Hieroglyphika

I really wish I could recommend this. Pros: - Good music - Good sound - Great atmosphere - Many different items, weapons etc. Cons: - The turns...take...so...long! If it wasn't for this, I'm sure I would get past the other cons, but it slows the game down to a crawl. It just really prevents me from having fun. - The controls don't always work perfectly. Sometimes the mouse doesn't register as being on a certain tile until I move it to another tile - The glyphs aren't actually clear at all about what they do. There's a point in trying out to see what they do, but this game is really obtuse. Want to know whether an enemy will move twice, once or not at all after your turn? Bad luck. I think the developer went to far in trying to stylize the game, that he forgot how to make it readable (and I'm a guy that likes Dwarf Fortress). Too bad really, had high hopes for this one. Nothing that can't be fixed though, but there have been many complaints about the speed and nothing has happened, so I'm not too hopeful.

This game suffers from a horribly slow enemy turn. You move one tile, then the enemy takes 3-5 seconds per enemy to move. With multiple enemies, it can take what seems like 20-30 seconds of waiting for moving one tile. It's a waste of your time. I'm a traditional roguelike player and have never seen such a poorly implemented AI animation/movement sequence. The game looks beautiful, has some interesting language mechanics. It's a shame the slow AI turns make it not worth the wait.

Although I LOVE the idea of this game, I simply cannot stand how slow turns progress. Once you move, EVERY SINGLE ENEMY moves singularly, and slowly for that matter. This problem is so prevalent that I could not continue playing this game. In these regards, I cannot recommend this game.

I can confirm what others said. The game is turn-based and the turns take quite long with no option to speed things up. The entire game is controlled by mouse. If you like to play with keyboard or gamepad: Nope, not working. The "no text" gimmick is kinda interesting, since you have to figure out yourself what the stats and symbols mean, but the fun is killed quickly when the game pace is extremely slow. Also, the music is mediocre at best.

It's good! It is quite good actually. Unlike the other popular rougelikes, you cannot sit idle and farm like crazy in this game. You have an urgency to get to the end of the level before long or bad things happen to you, which I enjoy. I have not played too much at this point but from what I have seen, the weapon/armor sets are exactly the same in every playthrough. This is not a bad thing however, as the game presents you with a lot of items with drastically different effects. And the ability to change items/weapons/armors at will once you get them, creates an amazing utility that doesn't exist anywhere else. While I believe the game can be further improved with the addition of randomness to the enemy spawn and other small fine tunings, the game at this point is fully fleshed out and complete. As for the price, I think 9 dollars is more than fair for this game. It offers numerous replayability options and probably over 50 hours of gameplay before being any kind of bored. Which better than anything I can say for the most A+ titles. Buy it, no brainer.

This is a quite clever and enjoyable game that I see as a slow-paced puzzle rogue-like (turn-based, procedural levels, random loot, permadeath). The premise: you walk from left to right, killing things, avoiding traps and looting other things until you go down the stairs at the far right and the difficulty ramps up. Everything happens in turns, order is determined by a speed stat that mainly depends on your equipped gear, and traps give a tell before they go off. The puzzle aspects start to come in to play when you find loot and try to figure out 'what does it do actually?' All aspects of your gear are visualized as pictograms and while you get all information about its effects, you have to figure out what these pictograms mean in the first place (which isn't that hard if you experiment a bit when you find something new to you). Examples: a new dress may restrict your movement to the 4 cardinal directions instead of the usual 8, but boost your speed and defence and further increase your speed when you stand in sand tiles instead of reducing it. Headgear may reduce or nullify a certain damage type / effect while making you more vulnerable to another type. With the new weapon you may be unable to attack now and then due to cooldowns, but it extends your reach and hit chance while dealing a damage type this particular enemy is weak against... and so on. While often things feel at first like flat upgrades to your ability to deal damage or get faster, you will come into situations where you'll have to skip some turns to swap items (each equipment change takes one turn, and spells and such start with cooldowns when freshly equipped) - and that along to changing your own movement or attack patterns give it a surprising amount of depth. Enemies come with abilities as well and may push you around (beware of holes in the floor after the first few levels), freeze or poison you and generally keep you on your toes since new enemies are introduced every level so far (made it past lvl 5 of 9). Just to extend on what kinds of things you have to keep in your mind: - your general stats: life, speed, defence, attack strength and hitchance - attack pattern of your normal and special attacks, damage type, additional effects when attacking, attack cooldowns - spell effects, patterns, cooldowns - your and your enemies resistances and vulnerabilities - traps, their types and patterns, and with your current speed, will you make it past them in time - or can you even use them against your foes - your own movement pattern (may need to change your suit to get out of a dead end) - and also how you deal with +/- health ... uhm... flying things(?); your shield may reverse their effects for example As for the graphics: Just look at the screenshots and form your own opinion. Npc/trap turns take a few seconds so it's a bit slow going but the important part is that you can always tell what is going on - it could lose its readability if sped up further. Equipped gear is always represented on your character sprite which is nice, but there are no animations bar some 'swoosh' lines when attacks are dealt. Also, a codex of some sort would be nice where you could unlock a view (with the same pictograms) of what you are up against, so far it's all about observing and memorizing and quite some guesswork - which isn't bad per se, but e.g. after I've killed the same bugger 20 times it would be nice to take a closer look into his actual stats. Can't comment on technical stuff, I've experienced no problems like crashes at all. *edit: about half an hour minutes after writing this it crashed for the first time. Well... *edit2: and an update that specifically targets that crash came within one hour. On a sunday. It's good.

[b]Hieroglyphika[/b] is a fun, new Egyptian themed, [i]Turn Based[/i], [i]Roguelike[/i] with old school sensibilities. With no item descriptions to guide you and no text in the UI, your first couple of runs will just be figuring out what you can and can't do. Your next few runs will be trying to figure out the various pieces of clothing and equipment that you'll find strewn around the pyramid and why those nasty big critters start chasing you [spoiler]for taking to long[/spoiler]. Then finally you'll be making the most of what you have learnt to try and push deeper into the underground to inevitably die at the hands of a newly encountered enemy type. It's this learning process that will either keep you playing for the first 2 hours or put you off of the game. I personally loved it and am now slowly chasing the achievements for each new floor I manage to accomplish. **the game has had some updates since my initial review adding more enemy types (some quite annoying) that I feel have altered the pace and feel of the game.

There are some mechanics spoilers, and I haven't blacked them out, so if you don't want to see them, don't read any further. I want to like this game, but it's too slow for the pay off. Being a roguelike game, there are obviously frustrating moments, like getting to level four only to discover that apparently some enemies can blast you against the wall at nearly full health and insta kill you. Well, FTL and Don't Starve have those moments too, but at least they don't seem as slow as this game. I don't have a problem with turn based games--original XCOM is one of my favorie games, and some of those turns can be quite long. The problem here is, that it just isn't as fun for me. This isn't really objective, as some reviewers don't mind it. What I really find frustrating is that when you loot sarcophagi it can take you a full turn to equip the item, unless it's the first item. For example, if you loot a shield and you didn't have one before, it's automatically equipped. If you already had a shield, you now have to choose to spend a whole turn equipping it. The problem is the turn based system for this game. It's the whole design. It seems to be built around initiative, so you get our speed up and it seems you get more turns, but it still just takes way too long. I really like all the different equipment and spells you can get: armor, helmets, amulets, defensive/offensive spells, and weapons. Probably my favorite spell is the vampire spell which allows you to take half an enemie's life. There is a lot of thought put into this game, for sure, and I do enjoy trying to figure out the mechanics myself. Some enemies you kill will turn into white bat-like creatures that you can heal yourself with, or they may heal or kill certain enemies. There are also black bat-like creatures that can heal or harm you and enemies. There are certain conditions for that which you have to figure out. You can knock enemies into walls, each other, and various items and have completely different reactions. It can be quite dangerous figuring out what new spells do, as they can hurt you. There are different kinds of traps: acid/gas, fire, freeze, spikes, etc. and each level is random. There are a lot of different things going on each turn, and you can't stick around too long in the levels as enemies spawn in from the left, and you really don't want to face all of them. I like a lot of things about this game, but it's just so slow. I may play it again, but I really can't recommend it, because I know a lot of people aren't going to like this aspect.

I wish I could say I like this game. I really do. It's pretty, runs well and has a lot of potential. But it's frustrating as all hell. I can get over the overly stylised interface and obtuse item descriptions. It's actually kind of rewarding to figure out what the symbols and descriptions without words mean. You'll do several runs so you'll have plenty of time to get accuainted with the items. It also sounds good and is a truly beautiful game. The biggest problem I have—which I share with most people complaining in their reviews—is how frustratingly slow it is. This is coupled with the fact that you as the player have one single action. You can move, attack, shield, use a skill or simply wait. Forget moving and attacking on the same turn or anything like that. Meanwhile there are enemies in this game who can move two tiles, position themselves perfectly and then attack you, doing massive damage. This is further infuriating as the enemies often simply undo what you literally just did. Oh, you grabbed some health? No, this enemy just attacked you for just as much, if not more. Oh, you moved a step forward? No, this trap was just activated by an enemy at the edge of the screen who stepped on a tile and you were pushed back again. Oh, you readied your shield expecting this enemy to step forward and attack? No, he just stood exactly where he is and won't move for several rounds just waiting for you to step into range so he can [i]♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ push you back again[/i]. Meanwhile, in between every single turn, you have to wait for every single enemy on the screen to make their slow moves as well as every single trap to activate and show their slow animations and every single effect on every single tile to animate. [i]There is so much waiting in this game.[/i] The predominant feeling I get in this game is utter powerlessness: a complete lack of proper agency. That is [i]not[/i] what you want to feel in a game. In this game I am at the complete mercy of the game in terms of what items I get, what the level layout looks like, what enemies are where and what they do—and like I said, sometimes they decimate you and sometimes they do literally nothing. I feel like I'm playing poker but I have to play the first hand I get. No exchanging cards. Oh, I got a pair of threes? Well, too bad. The game just plucked that third ace straight from the deck and slapped me in the face with a full house. I want to love this game, I really do. I just wish I didn't have to struggle with my impulse to rage quit every time the game turns my perfect run into instant defeat in one or two turns in a way that's completely out of my hands.

Seeing the mixed rating, I've decided to show some support for the dev. It's a smart, stylish, and unique game. I never got past level 5, but it's not because them turns take too long (not as long as people make it out to be) or any of the technical problems (don't remember any), but simply because I'm stupid and lack patience. Maybe one day I'll beat it, yet for now I appreciate it for what it is - a good, challenging puzzle roguelike that has its problems, but certainly deserves a chance. Especially if you're passionate about the Egyptian theme. I am, which partially explains my leniency, I suppose. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35305390-Big-Bad-Mutuh/?appid=262060]Curator[/url]