Down the Drain is a cute, simple roguelike that boils genre-essential mechanics down to their basics. It appears to be the first project from a new indie dev duo, and I applaud them for launching their first game - it's a huge accomplishment!
As of the time of this writing, I'm unable to recommend the game, as I feel it has a variety of mechanical and presentational issues that prevent it from realizing its full potential. I'm hopeful that the developer will continue to refine and polish the game, and assuming they do, I'll be happy to revisit and revise my review.
The overarching mechanics are all present and familiar: short, repetitive runs through procedurally-generated levels populated by randomized enemies; progress through the levels, defeat enemies, collect currency, and upgrade your abilities over the course of numerous attempts.
The presentation is simplistic but consistent - the color palette is restrained, and the avoidance of textures, while basic-looking, does make environments easy to navigate. Animations tend to consist of only a few frames, which can be effective if presented well. Music is a bit of a mixed bag - it varies from your run-of-the-mill MIDI-inspired backing track to some fairly catchy rock-influenced songs.
I'd like to touch on a few points of praise before diving into further critique:
- The mapping is well-handled and elegantly-displayed, showing a clear representation of the level and your position within it
- Power-ups are well-paced and doled out at a rate that makes sense, given the pacing of each level
- The setting is quite unique, and the backgrounds appearing as bathroom/kitchen tile was charming
- The UI is clean and well-presented, causing no confusion with regards to what each meter's function was
- The game performs well and runs at a steady framerate
- The Credits map was a nice touch (I won't spoil anything, but it's worth a runthrough!)
That all said, there are a number of areas that Down the Drain requires some refinement in before a purchase is well-warranted:
- Though it's made transparent that the game is best played with a controller, the keyboard controls could be vastly improved with little effort - the current mappings are fairly nonsensical and strangely-spaced
- The player character's movement controller, given that it's only controlled with one analog stick, possesses a wide arc upon turning. This means that trying to rapidly escape enemies and then shoot at them, in sequence, is borderline impossible due to the sweeping circle made by each 180 of the player character. A possible modification to player movement would be towards a traditional twin-stick shooter-style setup. A few enemy designs necessitate this - in particular, the purple enemies that give chase. Without being able to shoot while retreating, these enemies are essentially unavoidable - more on this momentarily
- Multiple enemy types are very difficult to deal with without use of the bubble shield, an ability which consumes energy that does not naturally replenish itself. This unfortunately creates a scenario in which you're almost guaranteed to take damage once your energy is empty. This leads to a feeling of player helplessness, and coupled with the inability to aim independently of moving, leaves you a sitting duck with enemies in pursuit. The natural inclination here would be to make energy a naturally-replenishing resource, a-la a stamina system, which would give the player more agency than they currently possess
- Enemy designs lack clear telegraphing of attack patterns, making their moves a bit unpredictable and difficult to reason about
- The player seems to lack a well-defined invincibility period after being hit, resulting in very rapid deaths if you're not able to deal with a threat fast enough
- Maps are small to the degree they're trivialized - increasing their size at least two- or three-fold would better lend itself to a feeling of exploration and progress. Larger maps might also provide opportunities for hidden areas and other secrets
- There are some collision issues throughout - I noticed enemies clipping through walls (in particular, the purple enemy that chases you can clip through walls when dashing), and it would look and feel slightly better if both the player's and enemies' collision boxes prevented them from overlapping map boundaries
- Given that a core conceit of the game appears to be cleaning the pipes of clogs and dirt, I would expect that this would be more fundamental to the gameplay. It might be interesting if the dirt were a literal impediment to progress, clogging massive sections of pipe and needing to be removed via more complex/involved manners
- Some animation loops don't start/terminate properly - for instance, the player character can be stuck in an open-mouthed position simply by holding the "fire" button
- The narrative would probably be better-served via a traditional third-person method; rather, exposition given before the game, rather than a series of comic-style panels that solely contain lines of dialogue. The sheer quantity of panels, and the lack of narration, makes it difficult to follow the storyline
Overall, Down the Drain is charming, and there's a solid technical foundation here to build upon, but at present, it has too many fundamental issues to be able to enthusiastically recommend. This is compounded by the slightly high price point - I would expect an indie game in the ~$10 price range to be refined to a degree that this one currently isn't.
Best of luck with your continuing work on the game, and please let me know when you've released an update!
Find more reviews and recommendations on my Steam Curator page, Indie Infinitesimal:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41769714/
