CTHON

A minimalist first-person adventure that can be completed in under an hour. Get in, get out. Kill anything not you and upgrade your kit along the way. Creates a sense of dread through ambient music and a short draw distance. The real selling point here is the impressive way your HUD and equipment change appearance based on upgrades; this ain't your father's Wolf-3D. My only beef would be with the absolute obscurity of secret rooms; I dare you to find one. Also would have appreciated some achievements to extend the replay value. Overall well worth the small price tag to support an obvious labor of love by a single developer. Just don't expect it to reinvent the wheel.

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.