Sunken

Roguelikes are well-known for being difficult, random and frustrating, mainly because that’s what gamers are looking for in the genre. Hence, you are usually required to put a fair amount of work into your character to survive the challenges, and there’s also a bit of luck involved sometimes. However, even very basic roguelikes have their charm in the right circumstances.

Sunken is a retro roguelike with simple gameplay mechanics, in which all you have to do is move around a grid as efficiently as possible, while avoiding obstacles, fighting monsters and finding the entrance to the next level. There’s something else, however: The dungeon is sinking, so you have a limited amount of time at your disposal in order to get as far as you can until that happens.

There’s not much variety in terms of gameplay, unfortunately, since you can only encounter a handful of things along the way. There’s the monsters, the treasure chests, the gold and the occasional boulder that must be avoided. Because of this, the experience can become repetitive after mere minutes, but you have to remember that the game was designed in a matter of days for a competition.

You also have to pay attention to the fact that by picking up gold you are actually making your character heavier, which makes you slower. Thus, your best bet is to actually forget about the gold and run as quickly as possible, although sometimes your path is blocked by an enemy. Fighting is fairly simple, since all you have to do is move in the direction of the monster until it is dead, but this obviously slows you down as well.

Lastly, the graphics are about as basic as they can get in the genre, and one could argue that they are also rather dark and difficult to make out sometimes. There’s also no tutorial to tell you what you should be doing, so you might need to read the official description first. Other than that, the interface is simple, and there are actually tooltips that can explain most of the stats.

Even if Sunken is in a very rough state at the moment, it could easily be expanded upon in the future, and it’s worth noting that the flood idea has some merit. Thus, a full version might even keep players engaged for a couple of hours.