game is good
i’m not much of a “dungeon crawler” or “reader” and didn’t realize you could just buy hearts + the wide-hit sword from the gameover screen for a while and that helps a bunch
Necrodancer on a dpad kind of hurts my hand!
This game is interesting though; it looks like it’s meant to be replayed. The Overworld gets shuffled every time so you’ll be forced to tackle different dungeons with different sets of items each time.
Huh, I played a little bit of necrodancer on my switch last night after disliking it on PC and I was like oh, I see why people like it now. The dpad felt like a big improvement to me!
Still get fucked up by the X/Y swap though
I played a lot of GameMaker games on a keyboard when I was growing up, so I’m probably the weirdo here.
1 Like
in addition to having very similar tastes I am with you on this one
I think if a game is timing heavy, my hands tense up when I’m playing with a controller so it gets fatiguing. I had this problem with precision platformers too. For Celeste and N++ I would switch back and forth between a controller and keyboard controls to give my hands a rest (which I think for most people would be a nightmare, but I’m sort of equally skilled with both).
2 Likes
This game is pretty heavily inspired by the NES Zelda. I say this because they made a lot of the same design decisions I made when I tried to make a randomized NES Zelda. Like the original Zelda, they try to put a shop, cave, or other secret on nearly every screen.
Their macro strategy for map generation is very similar to mine, too (although I suspect they’re using pre-built screens for the overworld rather than trying to wrangle some algorithm to do it, which is the smarter choice.) It’s split into “biomes”, places a coast “biome” on the outer walls of the map, and there is one dungeon per biome.
They even do this thing that I toyed with, which is having tiles from other biomes bleed into the outer edge of adjacent screens so that you don’t accidentally go into a place that you’re not ready for or so you can orient yourself better without looking at a map. I did this with sand tiles for my “lost desert”.
2 Likes
2 Likes
You can also switch to a full turn-based no-beat wait-mode in the options menu. Neat.
4 Likes
My interest in this game vastly increases
Based on ten minutes or so it makes it too easy but you can almost squint your eyes and pretend its a reg zelda game.
1 Like
I beat Cadence. It’s cute! I like that there’s an actual world map and dungeons with extremely basic puzzles and that you can move around at your own speed when there aren’t any enemies around. It’s also pretty easy once you get a couple of health potions and some hearts, a decent weapon. That’s alright though, it got me jonesing enough that I want to go back and finish Necrodancer.
1 Like
Really, is that it? Necrodancer has multiple tiers of postgame including a true final boss that I was barely able to reach but never beat after 200-ish hours. Surely Cadence has some depth too?
I was honestly expecting more of a to-do with some kind of “Now for the REAL challenge” but you’re sort of unceremoniously dumped back to the title screen after the credits. You can can choose the “Daily Challenge” or manually type in a seed/enable permadeath or single character but there’s really nothing about it that’s hinting to me as having any substantial extra content. 
1 Like
Hmm, too bad. I guess it’s a result of fixed timeframe dev cycle as opposed to incrementalized early access. It did take years for all that postgame to emerge. I guess it will be like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon to Necrodancer’s Shiren, then.
1 Like
I think there’s probably a lot of meat if you were to try to beat it in permadeath mode, but also that’s not the most compelling prospect and it’d be nice if there was some sort of challenge that would be between those two extremes in difficulty.
I bet a lot of their development time went into randomizing the overworld, which is something that most players won’t appreciate because they’ll only play through it once.
1 Like
Ah, okay, maybe the postgame is after permadeath mode completion. In Necrodancer it wasn’t as much of a difficulty increase as it sounds, because carrying over equipment from previous zones was a huge advantage.
Anyway, I should actually play this instead of speculatively posting so much. The download just finished…
Field report: permadeath makes the game considerably harder, to the point that I’d likely be better served by playing real Necrodancer to practice. Although I sort of suspect that it might be a bit easier after you get over the initial hump of only having 3 hearts and no items.
I also did unlock another character that makes the game much harder, and additionally there’s a setting to play the game at double time, which I imagine is a real bear when paired with permadeath.
Is there an Aria equivalent (one hit=death, missed beat=death) in the game? I’m trying to spoil as little of it as possible; upon my realization that, duh, I don’t need to use a Switch on a TV, I might end up getting one soon.
Not sure; the character I unlocked is forced to only have 1 heart (and has other limitations), but doesn’t seem to have a beat requirement.
It’s unclear if there are other characters to unlock after that.