Last week, as the gaming world was locked in an agonising love / hate relationship with Diablo III and its disastrous approach to DRM, I was playing an action-RPG with plenty of retro 8-bit charm, endless looting, and no strings attached.
Well, it's still in alpha testing and prone to crashing and / or losing your saves, yet Delver successfully scratched this reviewer's sword-on-monster itch with precious little frills. Oh, and permadeath: the most hardcore of deaths.
Well-crafted minesDelver's biggest selling point is its distinctly Minecraft-ian aesthetic, by which we mean it contains blocky, low-res 3D textures and primitively drawn 2D enemies with one-dimensional AI.
Forget about painstakingly constructing a hut made from hand-chipped foliage, though, for Delver's resemblance to Notch's iconic indie build-'em-up is merely superficial.
Instead, Delver is all about first-person maze navigation and the clobbering of aggressive spiders, bats, and staff-wielding wizards.
In the main, the control system is smart, with movement handled by tapping and swiping anywhere on the left to move and on the right to aim. Meanwhile, context-sensitive actions, like picking up loot, using ladders, and attacking with swords or ranged wands, are performed via reliable on-screen buttons.
The clunky inventory, which hides loot descriptions under your fingers when you tap on items, is the only weak link in what is a surprisingly fluid experience for an alpha test build.
Your mission in Delver is to search every nook and cranny for better weapons, armour, and skulls on a quest for the Yithidian orb. Somewhere on each floor, there's a ladder to the level below, too, with a promise of more monsters and more stuff to pick up and swap around in your inventory. Each floor one brings you step closer to becoming just another skull, though.
Caving inIt's a lovely lingering death you face, mind, with stacks of replay value providing your save doesn't disappear along the way.
Delver is still very much a work in progress - there's even a "Mostly Playable" subtitle on the loading screen - but the regular updates are ironing out a lot of the issues and adding new features.
So, if you fancy an adventure that's genuinely fraught with buggy peril, then get delving.