Meritous

Meritous takes the essential gameplay loop of a Rogue-like, strips it down to a simple interface and a three-pronged progression scheme, and dolls it up with mono-spectrum shaded pixel art. Its wonderful, a three note ascending scale that, if you're open to it, will play a never ending fugue with your dopamine receptors.

You walk around with the arrow keys, you hold space bar to charge up your Psi blast, and release the bar to unleash a wave of destruction. Enemies will die only with a certain threshold of Psi power, and the cool-down after a blast is higher the more you're charged up, so the game is very much about finding the point of diminishing returns while dodging bullets, and it works. You have three hits to a life, but you can develop a shield that can sustain so much damage at a given time, and quickly bounces back. You get a lot of depth out of those three static variables and one dynamic variable. When you kill enemies or find special tiles, you can collect crystals which can be spent on upgrading your shields, charge, and cool-down efficacy. In this manner you scope out a fractal, algorithmically generated dungeon populated by 10,000 demons and 3000 rooms, and uncover treasures. Explore all the rooms to find the ultimate power.

The game's storyline is a cipher, like most game storylines, and the writing is generally really hackneyed. The author, Lancer-X, is a good programmer, impressive game designer, and passable graphic artist, so its OK that he's a poor writer. The soundtrack is largely a crunk anthem ripped for MIDI that underscores the process of picking up lots and lots of bling; clearly this is a game for gangbangers, and I'm concerned that only gangbangers are going to want to play it.

Are you a gangbanger?