Lots of video games trap you in places where everything is trying to kill you. But many of those environments at least have the decency to stay the same so you could figure things out. Not Necropolis. You’re going to be starting a whole new death march every time you bite the dust.
Necropolis won’t be giving you any comfortable save points or easy-to-memorize layouts. That’s because it takes place in an evil, shape-shifting city-sized magical construct designed to trap adventurers and feed off their life force as they try to escape. All the eldritch loot scattered about by its malevolent architect? None of it will give you more than one life. Good thing it’s got a kickin’ soundtrack, because it seems like you’re going to be hearing it a lot thanks to all the permadeath.
I took a look at a pre-alpha build of Necropolis at PAX East last weekend and The smaller enemies you’ll see in the video above are called Grines. They’re shadow versions of the player-controlled character, which means you’ll be fighting yourself a whole lot, along with bigger randomly generated bad guys, too. I really dug the angular art style and shifting environments in Necropolis and will definitely be looking for it when it comes out later this year.
Comments
4 responses to “A Gameworld That Changes Every Time You Die”
So… it’s a roguelike then? The game world changing every time you die isn’t exactly a new concept.
Yeah, unless i’m missing something, this isn’t really all that special/exciting.
Exactly. Plenty of games (eg. Rogue Legacy as a recent-ish example) use this mechanic, moreso with the popularity of Rogue-sort-of-likes in the past few years. Sometimes I wonder if the Kotaku US writers are just stuck for ways to drum up interest for a game because occasionally it feels like they’re completely clueless about video games.
I think 3D+third person rogue-likes are a bit rarer compared to the 2D or isometric view games you guys are thinking of. Very different technology in play from my understanding. Harder to get running.