- Slide to attack your enemies
- Go deeper into the dungeon
- Find weapons and use them
I've played a lot of sliding puzzle games, which are some of my favourites, and I feel like I am getting more into casual roguelike games. So, when I saw RogueSlide, I was interested! If you are playing RogueSlide for free, you will get one - that's it, just one - daily run. If you die, that's it for the day.
If you do purchase the full version of RogueSlide, you are able to do as many runs as you want, along with an endless mode. The gameplay itself is pretty interesting. Your character is a tile on a screen. You can slide left, right, up and down, going until you hit a wall, a spiderweb, or another monster.
Monsters can fight each other, though you won't get any points when they die, by bashing into each other. There is a good variety of different enemies, which all have different ways of working. Some of them fire arrows across the way, some only move one tile instead of sliding the whole way, some stay in place and do one damage. There are also boss tiles that appear from time to time, which have a much greater health and sometimes even do bonus things like leave poison puddles and heal other monsters.
You start as a level one player at the beginning of each run, where you must gain XP to level up. This then makes it so that each time you bash into an enemy you do more damage, along with having more health. Potions and spells will appear on the grid, but monsters can often break them, so you need to be strategic about how you move. There isn't a way to keep XP from your runs, but you can find a special doorway, which appears randomly, that can be used to stash gold to use outside of the run. There are shops that appear as well to spend your gold on during your level. The gold saved from your runs can be used to purchase different starting characters, who have better abilities, or things to start a run with to help you last longer.
RougeSlide is an interesting combination of sliding your character around, making sure your enemies slide around perfectly so as not to attack you, and trying to stay alive long enough to get to a door to the next level (which is dependent on how many turns you take). I quite like the throwaway aspect - that each run starts you from scratch and you need to make it as far as you can. Although I hate having to try to find a safe to store my gold in, and I often die with more gold than I need as I want to unlock characters. Even so, I found myself playing quite a bit each time I opened it, as I felt like on the next go, I might go deeper into the world.
RogueSlide review - "Part puzzle, part strategy"
RogueSlide is an interesting combination of two genres, with the runs themselves feeling quite fun. It's hard to store gold for the next level, but that challenge is worth playing through.
Jupiter Hadley
Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, and judges many jams and events. You can find her on Twitter as @Jupiter_Hadley