Alpha Beta Gamer

It’s not what you think, there’s a lot more going on behind that odd title, and we’ve barely scratched the surface with developer Nelson Atmos’ chaotic title, No More Probes. Essentially, you’re a crazy hobo in a junkyard trying to build earth’s last defense from aliens raining from the sky.

You have a strange machine that serves as a platform for you to build your defenses while you run around the junkyard collecting parts to contribute to your last stand (you’re literally supposedly the last living human). We’re not yet sure what you could hope to accomplish, even if you defeat the alien invasion, but after playing the Alpha, you might learn that you want to stick around to see what happens. The game already features a wacky assortment of elements like teleporters, night time lighting, and a Sarlacc-like creature (hint: use it to lure your pursuers to their demise!), and the developer is running off of donations to keep the effort alive.

No More Probes plays like a tower defense game with rogue-like elements that fuel the gameplay. With crazy alien robots, hailing probes, and the ability to sift through junk and build Earth’s last hope all on your own, NMP has the potential to shape up into a robust title with a wealth of features and more in-depth gameplay. The art and animation is already well polished, and the basic idea is well-conveyed in this early alpha. This project will be off to a slow start, but we may see a crowdfunding campaign in the future to up the pace of the development life in the near future!

Help Your Hobo Survive The Alien Probes! Play the Alpha Free

’Poppy the Austere Hobbit Security Guard’ fought bravely, dispatching (among others) a professional dinosaur, a Demented Pool Cue and a Ruinous Mother-In-Law before falling foul to a Deformed Bishop on level 6. Rest in piece Poppy, you faught well!

No this isn’t the start of a mental break down, it’s just a normal play through of the wonderfully bizarre ASCII-styled procedurally generated FPS Roguelike - Illuminascii.

Thanks to procedurally generated enemies, levels, weapons and characters, every play though of Illuminascii is as strange and surprising as the last. The ASCII visual style is fantastic, with nice little touches everywhere, such as kicking over trash cans and watching lots of ASCII characters (and the occasional cat) spill out. The enemies are a particular highlight, taking the form of large colorful letters with a randomly generated description above them - you’ll never forget the first time you round a corner and come face to face with a 6-foot tall glowing letter ‘J’ described as a ’Moist Bearded Cat’.

To make it through each procedurally generated level of Illuminascii, you have to find 5 pieces of 'evidence’ (hidden in drawers throughout the levels) then make it to the exit. As you progress, you fight enemies, collect loot, equip new weaponry and level up your character. In typical rouguelike fashion, you only get one life, but when you die you’re treated to a eulogy which is a nice little touch - allowing you to recap your ridiculous adventure.

We first covered Illuminascii way back in January, and it’s come a long way since then, with the latest build featuring better visuals and even more ASCII-randomness. The Greenlight campaign started in July, but unfortunately it’s still not Greenlit, so if you like the game please vote for it, at least ’Poppy the Austere Hobbit Security Guard’ won’t of died in vain.

Play the Latest Build, Free & Check Out the Greenlight Page

Bear Hero is a fun roguelike platformer where you play as a bear (who is very heroic) and try to navigate an randomly generated overworld maze.

Before the game starts you’re presented with a choice of two images (for example a cat and a dog), you choose one and a selection of bears are eliminated from the herd. You repeat this process a few times until your left with one bear. That bear is you, and depending on your choices you’ll have different class of bear with unique stars and skills (including clerics, Tricksters, Duelists and demigods).

There are three types of stages that you can enter into from the world map: health-levels (where you gain health), treasure-levels (where you gain loot) and battle-levels (where you do battle). Every bear has a basic swipe attack with with a significant cooldown period (dependent on your stats). This forces you to think strategically about your moves, learning attack patterns and precisely timing your attacks.

Bear Hero is a pretty tough game, but it strangely addictive and rewards perseverance. Much like Spellunky, it will punish you for your mistakes, but you’ll always come back for more.

Play the Bear Hero Alpha, Free

Kraden’s Crypt is a fun physics influenced roguelike co-op dungeon crawler for up to four players, that features an interesting almost QWOP-like way of controlling your weapons, using your mouse or thumbstick to control their momentum.

It features vibrant and colorful character design, with huge bosses and outlandish enemy design, such as walking jelly beans, rock monsters and giant subway sandwiches. You can wield hammers, bows, swords, shields and many spells. Each of these weapons has its own unique combat mechanics. You operate the weaponry by moving the mouse (or thumbstick), and the player speed, weapon speed and enemy speed all factor into the damage that you do.

With a Kickstarter campaign due to start within the newt few days, Kraden’s Crypt is a fun game, bristling with vibrant colors, inventive enemy design, an innovative control scheme, loot, and a pleasantly chaotic co-op multiplayer. Swinging is great fun, especially with friends!

Download the Alpha Demo

Tiny Wizard is a fast paced 2D top-down procedurally generated roguelike with a focus on combat and a variety of fun and powerful spells to unleash upon the different creatures that want to kill and devour you.

Each time you defeat a boss you’ll receive a new item for you to test on the creatures, and by test we mean kill them in a cool new way. The game is challenging, with beautiful pixelated art style, great audio and snazzy graphical effects. Also, let’s not forget about perma death – even wizards are mortal!

Download the Alpha, Free

The End of Journey is an addictive interactive fiction/survival game with random elements that sees you trying to survive for as long as possible on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

To stand a chance you’ll have to scavenge for items in the wreckage of your ship, craft items, eat, drink, keep your spirits up and survive strange encounters (ranging from pulling dead bodies out of the water, to kissing a mermaid.) Your success in these instances is largely dependent on your physical state, but rest assured there are plenty of nasty ways to die in this game.

For such a simple premise, The End of Journey really does have lots of depth (pun intended) and replayability. There’s always a feeling that your next play though will be the one where you manage to escape a watery grave (though probably not). It’s a ship-shape shipwreck survival adventure.

Play the Prototype, Free

Retro-Pixel Castles is an RTS with elements taken from genres such as town management sims, roguelikes and tower defense games.

It’s not a game you can win, you just get better at prolonging the inevitable death of your civilization. As you play, you will unlock more content, such as, additional buildings, more items and access to more units to control, you can use these unlocks on your next attempt to keep your villagers alive.

Retro-Pixel Castles features a built in editor to design and share your own maps with. Each playable map is 512×512 tiles in size, but you will typically only find yourself playing in an area about 128×128, which means you really have to think about where you start your village depending on which resources are where.

At the moment the Alpha only covers the Retro-Pixel Castles map editor, which is fun to play around with and easy to use (with you even able to make some rather nice looking pixel art with it), but a more fully featured Alpha build with AI functions will be coming out within the next couple of months. We’ll keep you updated with it’s progress at ABG because we know you’ll want a chance to play around with your own tiny pixelated civilization.

Follow it’s progress & Download the Free Alpha (Map Editor)

Vagante is a pixel art platforming adventure with RPG elements, permanent death and procedurally generated levels with gameplay inspired by Spelunky, Castlevania, Metroid, Dark Souls, andDungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.

It’s a seriously tough game, with a steep learning curve and Dark Souls levels of difficulty, so you’ll die quite a lot. But as in Spelunky, every play through is unique, thanks to the procedurally generated levels and the vast amounts of loot and equipment which you’ll find or purchase. This equipment can be equipped through an RPG style menu system, binding items to various body parts and unlocking special abilities which will aid your progress.

Each play through in Vagante is a venture into the unknown, packed with deadly monsters, traps, cool surprises and lots of lovely loot to make it all worth while. It draws comparisons to Spelunky, Magicite and Chasm, but it really is shaping up to be a wonderful cavernous adventure in it’s own right.

Download the Vagante Alpha, Free

alpha-beta-gamer:

Phantasmal is a genuinely terrifying roguelike first person horror game inspired by Dead Space, Silent Hill, Metro and Resident Evil, set in an old abandoned, procedurally generated mansion.
The prevailing darkness makes for a very claustrophobic feeling game, and both the character design and audio are both particularly freaky, but the single most terrifying aspect of it is that the levels are all procedurally generated. This procedural generation means that every playthrough is different and just as pant-wettingly horrifying as the last. You never know what’s going to come at you next, although it’s a safe bet it doesn’t want to be friends.
The goal of the game is to escape the mansion, by making your way through levels full off all manner of creepy ghouls, trying to reach the level exit portal. This is no easy task, resources are sparse and you’re pretty fragile. You have a mixture of traditional weapons and makeshift weapons but a lot of the time, sneaking is your best option, especially with the most common enemy, blind humanoid creatures that hunt through sound.
As if things weren’t stacked against you enough, you’re also prone to hallucinations, looking directly at some creatures with your torchlight turned on will cause you to slowly lose your sanity. Make no mistake, you’ll die a lot in this game, you’ll learn how to take on different enemies, but you can forget about learning level layouts. You never know what’s behind those corners, and most of the time it’s something very bad.
Download the Pre-Alpha, Free
UPDATE: Phantasmal has just recieved a significant update which makes the game EVEN HARDER! You can download it now, Free.

Reliquary is a roguelike futuristic action rpg focused on exploration, survival, and dying a lot. Stranded in a procedurally generated asteroid field riddled with derelict ships and bizarre creatures, you’ll need to survive countless perils in your search for a way home.

It’s a great game, with a fun combat system influenced by Vlambeers Nuclear Throne, challenging gameplay influenced by Spelunky and Demon’s Souls, a very cool minimalistic soundtrack, challenging gameplay, upgrades, boss fights, a wonderful pixel art graphical style and procedurally generated level design.

The Alpha demo gives you access to the whole of the first area of the game, the first boss fight and free rein of the crashed spacecraft that acts as a base of operations for your intrepid explorer. You’ll have to clear four procedurally generated levels to reach the boss fight, which is easier said than done.

As you can imagine by the games it’s been influenced by, Reliquary is no walkover, ammo is scarce and some of the enemies can be pretty devastating. You’ll have to fight smart if you’re going to survive this space oddity.

Download the Alpha Demo, Free

Posts tagged roguelike