Moving to the right is what heroes do. Only villains go left. In this peculiarly Japanese take on roguelikes, you’ll explore dungeons, talk to townsfolk, do your between-battle shopping, rescue queens etc. in a kind of frantic fast forward, because you can’t stop for long or the darkness will swallow you.
There are plenty of roguelite-style unlockables here to keep you busy, with a variety of classes, perks, and difficulty levels you can use to change things up, particularly in the Plus expansion (which I highly recommend). The game uses a Shiren the Wanderer style vault to twink items between characters, but its usage is extremely limited. It also features some interesting online features in that you can display a comment to other players which will show up along with some basic stats as to how you’re doing, in the upper left corner (if you’re playing a dimension shared with others). You’ll also run across the ghosts of dead players in these dimensions.
The game’s aesthetic strongly reminds me of Elona, for some reason, even though the two games are alike only in that they’re Japanese turn-based games that are roguelikes in a very loose sense of the word. This isn’t a bad thing; the way dialogue is written, the cheesy midi music, it’s all got that uniquely Japanese indie feel to it that’s ever so slightly jank, but adorable at the same time. You’ll be generating dimensions with names like ARAEYRILHG and trying again and again to kill that pesky Demon Lord for a long time to come, if you pick this one up.
