About Trick Or Treat:
A turn based roguelite that feels like: +Dungeons of Dredmore combat (enemies move after you move) w/ Blinding of Issac like maps +Enter the gungeon teleport map traversal so not too much backtracking & various risk/reward gambling loot rooms! +Work with what you have – randomized access to table of all spell lists, weapon types, consumables. +Build your character based on starting weapon/spell combos with currency carryover on death for upgrading future runs +Extremely good UI, colorful graphics for inventory, options, clear layout of character & damage stats. As a fan of dungeons of dredmore, sword of the stars the pit, tangle deep this game is easy to pick up with decent variety of weapon/spell combos that gives plenty of risk reward events. Also has really good mouse/keyboard options. I could easily see this game polish with more difficult fine balances for veteran players. New modes, challenges etc. So much potential! It’s an okay rogue-lite and thus an okay option for rogue-lite players looking for something new, but I don’t feel like it’s okay enough to positively recommend. Really nice to see a turn based rogue-lite at all, and it does that decently well. Solid variety for weapons, abilities and consumables. Decent enemy variety but combat as a whole doesn’t feel very consequential for a turn based game. Individual enemies and even elites feel non threatening, the general technique for killing most threats is spam abilities and blink away when in danger. The elemental system has synergies but they seldom come into play. Players just often do not have enough options to actually take much advantage of elemental synergies, the closest players usually get to synergies is the premade synergy their ability set is designed around. The elemental system itself isn’t very well explained, not even by the games own encyclopedia, and many elemental interactions are left a mystery. Most of the danger comes from players not knowing how to deal with a threat. Once players know how, fighting that threat immediately becomes a routine. Until players discover the required pattern, survival is highly unlikely. Players mainly avoid damage by blinking away, so when players run out of blinks they can’t avoid many sources of damage anymore. Thus every fight is under a countdown to when the player physically can’t avoid that damage anymore, so when players use up all their blinks frantically avoiding unknown attack patterns; death is almost inevitable. The art and music are both fine but the story is extremely shallow. Generic spontaneous protagonist is bequeathed responsibility to defeat the enemy. The world design surrounding the idea of dreams mostly feels like an excuse for the game to have zero thematic consistency. Each area is an entirely different type of location which exists for no obvious reason and the order of those areas is random each run. At absolutely no point does it feel like a real world, just a generic placeholder fantasy story mostly serving to provide an excuse for nothing to make sense. This also throws into question what the difficulty scaling in this game is supposed to be when players go through the areas in a random order. So if the areas aren’t fundamentally designed to be more challenging than the alternative seems to be statistic scaling. Or there’s no difficulty scaling at all, and every area is just the same difficulty every time. There is an upgrade system but it’s also just okay. It’s not especially deep, most of the upgrades are pretty typical, at least half of them aren’t really appealing unless players have nothing else to spend their currency on. The item variety is similar. No especially exciting or significant item effects and for the most part the two main builds players can form from items are for critical hits or spell improvements. Everything else is too scattered and awkward to be very reliable. There are items that buff elemental interactions but getting those specific items when players have those elemental skills is also unreliable. The game has four distinct floor types and they aren’t very interesting since, the environment is mostly just an inconsequential background and the enemies are usually just things the player mows down. The game doesn’t seem to really expand beyond that outside of changing the final boss in each chapter, and adding a couple of modifiers here and there. It’s okay. The combat doesn’t have much intensity to it, there’s not much interesting variety or depth to progression or builds and the story is generic whatever. It doesn’t feel bad, just not especially good either. If you’re interested in finding some games that I do positively recommend they can be found on my curator page here .
