Ludus Mortis

I really want to like this game. It does so much, so well. But the grind is not fun at all. I've done 6-7 dungeons now and enjoyed each one quite a bit. But, each new dungeon you unlock is quite the jump from the previous ones. So, you have to grind for XP to get stronger. Problem is, you only have the previous dungeons to grind in. And they are the same layout, completely revealed, with NO changes. So, you're just doing the same thing over and over and over. The game hints that you eventually unlock a randomized dungeon... Why is this not introduced MUCH sooner? It's insane that you have the ability to make a randomized dungeon, but you force the player to redo the same maps repeatedly. Just add a randomized dungeon where you can choose the level and bam, this game is gold. Until then, it's a repetitive slog that I just can't suffer.

So there's some problems. The interface is clunky as hell. Just trying to look at your characters' stats in basecamp involves going through what feels like the wrong menus, and is several clicks deep. Wanna know what characters you want to use which weapons when you're in the shop menu? Better hope you named your party members things like "trident + heavy armor + front rank," because otherwise you need to back out and go several screens deep into the wrong menu to get this information. How basic game elements work is also not always clear from the jump, and this wouldn't be as much a problem if you had resources to work with at the start. Your average character's basekit is nothing. If you're lucky, you might have a single button you can push to make a magic attack, but it costs half your mana bar. And this is with tediously rerolled minmax stats, which the game requires you to do to last more than a second in combat. Not that combat is the problem. Traps reset every time you visit a dungeon, and if they show up in first person view (they certainly don't get marked on the map even when they're in the same place every run) then it's kind of irrelevant because the draw distance is one tile ahead so you're going to run over them anyway. And when you run over them, one of your characters is guaranteed to die. That's not hyperbole. Of the five traps I've run over, one of them has not killed a character from full health. And when a character dies, at minimum they're losing all unspent exp. And you can't bank that exp, because each dungeon run that doesn't kill a boss gives you about 200 exp. A basic raise for one stat or skill costs 6,000. And the boss is cranked to hell and expects you to have a few levels when you reach it. And this is on normal. Highkey what are you doing here. A game can be intuitive and clunky and fun, or punishing and fun, but it can't be unintuitive and clunky and punishing and fun. At a certain point all the problems drag the appeal under water and drown it. I'm going to wipe my save file and start anew for the third time. I don't want to feel like I haven't given the game a far shot, but that trap damage might be the most automatic dealbreaker I've ever seen. Edit: So there's a character class that specializes in trap removal. What does it do? It gets a unique skill that removes traps, which does the same thing as the default throw a rock skill that every party gets. The throw a rock skill sucks, because it doesn't work one tile in front of you, it's two tiles only, but unless you're in a situation where you turn the corner and there's a trap, there's no reason to waste a party slot on a whole character class that is invalidated by the ability to toss a pebble. 2nd Edit: You can hire a mercenary who takes 25% of your gold from each run but will flash an obnoxious popup on the screen when an active OR disarmed trap is nearby. This initially seems bad for many reasons, but it's also worse because it prevents you from hiring the mercenary that slightly increases your drop luck. 3rd Edit: Rogues are for opening locked chests, not dealing with traps. And you need to have one. They're fragile and bad, so that's one of your two backrow slots permanently locked down forever, but the only way to lockpick is through the rogue ability. Your stats and skills can be as high as you want them to be. The sliding bar minigame does not work. It plays a sound, but it doesn't do anything even when you stop the bar in the right place---no loss of lockpicks, no opened chest, just a clunk sound that you can repeat as often as you like. 4th Edit: So a thing that I've seen in this game that I've never seen in any other blobber is that when you get jumped by a random battle sometimes they spin you right round right round like a record baby right round round round. 5th Edit: Cleared the first boss. Because you can't really grind and progress until you do, he's kind of a wall that keeps you from playing the game. Fortunately, there's an easy way to beat him. Repeat the fight until the rng rolls in your favor and he misses his attacks. Do you see how maybe this sucks? Do you see how maybe this is bad design? Fortunately, after beating him you unlock the ability to grind the starting area which you now need to do. 6th Edit: Okay, started running into traps that reset themselves and/or can't be pebbled safely, so there is a niche for the trap guy. Also the trap mercenary is terrible. Taking him does not ultimately make traps easier to spot. You just have to go slow. Which in this game... It's already tedious. Torches are apparently the consumable that gives you a barely workable draw distance, so this wasn't a hardware limitation. The developers just decided they wanted the game like this. To recap: your options are misleading, you need a consumable to see. 7th Edit: This is a finer grain than my other complaints, but the fundamental game loop is based around nothing happening. Attacks whiff constantly. Or they get blocked. Or they low-roll damage. The game chugs when you kill an enemy and forces you to wait before re-targeting. You have to grind five hundred encounters at the end of each dungeon to get a workable xp total. You have no interesting powers to start and you can't get any until you've power-leveled your skills, which costs a wild amount of xp and still isn't as useful as just taking regular levels because this game is built like DnD 5e---a system that is *only* interesting when you're telling a good story. And Ludus Mortis' isn't. I really want to like this thing. I like the premise. I like the sprite art. The music's fine if repetitive. But the design is holding it back. The only button I push is to spam melee, and all of the game's clunky menus feel meaningless. 8th Edit: Use charge to break through cracked walls. Cool, yeah, how. Because the game's only reference is the Rhetor, who does not tell you. And the hint that pops up sure doesn't either. And there's no class with a charge exploration skill. And there's no consumable that does this. 9th Edit: Ohhhhh. The tiny little block of text hidden in the lower left corner of the screen. The invisible little tiny little chunk of text. That's the one. The one that tells you which random letter key to press to charge if you squint and stare at the teeny little letters assuming this information will be there. To be fair, I could've also found this out by checking the controls in settings, but I did not have any reason to assume charge was a basic control when everything else is done by menus. I had to find a developer video in order to see that whatever they were doing was hotkeyed somehow. 10th Edit: So. Consumables. Torches let you see and play the game normally. Rations let you ignore your stamina bar, a thing that is completely useless 99% of the time. Keys let your thief do anything at all. Invisible eye lets you search for hidden walls, a thing you should be able to do normally, and have basically no duration. Wine does give you an actual bonus, I think it's the only consumable whose design is not antithetical to having fun. It's just, the bonus is to maximize the morale bar. The morale bar is a thing that builds when you hit attacks or dodges, and drops when you whiff attacks or dodges. So it's a win more meter tied primarily to rng. It's one step forward twelve steps back with this design. 11th Edit: Oh, yeah, no. Absolutely not. The damage and hp scaling on enemies by the fifth dungeon expects you to have ground an amount that is deeply mentally unwell. Play Star Crawlers, play Grimrock, play Etrian Odyssey, play any of the heaps and heaps of good indie blobbers. Even the ones that are mid are still fun. Ludus Mortis is tedious and bland, and this damns it in a way that merely high difficulty and bad design could not. 12th Edit: Grinded four hours. Got way over-leveled. Then my fighter got three-hit from full to zero by a blinded basic enemy. Nah.