LogFAQs > #966882027

I just wanted to see if anyone would take the bait on the other possible meaning of my last hint. It was a double entendre! I thought I was very clever.

#25: Ring of Pain

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/2/AAA-H0AADgAm.jpg

Ring of Pain is another one of those roguelikey things that I like to spend a lot of time on - to date, I've logged 143 hours on it, which makes it my 14th most-played Steam game of all time (only 5th out of games on this list though). I didn't play this one right away - I wasn't sure if it'd be good enough to be worth my time/money, so I earmarked it to see if it'd go on sale at a time when I could use a new roguelike to play on a rainy day. It went on sale, I was in the market for a good timewaster after I'd had my fun with SNKRX, so I ended up diving into this one.

I've been struggling with figuring out what to call these genres of games. I don't like to merely say 'roguelike' or 'roguelite', because that doesn't really narrow down the gameplay genre - a lot of roguelikes are action, but a lot of the ones I play are pure strategy, like this one. But I can't say 'strategy' because in gaming terms, that tends to imply war tactics, moving units around on a field, which this isn't. There's cards involved, but it's not a deckbuilder. It's sort of RPG-like, I guess, but it's not like it has a story or adventure, it's just numbers and swords and HP and monsters. Is that an RPG?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/3/AAA-H0AADgAn.jpg

So I guess this is a roguelike card-RPG-thingy, or something. You venture through a dungeon of 16+ floors, where each floor is a ring of cards that represent monsters you have to fight or items you can pick up. You can flip through the ring of cards either left or right to get to exit, but you have to either fight monsters on the way, or try to skip past them, risking taking an attack anyway. Killing monsters gives you souls which are money you can use to open treasure chests, which contain items that boost your stats and have helpful effects. Fairly standard stuff, but the whole ring of cards idea gives you a lot of important tactical choices for how to approach each floor; you can avoid dealing with a particularly strong enemy, but to do that you'll have to deal with whatever lies in the other direction.

Ring of Pain is a fairly unforgiving game, definitely at first, and I nearly bounced off of it originally. It really punishes you for going in unprepared; the game doesn't give you a lot of freebies and it expects you to have a good plan for how to deal with things, or you'll run out of HP pretty quickly and die. Even though the game tells you via its stats exactly how much damage you'll be looking to take, it's hard to pace yourself without knowing what's going to come up in the future. This game was fun, but I banged my head against the wall at first because I felt like making any kind of progress at all felt random.

But, I started to learn, bit by bit. Figuring out how to hit really specific stat threshholds was important, as it's hard to know when you first play what stats need to be prioritized, and how much of any stat is 'enough.' And, at first, I was taking too many common items and not putting enough priority on saving up for rare items; that was hurting me a lot. I kept trying to build around common items not really understanding that they were meant to be discarded pretty early on in favor of bigger and better things.

So after a few hours of playing the game and complaining that it was too hard, I kinda figured it out, and from there I started having a lot more fun with it. The best part of Ring of Pain for me is the sheer amount of content here; there's *tons* of items to discover and a lot of them have pretty fanciful and interesting effects that change the way you play the game, without any particular items being too overwhelmingly overpowered or underpowered, so seeing what items you get and what builds you can make each run are pretty fun. I think an important aspect of roguelikes is that you want to be able to make builds that you want to tell stories about later, and Ring of Pain passes this test. There's also a ton of items that you have to unlock by doing achievements, which gives you a lot of fun goals to work towards; I've done them all by this point, but some of them are really quite hard, such as finishing a run with low max hp or never picking up any items better than common, and devising strategies for how to do them was fun. Ring of Pain passed my "50 hour roguelike test" pretty well; after 50 hours, I was still figuring out new things I could do and continuing to test the limits of how to play the game.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/4/AAA-H0AADgAo.jpg

The presentation of the game is kind of a mixed bag. The music and sound design are superb, and the visuals have a pretty striking style that's kind of fun. The writing is annoyingly pretentious, though; I feel like this game is TRYING to be very deep and philosophical with its metaphors and its darker implications, but it all comes off as really trite and silly, like edgy teen poetry. I kind of wanted to make this writeup all rhyming couplets to make fun of it, but I just went for a standard review instead. It's harmless enough, though - I'm not here to play a roguelike for the story, anyway.

That's Ring of Pain. I don't have too much to say about it - it's just a rock solid card-rpg-roguelike thingy. I'll be logging a few more hours in it yet, I think, since there's been another content update since I last played, and I don't think they're done yet, which is great. I love a roguelike that continues to have content updates which help the game stay fresh for a little while. I can never decide how to rank these things, since my interest level in all but the best of roguelikes do have a shelf life, but for what it's worth, this one had a pretty long shelf life.

Next up: You're probably not going to get this one, but it's not the most obscure game on the list, so maybe someone will know it. It's a mostly-overlooked roguelike deckbuilder from early 2020. (Yes, another one of these.)