As the title suggests, to my surprise, quite recently, a game that I have enjoyed a lot during its playtests, has done a surprise early access launch. For those who might not know, I am referring to Dark and Darker, created by Ironmace studio.
Whilst officially the game's developers refer to this as a dungeon crawler that's quite unforgiving, I would go a step further and call it Sci-Fi dungeon explorer. I am aware that it probably means the same thing, for me it sounds a lot more exciting.
I remember when I was a kid, I used to run around with a few friends and pretend we were exploring, killing mobs and bosses, clearing dungeons and going through raids. Dark and Darker reminds me of these days, not just being you go through dungeons, but because you do them in groups of up to 3 or solo (which makes it more fun). Now add a bit of spiciness to this recipe with the good old pinch of "realism" - no "magical" defense mechanism that prevents friendly "fire" (this could be literally implied if you play a mage class). Funny that this mechanic also works with mobs, so you can make them take each other out.
Overall, the mentioned reminds me of the times when I was pretending to be going through these things. Addition of the realism of pain of losing from the die = lose everything mentality, it makes it so much closer to what I used to "feel" when I was playing these roles as a kid.
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