7DRL 2024 Reviews and Picks (Patreon)

As many of you likely know from reading my work (or even played it back then :P), Cogmind originated as a 7DRL in 2012, and the pretty good reception, combined with a concept so full of potential, were what convinced me to start turning it into something bigger the following year. Ever since then, each year I play and review 7DRLs, earlier on doing so in an official capacity, but in more recent years just picking those which look especially promising in order to explore their design and share the experience with everyone else via streams/videos, including providing feedback to other developers (who are either present during the stream or get that feedback later on).

There are a good 100+ new games each year, of which I often end up playing dozens. Last year I played about 35, and streamed nearly a couple dozen of those. This year I'm trying to cut it down to a smaller batch to save time (lots to do in terms of my own dev work!), and a surprisingly lower submission rate is helping with that, like this year is the first time that the number of signups and actual participants has fallen by a noticeable level rather than increased or remained steady? It's still a lot though, and I went through every single one looking for those I wanted to explore in more depth.

Okay not quite every single one, since I filter the list down to dev-designated "completed" turn-based games, which when I did that for my to-check list resulted in 103 7DRLs. (Only 13% of entries were declared real-time this year, compared to nearly one-third in 2023.)

You can browse the full list of entries here.

It took me the better part of a day to do an initial pass on all the games, some of which I played on my own since I didn't plan to stream them but wanted to check them out in more detail, but for a subset of the list which looked particularly promising (and appropriate) that I decided to share, I went into them fresh for the stream so that devs can see what fresh eyes on their game might look like. Having played many hundreds of roguelikes over the years my view might be slightly different than the average player, but fresh to each game nonetheless ;)

Here are the results of my search and a quick summary of play experiences, in case you want to try out some cool little games in your spare time.

Day 1

"Coop Catacombs" by AikonCWD: https://aikoncwd.itch.io/coop-catacombs

Cooperative rogueliking! Online asynchronous cooperation with other players as you leave/read messages, or drop an item or leave your hostile ghost on death. Players can benefit, or hinder, one another, and also check yourself and others in the graveyard at the entrance. It's the same dungeon for everyone, until someone wins and a new one is generated! Good tiles, good UI, comes with audio, and is an all-around treat.

AikonCWD is continuing to work on this one in terms of bug fixing, balance, and new content, and new players are still actively joining and cooperating to beat the dungeons. I imagine it's a good one to check out early while it's more active, since as with any multiplayer-focused game who knows how active it will be later, though the dev does have bigger plans to continue developing it as their main project. They're extremely active, too, and their rapid pace of development during 7DRL was respectable.

Most recently we've also added a new channel specifically for it on the Roguelikes/RoguelikeDev/Cogmind Discord server, so you can find players and the dev there as well (#coopcatacombs).

"Prim Reaper" by a team of Invisible, Inc modders: https://kaya3.itch.io/prim-reaper

A stealth roguelike that has you knocking people out, switching outfits, dragging bodies, and generally trying to look like you belong somewhere as you make your way towards a target for assassination by whatever means will work while still being able to escape undetected. Very nice job, though will be great with a little more input QoL (coming!).

After my stream they set to working on performance improvements to enhance responsiveness, and have ideas for how to expand its content in the future.

"Deiphage" by Caelyn Sandel: https://ectafoole.itch.io/deiphage

Features top-down 3D movement through a deep (abyssal even!) underwater environment, and certainly an interesting visual concept, though there doesn't yet seem to be a lot of depth to the mechanics.

Still, this one's worth checking out real quick if only to see it as a tech demo of one unique style of 3D visualization in a roguelike.

You can also see the entire first day's stream archived here.

On the first day I did a quick general intro to the event like I normally do, though not in quite so much detail as I might in the past, especially when I was doing official reviewing and showed some behind-the-scenes processes for that. You can see those things among archived years in my YouTube channel's 7DRL category.

And we had the devs of both Coop Catacombs and Prim Reaper in chat at the time.

Day 2

Yet another day of great games!

"Pictomancer" by Drestin: https://drestin.itch.io/pictomancer-7drl-2024

Take pictures of surrounding areas and keep a handful of these pictures on hand to paste them to other locations on the map in order to change the terrain and contents to overcome various challenges. Not a whole lot of content, but it has a unique mechanic that's very fun to play with for a bit, and looks pretty.

The dev later shared a list of really great ideas for expanding this concept, but they don't plan to do more with it themselves, preferring to leave it as a bite-sized 7DRL experience.

You can win in about 10-15 minutes, including learning time (and it's not very hard), so think about trying this one just to see what it's like :)

"Runner" by Drew Harry: https://drewww.itch.io/runner

An excellent tightly-designed non-combat ASCII roguelike experience, using six cooldown-powered special movement abilities to escape from a building while avoiding patrols, sentries, and the deadly Hunter. Be quick or be dead.

I had a lot of fun with it, deciding just how to avoid getting shot and achieving all the objectives within the pretty tight time constraints. It seems balanced quite well, though so far I've only had time to do that one run (which won), and I should do more to get a better idea, but from what I later saw of others' playthroughs it does seem to have just the right level of challenge, and figuring out how to slip through seemingly impossible situations undetected is a rewarding experience.

Drew plans to keep working on this one, with lots of ideas for expansion, but as is it's a solid core mechanic with decent presentation and worth devoting some time to if you like puzzling your way through dynamic obstacle courses with a handful of different movement options you can't simply spam to win.

"Seven Stone Sentinels" by rentonl and Finch: https://rentonl.itch.io/7-stone-sentinels

Great tactical roguelike with unique base abilities, ways to buff those abilities and effects, and truly unique enemies that grow more powerful with each map. It's a series of 15 maps with a shop between each in which to buy a new "relic" or two. While playing it repeatedly reminded me of the venerable Hoplite but with more complexity. A good comparison, and this specimen is already very polished.

rentonl says they do want to add more items, fix a few issues, and on request it seems a mobile version is not out of the question?! This would be awesome on mobile (again, not unlike Hoplite).

(I had a lot of fun and since I plan moves for a while there wasn't quite enough time to finish the run, so I went on to win the run later that night after the stream.)

You can also see the entire second day's stream archived here.

During the stream we had the devs of Runner and Seven Stone Sentinels available to answer questions, talk development, and give feedback.

Day 3

This week's stream encountered some technical issues since my internet dropped out in the middle, but it continued shortly after and I made it through all the games I'd planned to stream, this time looking into a few somewhat non-traditional ones as well.

"Rogue Strokes" by Keep Flying Games: https://keep-flying-games.itch.io/rogue-strokes-minigolf-dungeons-7drl

A turn-based golf-like heavy on physics, with a rogue-ish theme. An interesting fusion, and pretty. I wanted to try this out since the general 2D physics concept reminded me of older 7DRLs Enter the Chronosphere and Shackles of the Stellar Tyrant, both of which are pretty cool, especially the latter, one of my favorite 7DRLs of all time.

I didn't go for another run since I wanted to save time for the other games, but it's not incredibly hard and I reached the half-way mark, just don't touch lava like I did without knowing precisely what would happen :P. Lots of little interesting quality tidbits throughout this one, although performance was especially slow for me while streaming. (I've since gone back to play it some more and while not streaming performance is fine.)

"Electric Organ" by gridbugs: https://gridbugs.itch.io/electric-organ

One of this year's cooler more mechanically-mature-feeling entries, Electric Organ is ASCII-only but there's animation and audio, and it reminds me a lot of Cogmind in that you have to manage an array of changing body parts (which can be swapped, damaged, or modified) together with a good variety of resource levers, all while suffering environmental damage and attacks. Difficulty is on the harder side, but once you have a grasp of the mechanics, the challenges and options for overcoming them are more apparent, if not always easy to pull off.

At my most powerful I had a cybernetic claw that required battery power, a vampiric claw that required blood extracted from bodies to operate, and mostly functioning organs until the very end when I couldn't quite finish off the boss and started getting irradiated and ran out of consumables to manage the rather extensive environmental threats at that point. So close!

There are gun-based builds as well, though like Cogmind you sometimes have to build for what you have easier access to at the time :)

"Battlemage" by hellochar: https://hellochar.itch.io/battlemage

Gradually acquire items and permanently place them in a growing matrix to come up with combos for defeating waves of enemy groups. Most items rely on their proximity with other items to be useful, and given the large variety of items there seem to be a fair number of different possible synergies. Enemies by comparison are rather simple, having only different telegraphed attack/armor times, damage, and HP, and the difficulty is on the lower side, but it's interesting nonetheless. Battlemage is more puzzle roguelite than roguelike, but I enjoyed this one when playing on my own last week, so decided to share it with the rest.

The dev has lots of ideas for improving and expanding it, so hopefully this one will get built out even more in the future.

"Castlevania 2: The Lady of Berkeley" by Slashie: https://slash.itch.io/cvrl2-the-lady-of-berkeley

A very classic-styled ASCII roguelike by a team put together by Slashie, one of the 7DRL event organizers who's made a zillion roguelikes! This one has a top-down ADOM-styled static overworld with procgen dungeons in the world of Castlevania--visiting towns, completing tasks, and whipping enemies while jumping around. Pleasing aesthetics with music and audio to go with it. Completing the full story might take a while, but it's well produced!

Slashie intends to continue working on it as well. Already there have been some patches, including the most recent one to address QoL/other issues from my stream, but feature expansions are also planned.

You can also see the entire third day's stream archived here (and part 2 here).

And that's a wrap for 7DRL 2024! Although there are a few more I'd like to play, or a few of those already played I'd like to revisit, I don't plan to do any more streaming of them.