Inferno - Beyond the 7th Circle

Nice dungeon crawler; fairly simple but fun combat with some positioning and great looking demons to fight, but gets grindier and simpler (spam magic: physical attacks miss, attack spells don't) as you get into mid-late game. For exploration, there is some easy puzzles and secret areas scattered throughout but navigating through them gets tiring due to the lack of variety in backgrounds and tile placement. Minor issues like awkward waits for the main menu, stat screen, and other screens to load that should be instant and the magic map feeling awkward to read/make notes and annoying to pull up as a spell rather than just an ordinary map. Overall was a very comfy way to pass the time for price.

For me, games can make up for a lot of things through their art style and atmosphere, and Inferno - Beyond the 7th Circle is a great example of this. I've only ever done one run as a melee character that started out on the beginner difficulty, but about 2/3 through the game, survival and resource management became trivial and combat began to feel a bit dry, even with the spells you can sprinkle in. That said, this game had me absolutely hooked for the first hour or so getting to the shelter and led to multiple play sessions late into the night, all because of the little details it has. Spells have to be typed and catalogued, and whether you build into magic or not, you'll end up using and leveling some of it for QoL and combat. I'm a big fan of this since magic is often exclusive of melee archetypes, but here, it feels much more present. The atmosphere is great as well, and it has a certain coziness to it that makes it fit for a game you'd play offline whenever you're without Wi-Fi somewhere. I've never played dungeon crawlers before don't really intend to play any more, but I would recommend buying this on sale even if just the atmosphere piques your interest, as it did with me. If you're more familiar with the genre and like what you see, I'd imagine you could justify paying a bit more.

This one is pretty solid, rather difficult, maybe even Roguelike in it's level of punishment. But it's fair punishment. Game mechanics are very interesting, the magic system in particular where you have to "memorize" spells to cast them. And how you can cast spells above your level. The fatigue system is pretty good as well. Arms & Armours are somewhat on the boring/non memorable side, which is a bit of a shame, but the monsters are cool enough and the designers clearly did the best they could with their means available; they used some very cleaver ideas to "get around" budget limitations I suspect they had. Not recommended if you care about an elaborate and moving story, but who plays Dungeon Crawlers for the story anyway. Original thematic, convincing and unique fighting system, great monsters design. Big thumb up Update: I just realized this is a one-man project and the updates need no dlc? Well, then that's two thumbs up!

I am a university professor, game developer, and 4X TBS game enthusiast. I have played, developed, collaborated on, playtested, analyzed, written about, and searched for turn-based games most of my life. I found this game after carefully reviewing countless YouTube videos, asking friends, and consulting Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. I wrote this report after 25 hours of gameplay and finishing my first 3 games. This game is a mixed bag of good and bad, but overall, I don't recommend it. The good: A new turn-based RPG for modern computers, which is rare. Several innovative features. I have not found any bugs or performance problems yet. The bad: The battles' degree of freedom is too low. Not enough actions to choose from. Battles are repetitive and tend to feel similar. Few monsters, they always come one at a time, and movement is only forward or backward on just 7 slots to stand on. No probability of success is displayed for critical actions, such as Flee. Also, the rules are unclear about this and other things. Battle outcomes and lockpicking outcomes are too random, which almost certainly means frequent reloads that defeat the purpose of an RPG. Not enough story or guidance about where to go. The early exploration does not have a good auto-map, so if you don't want to get lost, you have to make your own map, especially if your character is not a good spellcaster. This might be fun for an excellent, deep game, but it's boring for a mediocre one like this. Low replayability value. Not much fun to redo the early parts that I already played. Not enough diversity or randomness in the environment, weapons, or other things that impact replayability. You start your first game without any spells. The only way to get new spells is to explore the area and find them. But the same spells are always in the same place, and worse, you start your second game already knowing those spells. You don't even need to explore again to find and cast them. Adding notes to the auto-map requires casting the expensive Map spell (at least in the early game). Looking at it requires casting the spell again. Adding text to the map has a bad UI: a mandatory long textbox to type a single character. Lockpicking is real-time. It does not fit the turn-based nature of this game. It is just fast-clicking buttons thousands of times for a small chance of success while wasting resources. Boring, painful, a waste of time. Items are not clearly explained. For example, Regenerating Fluids only says "Causes Regenerating status for 11 rounds." But you have to use it to find out it only regenerates 1% of max HP per round, for a total of 11%, half of the 22% given by Health Medicines. To make it worse, Regenerating Fluids costs double what Health Medicines cost. Pressing Shift moves the character forward. This is surprising and caused me to unintentionally move forward, even into battle. It can't be turned off. I use Shift often to take screenshots, because the rules shown in hints only display for a few seconds: not enough time to read, and not enough to save them for future reference to catalog the rules. My main weapon and armor cannot be changed during battle. Why? Battle action results are not clear. Damage numbers flash too fast and are not logged. There is a Log on the overland map, but if I look at the same note on a wall 3 times, it gets logged 3 times. A waste of space and time. No information on the upcoming battle. What kind of monsters? How many? What level are they?

Fun dungeon crawler. I love the complex mechanics, I had to do some homework to ensure that I understood how everything works. The only down-side to this game is the static art, it looks great, but it did not help with the Immersion.

Good !

This game plays like an interactive Lucio Fulci movie.

heavy ♥♥♥♥♥♥' metal

A superb old school RPG.

A truly quintessential DRPG. Plenty of RPG depth, a wide world to explore with plenty of secrets to find, and genuinely some of my favorite turn based combat I've ever experienced.