CTHON

Cthon is a pretty simple roguelike, with the graphics and action of Wolfenstein 3D (albeit with all ranged attacks here being projectiles instead of hitscan), and the story of Doom. The core gameplay consists of wandering procedurally-generated mazes, looking for the exit while fighting enemies with bare bones FPS mechanics, and managing and upgrading your ♥♥♥♥. You pick from one of three classes for your run through three chapters, each broken up into three levels, plus a final boss level. On normal difficulty, a full run takes about an hour. Each class specializes in one of the three available weapons, though there's some utility for all weapons across all classes. You develop your character by equipping items that upgrade your weapons' capabilities or your own, but you're limited in how much you can carry or use based on your energy reserves and inventory space, which themselves can be upgraded with the proper pickups, or with resource expenditures at certain shops. (If you've played 3079 Block Action RPG or System Shock 2, you already have some idea of how this'll feel.) I like how most of the upgrades will actually show up on weapons' viewmodels and the HUD when equipped, which sticks out among... Visually, as you can tell from the screenshots on the store page, Cthon is a bit basic. Pixels are chunky, assets are few, and the draw distance is short. Even beyond just sticking to a simplistic art style, I think this was really more about maintaining the aesthetics of early 3D games, which in all honesty, are still very much 2D in function. There is forward and backward, there is left and right, but there is no up and down. This could've just as easily been a top-down game, but the first-person perspective adds more tension and unknowns, alongside the unnecessary issue of being far wider than your field of view suggests, and I had to slowly adapt to that knowledge in dodging shots and navigating around all-too-conspicuous furniture. The levels and their items/enemies/utilities are procedurally-generated, which does mean that every single playthrough is going to be different and keep you on your toes a bit, but stages often get built in a linear fashion that completely knocks the wind out of any sense of exploration. If the graphics were any more complex, enough for me to mentally note areas down as landmarks or whatever, the automap wouldn't even have a reason to exist. Probably a third of my time in this game has been spent walking back through levels that are really just straight hallways filled with corpses, to collect and/or sell items that I didn't get on my first pass before going on to the next stage. It's a hefty amount of boredom, but the way the difficulty works makes it necessary, especially on hard mode. "Hardcore" difficulty creates problems, where 99% of the time, the player is set up to fail. It's not a question of whether it's hard, but why it's hard, and so often in hard mode this boils down to the randomness endemic to the roguelite genre, compounded by the simpler stuff that would otherwise be a welcome increase in difficulty. The randomly distributed enemies are tougher to be sure, but the randomly distributed resources are also far fewer, to the point that success will ultimately depend on extreme variables totally outside the player's control, rather than on ability. You can have all the money in the world, but it means exactly bupkiss if you have nowhere to spend it. You can be as thrifty as possible with your ammo and health, but it'll be for naught if the game keeps deciding not to spawn any source of either. You can be as careful as you want with enemies, but that won't stop the game from starting a level with five or so tough ones immediately in your path, and you trapped in a short hallway with no feasible way to handle them all. All of this is to say that no playstyle can account for the game's ability to arbitrarily cease a Hardcore run whenever it wants by creating impossible conditions. No matter how secure and safe you think your build, you're really just playing a Russian roulette marathon (Cthon thong thong). Now, is it still fun, despite that often inescapable futility? Maybe. I enjoyed it, even if it is a tad basic and its practical limits are constantly undercut like my DM is a spoiled brat who will do everything possible to make me lose, but we aren't all drowning in the masochistic psychological complexes we created to balance out our natural sadism. I digress. The biggest issue from this is the discrepancy between the hard and normal difficulties. At its worst, Hardcore is downright impossible, but it does feel a lot more involved than normal difficulty, as a more focused playstyle is still demanded to endure until the game ♥♥♥♥♥ you with an unwinnable situation. After dumping hours into hard mode, though, most of normal difficulty holds zero challenge. There isn't really a middle ground that could be described as "tough, but fair." The gap between the difficulties is a perfect reflection of my feelings on the game as a whole. After all is said and done, normal is likely going to be too easy and slow for those experienced in this genre, but Hardcore is so eager to deny its potential depth with insurmountable aberration that it feels more like blind gambling than technique. To that end, I suppose the people to whom I'd most recommend Cthon are those new to action roguelites, and those looking to punish themselves.

English and German below. (mild spoilers too) [h1]ENG:[/h1] The negative reviews for CTHON often come from users who have played this game for less than an hour, sometimes only minutes. I understand that the graphics can be off-putting if you haven't experienced the early first-person shooters back in the day, or that the gameplay mechanics can seem a bit unbalanced at times. However, with over 20 hours of gameplay, I think I'm in a position to make the final judgment: This game is great. Especially the aspect of procedurally generated maps makes CTHON a gem of high replayability and compensates for the short playtime of one to two hours. Nevertheless, the random levels always lead through a research station, then an alien temple and finally a gloomy underworld before we enter the hall of the final boss, Cthon. The presentation with its 90 degree angles and fixed ceiling height is reminiscent of the legendary Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. The accompanying, highly eerie soundtrack is fantastic, by the way. While at the beginning only spiders, dull melee fighters and weak ranged enemies follow us through the corridors, soon giant snakes, hovering titans and floating steel beasts also bombard us with their multiple projectiles. To defeat them, we have the rifle, the grenade launcher and the rather redundant melee weapon at our disposal. Like the health kits, ammo supplies and grenades, the enemies are always randomly distributed. The collectible objects also include the important and varied gadgets. These can be used to increase our weapon strength and fire rate, our ammunition and health capacity, or our running speed, for example. To be able to collect them, we need corresponding slots, and to put them into operation, corresponding energy cells, which must also be found. Alternatively, needed objects can be bought with collected nanites at vending machines, provided that they were randomly placed in the current level. In this way, our main character increasingly builds up individually. The principle of chance often makes the game a matter of luck, but also provides its special thrill. Thus, it can happen that you find mainly useless gadgets, or laboriously have to search for health, ammunition, gadget slots and energy cells. The tension in this regard arises especially from the rogue-like gameplay without saving options, where death is permanent and results in a complete restart. CTHON is very atmospheric, but quite hard to beat even on medium difficulty. However, this always makes for a suspenseful challenge. [h1]GER:[/h1] Die negativen Bewertungen für CTHON stammen häufig von Rezensenten, die dieses Game weniger als eine Stunde, zuweilen auch nur Minuten gezockt haben. Ich verstehe, dass die Grafik abschrecken kann, sofern man die ersten 3D-Egoshooter dereinst nicht erlebt hat, oder dass die Spielmechaniken etwas balancelos anmuten können. Mit über 20 Stunden Spielzeit jedoch glaube ich mich in der Position zu wissen, das abschließende Urteil zu fällen: Dieses Spiel ist großartig. Insbesondere der Aspekt prozedural generierter Maps macht CTHON zu einer Perle hohen Wiederspielwerts und wiegt die kurze Spielzeit von ein bis zwei Stunden auf. Dennoch führen die Zufallslevel im ersten Drittel stets durch eine Forschungsstation, im zweiten durch einen außerirdischen Tempel, im dritten durch eine düstere Unterwelt, bevor wir die Halle des Endgegners betreten: Cthon. Die Präsentation mit seinen 90-Grad-Winkeln und seiner unveränderlichen Deckenhöhe erinnert an das legendäre Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Die begleitende, höchst unheimliche Soundkulisse ist übrigens fantastisch. Während uns zu Beginn nur Spinnen, dumpfe Nahkämpfer und schwache Fernwaffengegner durch die Korridore verfolgen, beschießen uns bald auch Riesenschlangen, fliegende Titanen und schwebende Stahlbestien mit ihren multiplen Projektilen. Um sie zu besiegen, steht uns das Gewehr, der Granatwerfer und die eher überflüssige Nahkampfwaffe zur Verfügung. Wie auch die Gesundheitskits, Munitionsvorräte und Granaten sind die Feinde stets zufällig verteilt. Zu den einsammelbaren Objekten gehören überdies die wichtigen und vielfältigen Gadgets. Mit diesen lässt sich etwa unsere Waffenstärke und Feuerrate, unsere Munitions- und Gesundheitskapazität oder die Laufgeschwindigkeit erhöhen. Um sie einsammeln zu können, benötigen wir entsprechende Slots, und um sie in Betrieb zu nehmen, entsprechende Energiezellen, die ebenfalls gefunden werden müssen. Alternativ lassen sich benötigte Objekte mit gesammelten Naniten an Automaten kaufen, sofern diese zufällig im gegenwärtigen Level platziert worden sind. Dergestalt baut sich die Spielfigur nach und nach individuell auf. Das Gebot des Zufalls macht das Spiel oft zu einer Glückssache, verleiht ihm jedoch auch seinen besonderen Thrill. So kann es passieren, dass man vornehmlich unnütze Gadgets findet oder mühselig auf der Suche nach Gesundheit, Munition, Gadget-Slots und Energiezellen ist. Die Spannung ergibt sich in dieser Hinsicht insbesondere aus dem rogue-like-Spielprinzip ohne Speichermöglichkeit, in dem der Tod permanent ist und in einem gänzlichen Neubeginn mündet. CTHON ist sehr atmosphärisch, jedoch schon auf mittlerer Schwierigkeit ziemlich schwer zu gewinnen. Dies sorgt aber stets für eine spannende Herausforderung.

It's good.

Truly, one of the better attempts at a FPS-roguelike. Beats "One More Dungeon" and similar.

I love the vibe of this game and it's quite well priced for what it offers, I just wish the levels were more interesting.

My word, what a load of crap, i have never seen a boomer shooter so uninviting to exploration, nor one with such a c*ckblocking progress control. Whoever though of the inventory limit based progress for this type of game needs to find a day job

great game for what it is...

Imagine a very simple little Roguelike thats like Wolfenstein 3D but with Doom 64's atmosphere. I thought it was pretty good and worth checking out.

I think the most prominent thing about this game is it's art direction. The game features a wonderful soundtrack and has really great spritework and atmosphere. I think the games direction is really good and it works well within the confines of it's pseudo-3D nature. I think in terms of gameplay Cthon is set apart from other similar games because of it being a roguelike, and featuring class & customization elements. Personally, I think the roguelike aspect works well for Cthon and I think the procedural generation keeps things mostly interesting. That said, it can be pretty frustrating to die and loose all your progress and have to go through the mostly same-ish looking levels, though I know that is just part of this kind of game. The game also has some classes and most importantly a lot of different upgrades. The upgrades are great as you can find or buy them and they do a lot of different things, and even change the sprites of your weapons and their projectiles which I love. I think it is fun to play and sort of create a particular build each time. Another important thing to mention is that the game features no keys. Personally, I think this is a great compliment to the game, as it is less annoying and because even if you find the exit early in the game, its heavily incentivized to explore and often backtrack the entire map to find upgrades and items. It creates a lot of slow moments but if that kind of thing appeals to you, I think Cthon does a fantastic job with it. So I think overall I would definitely not recommend this game to everyone, but I think if you like the elements that go into Cthon, the game does a great job and is very enjoyable.

They need to add screen resolution and aspect ratio selection at the very minimum. Asking for refund.