Eternal King

Refusing to break his genre-trekking streak, chimp is following up his catalogue of exploration-driven open-ended 3D platformer, physics-based ball roller, and 2D fighting game, with a unique level-based roguelite hack and slash. Eternal King has some weighty and dynamic (if occasionally ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥) combat, starting each of the 9 stages with just your basic attack-block-jump-kick moveset and unlocking special moves as you clear each of the eight waves in the stage. It's a simple but well executed concept - every couple of waves, you are given a choice of one of three random moves, each of which is either active or passive, with varying offensive and defensive utility. The first one is mapped to Shift-Attack, the second one is mapped to Shift-Defend, and so on. This does introduce an element of luck to the game, but most of the moves are useful enough that ending up with a roster full of duds is very unlikely. Beat all 9 levels? Here's a significantly harder remix of each arena, and a combat sandbox that lets you populate an arena with enemies and pick out your moves from any you have unlocked. To be honest, I'm a little surprised there's no True Roguelite mode with procedurally generated enemy encounters across all the arenas, but there's still plenty of replayability if that's something you're concerned about. Aesthetically, the game is solid. It has some great music, proggy and full of some delightful-sounding Hammond(?) organ, and some very pretty skyboxes. The player and the enemies are Doom-style flat renders of 3D models, with a lot of creativity and character in their appearance and animations, while the levels themselves are fairly basic and utilitarian. [i]Economical[/i], even (and that's a good thing)