Really, the only game of note that I have been playing lately has been Pixel Dungeon on my phone. I did my Witcher 3 NG+ playthrough and also made a feeble effort at becoming proficient at Dwarf Fortress. Really though, it is all just biding time until Fallout 4 is released; Just a mere two days away.
Regarding Pixel Dungeon: It is a roguelike (turn-based combat, randomly generated dungeons/loot, permanent death) dungeon crawl that is available on most platforms. The goal of the game is to make it through 25 levels and beat the 5th boss. Thus far, the furthest I have gotten would be level 13. A couple of things that I have learned:
- There is no shame in just restarting the game when the random number generator utterly shits on you with a bad loot table in the early levels.
- You don’t need necessarily eat when you are hungry or even starving. When starving, you will only lose 1HP every 30 or so turns (depending on your class, etc). I will typically save my food until I am starving and at or below half health.
- Upgrade scrolls will reset your weapon/armor durability. It may be worth saving and stockpiling these items. There really aren’t too many worthwhile weapons in the lower levels of the game unless you get really really lucky.
- On a similar note, I am kind of starting to lean on the side of upgrading armor before weaponry. survivability goes a long long long way…
- Bottleneck groups of enemies at the doors so that they don’t attack you all at once.
- The “door trick” is a critical skill: Walk outside of a room just past the door so that the mob that you are targeting is on the door. 100% hit accuracy for 1 hit. Useful for killing the stupid ghosts that spawn out of the graves.
- You can super farm the swarms of flies for healing potions (levels 3, 4, 6 through 9). Every time you hit a fly without killing it, it will split given that there is an empty space next to it (up, down, left, right. Diagonals don’t seem to count). Flies at the 3rd and 4th split seem to have a very high chance of dropping healing potions. They will literally do zero damage if you have high armor. Also, this trick only works up until character level 12. In other words, don’t over level before the first boss fight on level 5. Prime health pot farming time is after the fist boss but before the second as that is where the flies spawn.
- I have also noticed that my “good runs” have been as a whole, mostly those in which I had received a decent weapon/armor relatively early in the game. Even just the smallest gear upgrade goes a long way and curbs the need to constantly burn resources to heal.
Overall: If you enjoy roguelikes and challenging dungeon crawls, I would highly recommend Pixel Dungeon.