CTHON

Too short and simple for its price, only viable build is marksman. Procedural generation of levels is ok. Now tested on normal, it's still just up to items and not skill. If you want simple FPS, try wolfenstein or blake stone. This game has progression through inventory and limited slots for active items, but it's not much because you have just 3 weapons. Enemy variety is smaller than ye ole doom's. Got this with -90% discount. All in all, nice first try at gamedev, but not much for this pricetag.

Too dark and no gamma settings. Can't see anything so can't really play. BUT The atmosphere is dark and foreboding; the OST complements it will too. The art is gorgeous and the sprites are lovingly made. Despite the nice presentation though, if the game is so dark that I can't appreciate anything, it's rendered a bit moot.

An absolute must play if you like boomershooters and or horror. I will say that people complaining about being able to progress via pickups is sort of true, it also depends on which class you play and the playstyle you adopt. You can very easily mitigate spent resources if you're a careful player. The combat is barebones by the standards of 2023. However examining this game like it is a game from 2008 would be unfair because this game emulates things more like Wolfenstein and Pathways Into Darkness. Even vaguely reminiscent of System Shock so if those titles are resonating positive bells for you, you'd enjoy this game as well. The music while very short and often looped (probably would help if I didn't full clear every floor) is quite good. The sound effects are about what you'd expect them to be. With most notably the doors in the third floor being one of the worst sounds I have ever heard in a game. Not because it's bad or there is some distortion with the audio. It just makes my skin crawl every time. I love it for that reason and I also hate for that reason. Good job on that design. I will say more games need the "show your upgrades on your gun" feature. It is a direct reminder of progression in the game when the boomstick gets boom-ier and stick-ier. The game is relatively short; where you can complete the game within 2 hours. I do not plan on playing the game again myself after my 4+ hours but I am sure I will come back to it in the future.

im honest i guessed it already while watching the videos but the monsters looked so damn cool actually the whole graphics but yeah its so damn repetitive already after 30 minutes no way i play this a minute longer but i bet with a few not to complex changes this could become something real good

CTHON is an action roguelike with nine levels and only X,Y map coordinates (no Z axis, no jumping, and no rooms over rooms). Every level is a series of rooms connected by corridors. At first glance it shares many similarities with WOLF3D, Corridor 7, Blake Stone, etc. Unlike those titles, CTHON offers remarkable depth and replayability. With the exception of the finale, all levels are the result of procedural generation and random with every new playthrough. Same goes for power ups, enemies, items, and decorative objects. Factor in three player classes as well as player power-ups inspired by System Shock 2, and there is a surprising amount of content here with new challenges for different playstyles and strategies. In true, "rogue-like" fashion, the game features permadeath and lacks saves. This is usually a deal breaker for me but given the brevity of CTHON and the fact that most games take 60-90 minutes to complete, it is excusable here. The unique soundtrack adds just the right amount of suspense and lends to the sense of isolation while exploring an abandoned colony. Fans of Doom 64, Corridor 7, Diablo, Quake, Dead Space, and Alien Breed will find familiar themes of dread, isolation, and cosmic terror here. Highly recommended for first person shooter fans, rogue-like enthusiasts, and people that loved the original Alien film.

Don't let yourself be fooled by the seemingly spartan design that evokes cheap Wolfenstein-knockoff sentiments... CTHON is a lot more than you'd expect, especially seeing the comparably low price point. It's short, yes, but replayability is guaranteed with procedurally generated levels and an upgrade system that lets you customize your build. Upgrade and inventory management can be a bit on the frustrating side - you never have enough space or energy - but that feeds well into the horror aspect of the game. And my oh my, it's creepy. Not only does the overall design provide an increasingly uneasy feeling turning every corner, the sound design, especially the ambient sounds, is just amazing for a game of this caliber. It's good, creepy fun for an hour or two, every once in a while, and well worth a fiver.

English and German below. (mild spoilers too) [h1]ENG:[/h1] The negative reviews for CTHON often come from users who have played this game for less than an hour, sometimes only minutes. I understand that the graphics can be off-putting if you haven't experienced the early first-person shooters back in the day, or that the gameplay mechanics can seem a bit unbalanced at times. However, with over 20 hours of gameplay, I think I'm in a position to make the final judgment: This game is great. Especially the aspect of procedurally generated maps makes CTHON a gem of high replayability and compensates for the short playtime of one to two hours. Nevertheless, the random levels always lead through a research station, then an alien temple and finally a gloomy underworld before we enter the hall of the final boss, Cthon. The presentation with its 90 degree angles and fixed ceiling height is reminiscent of the legendary Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. The accompanying, highly eerie soundtrack is fantastic, by the way. While at the beginning only spiders, dull melee fighters and weak ranged enemies follow us through the corridors, soon giant snakes, hovering titans and floating steel beasts also bombard us with their multiple projectiles. To defeat them, we have the rifle, the grenade launcher and the rather redundant melee weapon at our disposal. Like the health kits, ammo supplies and grenades, the enemies are always randomly distributed. The collectible objects also include the important and varied gadgets. These can be used to increase our weapon strength and fire rate, our ammunition and health capacity, or our running speed, for example. To be able to collect them, we need corresponding slots, and to put them into operation, corresponding energy cells, which must also be found. Alternatively, needed objects can be bought with collected nanites at vending machines, provided that they were randomly placed in the current level. In this way, our main character increasingly builds up individually. The principle of chance often makes the game a matter of luck, but also provides its special thrill. Thus, it can happen that you find mainly useless gadgets, or laboriously have to search for health, ammunition, gadget slots and energy cells. The tension in this regard arises especially from the rogue-like gameplay without saving options, where death is permanent and results in a complete restart. CTHON is very atmospheric, but quite hard to beat even on medium difficulty. However, this always makes for a suspenseful challenge. [h1]GER:[/h1] Die negativen Bewertungen für CTHON stammen häufig von Rezensenten, die dieses Game weniger als eine Stunde, zuweilen auch nur Minuten gezockt haben. Ich verstehe, dass die Grafik abschrecken kann, sofern man die ersten 3D-Egoshooter dereinst nicht erlebt hat, oder dass die Spielmechaniken etwas balancelos anmuten können. Mit über 20 Stunden Spielzeit jedoch glaube ich mich in der Position zu wissen, das abschließende Urteil zu fällen: Dieses Spiel ist großartig. Insbesondere der Aspekt prozedural generierter Maps macht CTHON zu einer Perle hohen Wiederspielwerts und wiegt die kurze Spielzeit von ein bis zwei Stunden auf. Dennoch führen die Zufallslevel im ersten Drittel stets durch eine Forschungsstation, im zweiten durch einen außerirdischen Tempel, im dritten durch eine düstere Unterwelt, bevor wir die Halle des Endgegners betreten: Cthon. Die Präsentation mit seinen 90-Grad-Winkeln und seiner unveränderlichen Deckenhöhe erinnert an das legendäre Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Die begleitende, höchst unheimliche Soundkulisse ist übrigens fantastisch. Während uns zu Beginn nur Spinnen, dumpfe Nahkämpfer und schwache Fernwaffengegner durch die Korridore verfolgen, beschießen uns bald auch Riesenschlangen, fliegende Titanen und schwebende Stahlbestien mit ihren multiplen Projektilen. Um sie zu besiegen, steht uns das Gewehr, der Granatwerfer und die eher überflüssige Nahkampfwaffe zur Verfügung. Wie auch die Gesundheitskits, Munitionsvorräte und Granaten sind die Feinde stets zufällig verteilt. Zu den einsammelbaren Objekten gehören überdies die wichtigen und vielfältigen Gadgets. Mit diesen lässt sich etwa unsere Waffenstärke und Feuerrate, unsere Munitions- und Gesundheitskapazität oder die Laufgeschwindigkeit erhöhen. Um sie einsammeln zu können, benötigen wir entsprechende Slots, und um sie in Betrieb zu nehmen, entsprechende Energiezellen, die ebenfalls gefunden werden müssen. Alternativ lassen sich benötigte Objekte mit gesammelten Naniten an Automaten kaufen, sofern diese zufällig im gegenwärtigen Level platziert worden sind. Dergestalt baut sich die Spielfigur nach und nach individuell auf. Das Gebot des Zufalls macht das Spiel oft zu einer Glückssache, verleiht ihm jedoch auch seinen besonderen Thrill. So kann es passieren, dass man vornehmlich unnütze Gadgets findet oder mühselig auf der Suche nach Gesundheit, Munition, Gadget-Slots und Energiezellen ist. Die Spannung ergibt sich in dieser Hinsicht insbesondere aus dem rogue-like-Spielprinzip ohne Speichermöglichkeit, in dem der Tod permanent ist und in einem gänzlichen Neubeginn mündet. CTHON ist sehr atmosphärisch, jedoch schon auf mittlerer Schwierigkeit ziemlich schwer zu gewinnen. Dies sorgt aber stets für eine spannende Herausforderung.

Cthon is a pretty simple roguelike, with the graphics and action of Wolfenstein 3D (albeit with all ranged attacks here being projectiles instead of hitscan), and the story of Doom. The core gameplay consists of wandering procedurally-generated mazes, looking for the exit while fighting enemies with bare bones FPS mechanics, and managing and upgrading your ♥♥♥♥. You pick from one of three classes for your run through three chapters, each broken up into three levels, plus a final boss level. On normal difficulty, a full run takes about an hour. Each class specializes in one of the three available weapons, though there's some utility for all weapons across all classes. You develop your character by equipping items that upgrade your weapons' capabilities or your own, but you're limited in how much you can carry or use based on your energy reserves and inventory space, which themselves can be upgraded with the proper pickups, or with resource expenditures at certain shops. (If you've played 3079 Block Action RPG or System Shock 2, you already have some idea of how this'll feel.) I like how most of the upgrades will actually show up on weapons' viewmodels and the HUD when equipped, which sticks out among... Visually, as you can tell from the screenshots on the store page, Cthon is a bit basic. Pixels are chunky, assets are few, and the draw distance is short. Even beyond just sticking to a simplistic art style, I think this was really more about maintaining the aesthetics of early 3D games, which in all honesty, are still very much 2D in function. There is forward and backward, there is left and right, but there is no up and down. This could've just as easily been a top-down game, but the first-person perspective adds more tension and unknowns, alongside the unnecessary issue of being far wider than your field of view suggests, and I had to slowly adapt to that knowledge in dodging shots and navigating around all-too-conspicuous furniture. The levels and their items/enemies/utilities are procedurally-generated, which does mean that every single playthrough is going to be different and keep you on your toes a bit, but stages often get built in a linear fashion that completely knocks the wind out of any sense of exploration. If the graphics were any more complex, enough for me to mentally note areas down as landmarks or whatever, the automap wouldn't even have a reason to exist. Probably a third of my time in this game has been spent walking back through levels that are really just straight hallways filled with corpses, to collect and/or sell items that I didn't get on my first pass before going on to the next stage. It's a hefty amount of boredom, but the way the difficulty works makes it necessary, especially on hard mode. "Hardcore" difficulty creates problems, where 99% of the time, the player is set up to fail. It's not a question of whether it's hard, but why it's hard, and so often in hard mode this boils down to the randomness endemic to the roguelite genre, compounded by the simpler stuff that would otherwise be a welcome increase in difficulty. The randomly distributed enemies are tougher to be sure, but the randomly distributed resources are also far fewer, to the point that success will ultimately depend on extreme variables totally outside the player's control, rather than on ability. You can have all the money in the world, but it means exactly bupkiss if you have nowhere to spend it. You can be as thrifty as possible with your ammo and health, but it'll be for naught if the game keeps deciding not to spawn any source of either. You can be as careful as you want with enemies, but that won't stop the game from starting a level with five or so tough ones immediately in your path, and you trapped in a short hallway with no feasible way to handle them all. All of this is to say that no playstyle can account for the game's ability to arbitrarily cease a Hardcore run whenever it wants by creating impossible conditions. No matter how secure and safe you think your build, you're really just playing a Russian roulette marathon (Cthon thong thong). Now, is it still fun, despite that often inescapable futility? Maybe. I enjoyed it, even if it is a tad basic and its practical limits are constantly undercut like my DM is a spoiled brat who will do everything possible to make me lose, but we aren't all drowning in the masochistic psychological complexes we created to balance out our natural sadism. I digress. The biggest issue from this is the discrepancy between the hard and normal difficulties. At its worst, Hardcore is downright impossible, but it does feel a lot more involved than normal difficulty, as a more focused playstyle is still demanded to endure until the game ♥♥♥♥♥ you with an unwinnable situation. After dumping hours into hard mode, though, most of normal difficulty holds zero challenge. There isn't really a middle ground that could be described as "tough, but fair." The gap between the difficulties is a perfect reflection of my feelings on the game as a whole. After all is said and done, normal is likely going to be too easy and slow for those experienced in this genre, but Hardcore is so eager to deny its potential depth with insurmountable aberration that it feels more like blind gambling than technique. To that end, I suppose the people to whom I'd most recommend Cthon are those new to action roguelites, and those looking to punish themselves.