Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Game Announcement: Din’s Curse

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 1, 2010

Din's Curse ActionOkay, ladies and gentlemen — this is the one I’ve been waiting for. Big time. Din’s Curse is now available!

I’d say quit reading and hit the above link and download the free trial version RIGHT NOW, but considering how many people read this blog from work, I will suggest you bookmark it, email yourself the link, and remind you to download it as soon as you get home tonight. You are going to be having some fun this weekend!

So going back in time a bit – I have made no secret of my love for Depths of Peril, the first game in this series (if you can call three very different but connected games a “series”). It was partly because it was such a pleasant surprise. I saw the previews, originally, and thought, “Ugh! Diablo clone! Do we need another of those?”  I heard Steven Peeler’s contention that the thing that would be cool would be that the player choices mattered. Bah, hasn’t everybody said that of their RPGs? I’d heard the term, “dynamically generated content” enough to automatically translate it to “randomly generated content.” Ho-hum!

While it wasn’t the holy grail, it far surpassed my expectations and became one of my favorite RPGs. When people ask, “What’s the big deal with indie RPGs?”, I have pointed them to Depths of Peril.  While the game wasn’t for everyone, nobody could deny it blazed some new territory.

Peeler’s  second indie title, Kivi’s Underworld, was a radical departure to make a more casual-friendly game. Because, frankly, Depths of Peril could be pretty intimidating. Maybe it pushed too many boundaries and drove too far from the comfort zone for people. So Kivi’s Underworld was an effort to re-tool the same engine to make a fun, fast-paced dungeon crawler that could be played in short sessions. With Kivi’s Underworld Peeler showed that he was willing to experiment with the genre / category and do something unique and different with it.

Now Steven Peeler and his one-man-plus-contractors indie game studio, Soldak Entertainment, have come out with the third game set in the same world, using the same engine: Din’s Curse. According to this excellent preview at RPGWatch, Peeler has described it as “Depths of Peril – factions + way more dynamic stuff + lots of world interaction + more random features + prettier + 141 class combinations + co-op multiplayer.” I see it as the best ideas from Depths of Peril, Kivi’s Underworld, and roguelikes.

So setting aside the pedigree, what is Din’s Curse?

Battling in the depths of Din's CurseIn Din’s Curse, you play an adventurer who – in a previous life – was kind of a selfish jerk. So now you are cursed to be the pawn of the god Din, earning back your freedom by being taken from town to town across the world to make amends for your previously down-and-dirty ways. What this means, in practical purposes, is that you get whisked from dynamic adventuring world (a town and dungeon) to another once your job is concluded (one way or the other).

It’s a Diablo-style action-RPG Dungeon-Crawler with unique and dynamically changing environments,  strong roguelike influences, and a highly dynamic story / event / quest system.

A “highly dynamic story / event / quest system?” What the heck does that mean?

Okay, in a normal RPG, you might have quests. These may either be designer-created tasks that you need to complete, or sometimes randomly generated tasks like, “Go out and kill ten rats.”

In Din’s Curse, you have some of those randomly generated quests, too. But what really drives the game is events. Quests are based on events, an underlying plotline, and can change and evolve during the course of play. The big bad boss isn’t content to stay down in his lair at the bottom of the dungeon or whatever and wait for you to defeat his plans. His plans roll forward with or without you.  And those little side-quests to help the town build up their defenses or whatnot? They aren’t just fooling around. Those come in real handy if you aren’t johnny-on-the-spot in saving the town from it’s upcoming doom. They really can buy you some more time (or at least make your job easier).

The story advances – with or without you. The city is always in one peril or another – from doomsday machines to assassins to plagues to zombification to… well, there’s a lot of disasters to remedy or evil plots to foil. Fail the main storyline, and the town is destroyed and you will be whisked off to another city. Succeed – and you will get to choose when to be whisked off to another city.

But the destruction of a town can come in stages – I’ve found myself in situations where all the merchants of the town had been killed early in the game (by plague or something, I can’t remember) and I had no place to trade gear. I ended up leaving a lot of loot on the ground, intending to choose the best (and most expensive) stuff to the next town when I was done. Unfortunately, I failed – the big bad set an assassin loose on the remaining citizens of the town, and I was still too weak and too slow to stop it. The town was lost, and I was taken to a new city without having a chance to pick up my old gear. That’s just how it goes.

Din was not pleased.

But aside from this, yet more “side events” seem to happen either from your quests or to create your quests. Other adventurers / characters may be down in the dungeon, too, trying to solve the same quests as you. The monsters don’t all get along either – the dungeons of Din’s Curse seem like warzones, as monsters of different kinds battle each other and human victims for supremacy. The good news is that you can take advantage of this and often have to fight wounded opponents. The bad news is that quest NPCs can be killed. Yet more bad news is that the monsters “level up” too from all this combat, becoming more powerful champions and boss-monsters over time.

The entire game-world – quests and everything –  evolves as you play. This was a hallmark of Depths of Peril, and it has been improved tenfold in Din’s Curse.

All that, by itself, would make it pretty clear that Din’s Curse has replayability in spades.”But wait!” I say in my best TV Pitch Guy voice, “There’s more!

There are six full classes that you can play… plus 18 specialties … and 141 different class combinations that you can try. Plus a very flat skill system that allows even further specialization of your character. And you can put literally dozens of hours into every single character as they advance through the game and dozens of towns.

Oh, and there are some additional options. You can set the difficulty level by setting a faster or slower-paced game, and setting the starting level of the monsters relative to your own. And there are two special game modes available as well: Cursed, and Hardcore. In cursed mode, your character is only allowed to use cursed magic items. This isn’t as bad as it seems – cursed items are generally pretty nice magic items, but saddled with some kind of limitation. Then there’s hardcore mode – where you aren’t allowed to use any shared “common” items from your other characters, and perma-death.

There are all kinds of traps. Lots of them, in some dungeons. Secret areas. Intelligent weapons with egos that hinder their use in some situations. Cave-ins. All kinds of dynamic stuff in dungeons… which sometimes the smarter monsters know how to use to their advantage. While variety is nothing new in these kinds of games – it’s actually critical to their success – Din’s Curse often goes just a step or two further.

Oh, and remember – while whacking on destroyable items is a lot of fun, don’t try and destroy a support column with a melee weapon. It will only lead to tears.

And then there’s cooperative multiplayer. I haven’t even tried this one yet. I want to. Everything is more fun with friends, and this was the missing ingredient in Depths of Peril.

I’ve put several hours into this game over the beta (carefully rationed, as I totally realize that it’s actually a secret weapon to eliminate their indie competition by addicting them to this game so they can’t finish their own…), but I still haven’t come close to seeing everything. Sure, by this time the monsters are pretty familiar (as they have been since Depths of Peril), and I’ve seen several basic plots and dungeon styles revisited. But so far, the feel and development of every adventure has been different.  I’m constantly amused finding something else new, some new wrinkle that appears as either a carefully placed situation in the design, or as some kind of emergent gameplay element that resulted from all these things acting and being acted upon.

Part of me is worried now about somehow over-hyping Din’s Curse. It’s still not the holy grail. It’s not perfect. And it definitely won’t appeal to everyone. But another part of me is just gobsmacked by its awesomeness. It’s fun. It’s original. It’s exciting. It feels like it was written just for me – as though Soldak Entertainment trolled through my old emails and blog posts and compiled a shopping list of all the things I’d wished this type of game would do, and used that for a design doc. Maybe in another twenty or thirty hours of play I’ll come up with some more harsh criticisms of the game – but this ain’t a review, and I’ve gone on way too long as it is.

But for now, I’m entirely serious when I say that  Diablo III has its work cut out for it to top this game. It will likely be cleaner, prettier, and more streamlined, with more environments. But more entertaining? That’s a tall order. I can only hope. But there’s no rush. I think I’m going to be playing Din’s Curse for quite a while.

Download Din’s Curse and try it for free today!


Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Read the First Comment



  • Stu said,

    one day, we’ll get good games on linux .. 🙁

top