Going Rogue: Meteorfall: Krumit’s Quest

With my second post, I can officially call Going Rogue an ongoing column. (Take that, people who say I never follow through with anything!) Read the first Going Rogue column, on Monster Train, here.

Indie games are my first and greatest gaming love, and one of the great joys of roguelikes are that it’s functionally a 100% indie genre — despite selling well, the games are too small, too niche, and too difficult to monetize to interest AAA studios. So nearly every roguelike is a small team’s labor of love, and this shows in the games. This month’s title, Meteorfall: Krumit’s Quest, is an example par excellence. You can get it on Steam here.

The Game

Krumit’s Quest is the second game in the Meteorfall universe from Slothwerks, a small studio focusing on deckbuilders (other indie devs, take note: this could be you).

This quirky little game, with its Adventure Time-styled art, punches up a standard sword-and-sorcery setting by leaning hard into its zany tone: the lively running commentary, the way your path meanders aimlessly in circles around the map, the dungeon master-like Krumit pulling the battle arena out of his coat in a cardboard box like he’s hawking stolen watches. (What’s Krumit’s deal? Are the battles “real,” or is the whole thing an imaginary game even within the game world? I have no idea, and it delights me that the game just doesn’t address this question at all.)

The combat itself is a simple back-and-forth with a single opponent, which, despite some complicating effects like parries and freezing, would lose the interest of any serious roguelike player in about five minutes. What keeps it interesting is the strategy between individual combats. The arena is a Tic-Tac-Toe board of nine tiles, some of them opponents, some of them items and power-ups. You can freely choose which order to tackle the tiles in, giving you a welcome degree of flexibility compared to the shotgun-wedding approach of games like Slay the Spire, where you don’t know what you’re facing until you’re already engaged. As items are taken and enemies defeated, new tiles fall onto the grid. You can also snipe enemies with bows and spells without engaging in melee, and unusually for a roguelike, you can flee combat with very little penalty. This is the real heart of the gameplay, and there’s more subtlety to it than there initially appears.

Runs are about the shortest imaginable — just 9 immaculately-scaled levels, counting the boss, and no non-combat events. On the upside, you can squeeze in a full game on the bus ride home from work. On the downside, be prepared to see a lot of the same levels over and over.

Simple Math: A

Now this is what I’m talking about. Both heroes and enemies deal single-digit damage. Enemy health starts at 4 and even major bosses rarely pass 100. There are blessedly few status effects, and while confluences are an important part of the strategy, runaway stacking usually isn’t — a stack of five poison or burning is a lot. Even I can handle that level of arithmetic.

This allows the kind of precise strategy that makes a tactical roguelike really satisfying — there’s nothing like deploying that single-use item at the right moment to give you the +1 damage you need to get the boss to precisely 0 health. Particularly if you did so eight or nine or ten steps ahead — which, in this game, you totally can.

But don’t get the idea that simple means easy. Runs get gnarly difficult by the time you get to the boss, and even more than most roguelikes, a lot of the runs do end in a fight that feels mathematically impossible if you made the wrong choices along the way. Them’s the breaks.

Deterministic Outcomes: A

It’s hard to get more deterministic than Krumit’s Tale, a game that makes a point of concealing nothing from the player. From the start of a level, you can view every tile on the level and how many of each. Before attacking an enemy, you can view its entire moveset. The only random factor is what order the tiles appear in — and since there are nine on the board at a time and you can choose the order you tackle them, that isn’t much of a limitation, either.

In fact, the determinism in Krumit’s Tale is so strict that it begins running up against the limitations of the mechanic. With so much information available, it’s theoretically possible to calculate all the damage that the player and the enemies can deal over the course of a level, reducing the whole thing to a big arithmetic problem, and it’s easy to feel like any failure is just a failure to do enough of this advance calculation. (But then again, isn’t pedantically careful calculation what roguelikes are all about?)

Tradeoffs: B

Now this is interesting. Krumit’s Tale doesn’t have mana, energy, or any analogue; cards cost money to acquire and your inventory has strictly limited space, but once acquired, there’s nothing preventing you from using every item in your inventory at once. And with no energy cost, a +2 weapon is always strictly better than a +1 weapon.

The limitation is a different one: All items are exhaustible. Spells and such are exhausted after one use, as expected, but even a sword or a suit of chainmail has at most three uses. So the central tradeoff is: Use this item now or save it for a tougher opponent? This encourages you to defeat enemies efficiently using the minimum possible equipment.

It also introduces much-needed variety to the sometimes-repetitive opponents. While you may fight eight identical harpies in one level, you can’t simply find a winning strategy and use it so smash through the whole lot — you might snipe one with a fireball, freeze a few more, and soak the damage from the last couple (hit point spending is an important part of the strategy).

Intermediate Geometry: B

The square nine-tile grid, with new tiles falling from above to fill gaps, immediately indicates that there will be an element of geometry at work here, but I actually played several levels before I encountered any — for the first hour or so I was wondering if the grid layout was just there for aesthetics. And indeed, if you’re playing Bruno, the starting hero, geometry is an afterthought.

But it rockets to the forefront as you play some of the more complex characters. Greybeard the Wizard, for instance, does a lot of burning, which inflicts damage as the tiles descend down the grid, and much of the strategy involves pushing tiles back up so they can fall further and continue taking damage. Other spells and items affect all enemies in a row, column, or adjacent to the item. At higher levels, these compounding factors become essential to tipping the scales from failure to success.

But once you engage with an enemy, it’s back to you hit them, they hit you, and geometry becomes irrelevant, and ultimately, fighting is still the majority of the gameplay. So I can’t quite call this a success on the geometry front.

Overall grade: B+

I freely admit, while I initially found Krumit’s Tale delightful and giggled all the way through my first run, the combination of repetition and difficulty made me lose interest pretty fast, and I haven’t yet beaten the game as any of the other characters. Still, 10 hours of entertainment and plenty of laughs is more than you’d get if you spent your $14.99 going to the movies. And anyway, mechanics is not truly what this game is about — it’s all about juice, juice, juice.

Metaprogression: Game

The metarprogression is just what you’d expect: Every run, you gain XP, level up, and unlock new tiles. It’s on quite strict rails, too: Reaching level 3 with one character unlocks the next character. I didn’t find this metaprogression to be particularly compelling — while the characters have significantly different playstyles, the new tiles didn’t alter the game much. Plus if you, like me, run into a character you didn’t particularly like playing, this effectively locks off the rest of the game.

As for our honorary award, a lot of roguelikes have impressed me with their elegance, challenge, and innovation. Not a lot have impressed me with their humor, especially not with humor that fits so neatly into a consistent look-and-feel.

Honorary Award: Best Whimsy

Thanks for reading, and join us next month for another great lesser-known roguelike! Hint: It might be horror…

More Going Rogue

Tetra Tactics
Mortal Glory
Iris and the Giant
Fhtagn Simulator
Monster Train