use them against your foes- your own movement pattern (may need to change your suit to get out of a dead end)- and also how you deal with +\/- health ... uhm... flying things(?); your shield may reverse their effects for exampleAs for the graphics: Just look at the screenshots and form your own opinion. Npc\/trap turns take a few seconds so it's a bit slow going but the important part is that you can always tell what is going on - it could lose its readability if sped up further.Equipped gear is always represented on your character sprite which is nice, but there are no animations bar some 'swoosh' lines when attacks are dealt.Also, a codex of some sort would be nice where you could unlock a view (with the same pictograms) of what you are up against, so far it's all about observing and memorizing and quite some guesswork - which isn't bad per se, but e.g. after I've killed the same bugger 20 times it would be nice to take a closer look into his actual stats.Can't comment on technical stuff, I've experienced no problems like crashes at all. *edit: about half an hour minutes after writing this it crashed for the first time. Well... *edit2: and an update that specifically targets that crash came within one hour. On a sunday. It's good.. Gorgeous Minimalism. Impatient souls beware Slow turn ticks.. Well this game is interesting.I bought.. refunded.. re-bought again.. struggled over and over.. many ragequits etc..And then I beat it. This is one of rarest roguelike game in existance that has such high skill cap and made me feel "pride and accomplishment"..no, there are no lootboxes..Game is turn based, hard to learn, but once you really get used to it(takes a lot of time because no youtube guides available or real gameplay that doesnt suck.But the game really shines because its really a lot depends on your skill.At first I swear it was stupid rng over and over but now its just SKILL and SKILL only**except if you pick that shield as first item. Shield that drops - health. Then you need to find another shield asap or die... I wish I could say I like this game. I really do. It's pretty, runs well and has a lot of potential.But it's frustrating as all hell.I can get over the overly stylised interface and obtuse item descriptions. It's actually kind of rewarding to figure out what the symbols and descriptions without words mean. You'll do several runs so you'll have plenty of time to get accuainted with the items. It also sounds good and is a truly beautiful game.The biggest problem I have\u2014which I share with most people complaining in their reviews\u2014is how frustratingly slow it is. This is coupled with the fact that you as the player have one single action. You can move, attack, shield, use a skill or simply wait. Forget moving and attacking on the same turn or anything like that. Meanwhile there are enemies in this game who can move two tiles, position themselves perfectly and then attack you, doing massive damage.This is further infuriating as the enemies often simply undo what you literally just did. Oh, you grabbed some health? No, this enemy just attacked you for just as much, if not more. Oh, you moved a step forward? No, this trap was just activated by an enemy at the edge of the screen who stepped on a tile and you were pushed back again. Oh, you readied your shield expecting this enemy to step forward and attack? No, he just stood exactly where he is and won't move for several rounds just waiting for you to step into range so he can \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665ing push you back again.Meanwhile, in between every single turn, you have to wait for every single enemy on the screen to make their slow moves as well as every single trap to activate and show their slow animations and every single effect on every single tile to animate. There is so much waiting in this game.The predominant feeling I get in this game is utter powerlessness: a complete lack of proper agency. That is not what you want to feel in a game. In this game I am at the complete mercy of the game in terms of what items I get, what the level layout looks like, what enemies are where and what they do\u2014and like I said, sometimes they decimate you and sometimes they do literally nothing. I feel like I'm playing poker but I have to play the first hand I get. No exchanging cards. Oh, I got a pair of threes? Well, too bad. The game just plucked that third ace straight from the deck and slapped me in the face with a full house.I want to love this game, I really do. I just wish I didn't have to struggle with my impulse to rage quit every time the game turns my perfect run into instant defeat in one or two turns in a way that's completely out of my hands.. This game suffers from a horribly slow enemy turn. You move one tile, then the enemy takes 3-5 seconds per enemy to move. With multiple enemies, it can take what seems like 20-30 seconds of waiting for moving one tile. It's a waste of your time. I'm a traditional roguelike player and have never seen such a poorly implemented AI animation\/movement sequence.The game looks beautiful, has some interesting language mechanics. It's a shame the slow AI turns make it not worth the wait.
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