The evil Lich King, Raq'zul, has cast a life draining spell on the world - in hopes to become immortal. Many heroes try to find him deep in his lair, but all have fallen to his army of monsters and devious traps. Now it is your turn!
Curse of the Lich King gives you tactical grid based combat in a roguelike dungeon crawling setting. A cast of monsters will try to stop you, all in their own way as you descend towards the Lich King's crypt. Loot everything you see to make sure you find food and weapons to help you on your journey. But beware, not everything is what it seems...
Are you ready to solve the tricky battles and master the Lich King's lair? Can you save the world? Good luck!
Support more games like this -> Check out my Patreon!
CONTROLS
Use thearrow keys to move and navigate menus.
X opens your backpack and select items.
C closes the current window.
CREDITS
Design/Art/Code: Johan Peitz (@johanpeitz)
Music/Sound: Chris Donnelly (@gruber_music)
Special thanks to the good people at my discord for testing the game!
Why not join? https://discord.gg/pF76upS
| Status | Released |
| Platforms | HTML5 |
| Rating | Rated 4.7 out of 5 stars (129 total ratings) |
| Author | Johan Peitz |
| Genre | Adventure |
| Made with | PICO-8,Aseprite |
| Tags | 2D,Dungeon Crawler,Perma Death,PICO-8,Pixel Art,Retro,Roguelike,Roguelite,Singleplayer |
| Average session | A few minutes |
| Languages | English |
| Inputs | Keyboard |
| Mentions | itch.io Recommends: roguelikes, puzzles... |
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This is the first roguelike I've beaten-somehow this implementation just clicked with me. Thank you for 2423"last tries" before having to head out to work, sleep, function. This was delightful.
A true lesson in good game design, which I'd love to learn more about. Do you remember which decision had the biggest impact on the feel? I was always overwhelmed by the complexity of some other roguelikes and I was looking for something more 'casual'-in the best possible sense.
Happy to hear you enjoyed it! I don't play much roguelikes myself (for the same reasons) so I wanted to approach it from a newcomers point of view. A combination of a few simple but clear mechanics and an increasingly difficult cast of enemies perhaps? Small but overseeable dungeons? Lots of things probably, but the small scale of things is probably a main driver.
i died by a troll ....
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This is a pretty good roguelike with some nice design! I'd like to note that the lack of a wait button, although sometimes a bit annoying, makes the game a lot more strategic, which is nice. This also gets complemented with the fact that you can interact with doors, pots or bookshelves as a wait button, effectively turning the wait button into a resource.
The animations are surprisingly expressive for a pico-8 game. As soon as I see an entity or tile I understand what it is supposed to be, which really speaks to the quality of this game's art.
The game reminds me a bit of a simpler version of "Pixel Dungeon", an open-source Roguelike Dungeon crawler. Stellar work!
Now time for some things I don't like as much: I only figured out that I can break pots after it was my only option to move where I wanted to. It would be nice if the graphics somehow hinted at the pots being breakable, maybe a bright coloring or a glint every once in a while could help with that.
Also it would be nice if there were descriptions for items when I open their context menu, because the lack thereof made me make dumb mistakes like not drinking a max hp up vial "because my health is full", and drinking holy soup at full health to see what it does.
I've also read from the comment right before that the upgrades for weapons are actually effective downgrades, and it seems weird for luring an enemy into spikes to not give you XP.
Overall, a very solid pico-8 project that could be better. 8/10
Nice little roguelike you have here with effective, minimalist design. The only complaint I have that hasn't been brought up or addressed already is how two of the "improvements" for weapons are actually terrible. Blight is awful because in the rare instance its damage actually means anything, it robs you of exp and potentially items if it kills a fleeing chest. If you made it so any death of an enemy netted exp (and items if applicable) or made it so items could appear on the ground to then be picked up, you might solve this one (if you were to implement something like this, you could also make it so the Lich drops an object that triggers the end, avoiding the problem of being cheated out of an ending if the Lich wanders onto spikes). Confusion is also an awful thing to have on your weapon because it makes a monster walk away, which potentially sets them up to get a free hit on you thanks to the lack of a wait button. While I think the lack of a wait button is perfectly fine if you're going for for that, these two weapon affixes being so negative is a bit of an oversight. That said, I know this game is now an old project. Perhaps you have considered issues like this in some of your more recent projects. If not, I hope these tips can help you make some even more wonderful games in the future.
Wow! That was very good! Having to return to the good stations was a brilliant idea! This is the very first game that I was excited to find cursed stuff! enemy variety was low, but that is ignorable and I wish there was more use to the blessings on weapons because I always found myself going with the one with the bigger number. Battling with the lich king Raq'zul was very exciting, so this game is a solid 9/10!
My last run ended with me being killed by an imp on floor 3! This is really well made and I've had a lot of fun seeing how far I can get. Thanks for making Curse of the Lich King, it's obvious that you've put a lot of effort in to it and it shows. I know how hard it is to make a roguelike game, so I really appreciate how much work has gone in to this!
After 27 consecutive days, I finally finished the game. I was incredibly unlucky until today and the feeling of sheer accomplishment overwhelmed me. Is this how people feel when they beat a boss in Dark Souls? I can see how that'd be addicting.
That being said, very well done! It's not often I come across a game that's challenging, but not too hard that it frustrates me. The procedurally generated rooms/floors kept things interesting, and I really enjoyed learning the various monster and environmental hazards. The first time I walked into a spike trap was quite memorable.
"Why is this tile different than the others?" Steps on it and dies. "Ah."
10/10.
I got to the last floor, traded blows with the Lich King a few times... and then he warped behind a bunch of other mobs. I lured those mobs away, killed them, and cleared out the rest of the floor, but never saw the Lich King again, even after going around the whole floor again three more times. Is it supposed to be possible for him to escape and render the game unwinnable? (Might he have stepped on spikes while I was dealing with the regular mobs?)
Ok, I beat the game on my third or fourth attempt. Here's a guide for how to beat it (don't read if you don't want any help!):
* The key is to get the mob to move next to you, so you can strike it on your turn
* To do this you will often have to sacrifice a turn, for instance by using inventory objects
* Save interactibles in a room to use for turn-skipping (pots, bookshelves, etc). Only interact with these immediately if you direly need a power-up, otherwise you'd better clear the surroundings of mobs first.
* Wells, anvils, book stand etc only skip a turn if you have the correct inventory.
* Levelling up will replenish your health; try to time this with an almost drained health not to waste power-ups
* Vials can be used right away, they increase the max health so no point in saving (unless for, again, turn skipping).
* Identify the traps, and lure your mobs to walk into them. This does not skip a turn btw.
* For mid-levels, save a cursed food item to use with an untampered weapon to upgrade the weapon on an anvil.
* The most annoying mob throughout the game is the red, teleporting mob. It will hit you and then fly away a short distance. This means that without turn-skipping objects, it can hit you repeatedly. If you have no turn-skipping objects handy, lure it into a tight space or a space with untriggered traps.
* The Eyes will shoot a confusion beam upon line of sight. Approach it diagonally. If you can't get right in turn, lure it into a safe room, preferably a tight space where you may attack it by chance.
* The toughest normal mob is the large ogre. He will hit you for 3 and has 20 h.p, which means until the last level he'll probably hit you at least twice.
* I think the scimitar is the hardest-hitting weapon. A Holy Scimitar on lvl 9 (your xp lvl, not the map level) hits for 20, and can one-shot even the ogre. There's no point in using other upgrades for weapons unless in the window where you can't one-shot the Ogre, but you'll still comfortably one-shot other mobs; in this case you may want to have a Basilisk-weapon ready. This has a chance to stun all mobs and you might beat the Ogre in two strikes with no counterstriking on his part.
* Carrot, bread, soup, steak (might have missed one) all heal double the HP with Holy as a prefix. Holy Steaks should be saved until level 8, if possible.
* Identify a mysterious weapon before using it; it might become stuck to you so that you can't discard it if it turns out to be cursed.
* Save some 10 HP or so before engaging with the Lich King, which is a mob somewhere on map level 8.