Escape Guldur

Escape Guldur is a retro action RPG.

A nameless character is channeling their way out of a prison cell and through a dark castle, filled with heavily armed, unrelenting, and – probably – undeath foes. Escape Guldur doesn’t bother with giving the player context (beside of the title, the vague graphics, and the weapon names), let alone establishing complex narratives.

Likewise, the gameplay is rather simple – you can walk, hit, and – after you collected one – cycle through your weapons. Enemies that flank you at the start of your turn can attack you, causing damage – if you don’t kill them first. The levels are in general small, and the game can be easily beaten within 20 minutes. Still, Escape Guldur ain’t no dull hack-and-slay game: Your initial health has to prevail for the whole game, creating a need to search for a route with as less enemy contact as possible – you will need to sneak around corners, outmaneuver enemies and kite them if you want to win. Additionally, every level has a unique mechanic that you have to understand to beat the game, and there are even some neat little details every now and then: Throwing your axe requires you to pick it up again, and for your initial escape from the prison cell you have to find and use a hidden passage.

You might remember having played similar games before (although minimalist tactic intense 2D action RPGs are much less common than one might initially suspect), and there is nothing overly fancy in „Escape Guldur“ – but still, the basal gameplay principle is well executed here, and for a jam-game of this scale, Escape Guldur has a surprisingly good overall production and balance – playing through it is a fun and satisfying experience. The minimalist, retro inspired style works out very well, and the games overall atmosphere is coherent and dense (although, I recommend to fire up some dungeon synth while playing it).

The game developer, hazeycode, hasn’t published any other games yet, but seems to be involved in creating a free/libre open source framework for game development using the Zig-language. Escape Guldur is free/libre open source software and worked flawlessly in Firefox under OpenSuse Leap 15.3.


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