If you enjoy Diablo, you'll probably like XLarn. In essence, Larn is Diablo. So much of the gameplay of Diablo so closely resembles Larn that Blizzard's game is at least a homage: level layouts randomly selected from a pre-designed list; persistent monsters appearing in random locations when first entering the level; random loot drops; being able to both cast spells and wield weapons (melee and ranged); health and magic that regenerate over time; spam combat that involves repeating basic attacks over and over again with more powerful weapons/spells; distinct, powerful boss monsters at the bottom of the dungeon... A lot of these elements are commonplace now, but they were first brought together in one game in Larn, and didn't appear together again until Diablo.
Players of Rogue, NetHack, or any of countless other early roguelikes know that the most common way to die in all of those games was getting stuck in a randomly-generated level with no obvious way to continue, and thus slowly starving to death. Larn directly addresses that problem, both by not randomly generating dungeon layouts, and by not having a starvation mechanic. So you never get stuck on a level that was generated with no exits, as happens sometimes in Rogue and almost always in NetHack, but even if you do get stuck for some other reason, the game does not punish you by killing you for not being able to find an exit that isn't there. What this means, though, is that Larn is an easier roguelike than most; you can successfully complete a game of Larn at least 25% of the time.
Larn consists of two dungeons: the normal dungeon (with a very scary boss fight on the tenth level), and the elite dungeon (the volcano) which actually contains the object of your quest: the unique medicine needed to heal your daughter. You have a timer of "mobuls" - basically your daughter's health - that decrements one every 100 moves. The first time you play, your daughter has 300 mobuls. Once you win the game, that amount decreases the next time you play, and you start with a debt that has to be paid in addition to finding the potion.
It even allows for some strategic variation, with a variety of weapons and equipment that you can find that improve upon what you can buy. The store has two top-tier weapons: the sunsword and the Lance of Death. The sunsword is like a +10 weapon: it does a lot of damage, and hits about 99% of the time. The Lance of Death instantly kills about 99% of the monsters in the game, but it has a much lower hit probability.
XLarn is a recreation of Larn that uses mouse input and tile graphics. There are a few things changed/missing in the translation:
- XLarn accepts single-letter commands, with mouse input for any additional information. So you can move with the keypad, but you cannot choose a direction to shoot with a keypad, or type the name of a spell to cast. You must learn to recognize the spell icons so that you can click on them in the spell menu.
- the graphics are lovely. For the most part, they remind me fondly of Glenn Wichman's Atari ST implementation of Rogue. Some of them are arbitrary, jokey, or just selections that were "close enough to work, I guess" from a public-domain icon library (the shambling mound is a D&D troll, the lamia noble is... a donkey? The umber hulk is... Hulk??)
- there are a bunch of additional items in the game that didn't exist in Larn. So far I've found: rope, ladders, and magic boxes (which are basically like chests).
- the player's inventory is not listed with letters, so when you want to select an item from your inventory, you must scroll to highlight the item you want and press enter, rather than just typing the corresponding letter.
- an early game exploit has been removed, preventing players from short-cutting their way to a sunsword as you could do in the original
- there is no way to tell which specific squares you have visited on each level
- there are multiple difficulty settings to choose from at the beginning of the game. These seem to adjust how hard monsters hit you, and how often.
- the hit probability is set much lower than in the original; fights with even basic monsters take many turns because you have to swing 20 times to hit once. This makes combat a much more strategic choice than in the original: do I stay to fight this monster so that I can gain XP and get stronger, or do I save time by running away? If you stay to fight every monster like you would in Larn, you may actually have a hard time completing the quest in 300 mobuls.
- vermin monsters - rats and bats at least - spontaneously multiply while you are fighting them. Combined with the lower hit probability, this becomes really troublesome. In my plays of the game so far, both the first level of the dungeon and the "overworld" (outside) filled with so many bats it began to be difficult to traverse the level. This is the only issue that resembles an actual bug I've encountered so far. When I finally get powerful enough to hit reliably, I make a point in every game to go back and exterminate all the bats and rats on every level, just to cut down the likelihood that I will get trapped by a solid wall of bats.
- a bunch of impassable terrain - trees - have been added that make the overworld more visually interesting while also providing obstacles that one must maneuver to avoid.
As a result of these changes, XLarn feels different than Larn: a little slower, a little more grindy. But it's close enough that I still love it, just like I love Diablo, too.
