Woah
This is a really well polished little game! I sure still have a lot of stuff to explore, but I agree with the guy who said there is no saving by design... since it'd only take away the tension!
Reviews for "Cardinal Quest"
awesome
this game was awesome i wish you could make a sequel
How far we've come
Not a ton of people are familiar with the cult following behind the "Roguelike" genre, largely due to the fact that traditional games of that type are very old-fashioned and not exactly what one would call "hip with the times." Still, it's a very open platform of gaming with a surprising potential for experimentation.
Some could debate with me whether this Cardinal Quest counts as a (graphical) Roguelike, but that's how it was introduced to me, so that's how I'm going to review it. The traditional Roguelike is very difficult if you don't know what you're doing, but Cardinal Quest is a bit more merciful than most of them. The game straight-up tells you what character type (of which there are only three) a newbie should be using, and the gameplay is very simplified.
The game is basically played with the arrow keys. That doesn't sound like much, but if like me you've played a lot of Roguelikes you'll quickly gain an appreciation for the simplicity of the controls. The player character will do about half of the inventory management for you, so you don't have to start worrying about it until you're carrying a lot of weapons, spells, or miscellaneous items. The character will even acknowledge when an item is useless and sell it themselves automatically, although to whom we probably shouldn't ask.
You can't attack diagonally (with the exception of spellcasting) due to the control scheme, but that's not a huge deal since most of the enemies can't. Spell casting is as simple as *click* or possibly *click-click*, but each spell has a recharge time linked to the turn-based style of the game, which means you have to be careful how and when you use them. So already we've expanded on a simple enough concept to make it more challenging, difficult, and fun.
I don't know if this is a nit-pick, and there are a few other games which do this, but I don't like how running into a wall causes the player character to try and decide where you're going and start walking along the wall. I'd much prefer if the game made a smart-ass comment like "ouch! You walk straight into a wall!" because the character obviously knows where he's going, but I don't, which really bothers me. This might count as a contradiction of my previous praise where I said it was neat that the player character knew enough to manage the inventory himself, so take that with a grain of salt.
As with most games of this type, the story is very simple. "There bad guy, go kill!" Considering the game is a dungeon crawler, it's pretty much par for the course, so if you're a big fan of storyline in gaming this game probably isn't for you. I wouldn't call this a problem, just a characteristic of the game's style.
It occurs to me that I've been using the word "simple" a lot in this review, but that's what this game is: "simple." It seems like a game that would do very well on a phone-based system like Android, but it's also a nice curiosity as a Flash game. There's definitely nothing wrong with a game being simplified. In fact, I would recommend this game to people looking into the dungeon crawl genre without much experience: It makes no demands, doesn't take itself any more seriously than it should, and really does try (successfully, I would think) to go easy on you rather than inspiring ragequits galore like a lot of Roguelikes do.
This could be referred to as what we call a "coffeebreak Roguelike," a simple enough game that you can pick up and play for a little bit then come back to it later, or perhaps play it on the bus on your way to school. As a college student extremely busy with homework *ahem* this is basically a blessing to me. The game expands on a simple foundation to create a really great interactive experience that's worth checking out at least once. It's hardly going to bulldoze currently-existing fantasy games like Oblivion, but it really doesn't have to.
cool game!
Graphics and sounds match perfectly! Controls are reasonable each character beings a new experience!
awsome game and i don't think it should have a save feature because it is short any way