Din’s Curse Just Got Cheaper!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 12, 2010

Soldak Entertainment has dropped the price of Din’s Curse down to a mere $19.99.  This is a fantastic game and well worth the price. You can grab it here:

Din’s Curse – Reduced Price!

So if you still haven’t been convinced, the demo remains free (and the brand new demo has a higher level limit, as well).

But here’s the deal, if you still need convincing. Din’s Curse is an action RPG in the style of games like Diablo. But like its predecessor, the also-excellent Depths of Peril, it isn’t content with simply imitating a successful series, but instead really pushed the boundaries of the genre.

The big selling point with Din’s Curse is that each adventure exists within a dynamic world. Not only your actions change how things progress, but so does your inaction. While you are fussing around on level 4, the big bad monsters on level 8 may finally come together in their negotiations, and unleash a plan that causes much pain and badness on the world above.  Plans advance.

Some levels are like war-zones, but you can’t just let the monsters kill each other off. From these Darwinian struggles, leaders arrive, becoming new bosses with their own plans to further complicate your own efforts to save a town from destruction. Fortunately, you can use the enemy factions and other threats to your advantage, spring traps on your opponents, destroy the ceiling supports and cause a cave-in against a horde of otherwise lethal adversaries, and that kind of thing.

If it sounds frantic, it’s because sometimes it is.  While I’m usually successful, failure isn’t all that unusual. Quests fail, prisoners get lost, enemies advance their causes and can no longer have their evil “nipped in the bud” by a simpler action. And sometimes, entire towns fall. It’s always a balancing act, but it’s a fun one. Fortunately, once the main threats to the town are resolved – the plague cured, the enemies beaten, whatever – you don’t have to move on immediately.  There’s still adventuring to be had, albeit at a more leisurely and conventional pace, until you are ready to be transported by the god Din to another town in need of your aid.

While the dynamic world is my favorite part of the game, there’s a lot more to it than that.

First of all, there’s the classes. There are six base classes which sport three specialized skill trees each. Each skill tree has about ten different special abilities you can obtain and improve for your character, and also grant some additional bonuses just for possessing the tree. For example, the Rogue class has special abilities under three separate skill trees – Assassin (granting several abilities to inflict quick death on individual enemies), Trickster (granting skills which confuse and mislead opponents), and Thief (granting skills to pick locks, disarm traps, dodge danger, find more gold, elude pursuit, and more).  However, you can also choose to be a “hybrid” class, which allows you to mix ANY two of the skill trees from any of the classes.   After subtracting out the ones that are underpowered duplicates of the main classes, that’s something like 141 different combinations to experiment with.

Oh, and did I mention multiplayer? No? Okay. Multiplayer. Cooperative multiplayer. Adventure with friends. Get your friends a copy to double the fun.

Then there’s the usual TONS of randomly generated magical items that you can actually trade between your characters (or friends in multiplayer), a bunch of game difficulty sliders to customize the challenge,  and some unique gameplay modes to make the experience even more interesting, and a whole bunch of fan-made mods available for the game, and you have a LOT of game.

For cheap.

So go grab the Din’s Curse demo and try it out.

Have fun!

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