Songbringer
We built this RPG on Roq and Rogue
Developer Wizard Fu Games publisher Wizard Fu Games price us$ 20 AvAilAble At steam, GoG, Humble songbringer.com
Within moments of starting the Rogue-like, Zelda inspired pixel exploration/RPG, Songbringer, Roq, the shirtless rockstar protagonist had already found two powerful weapons, the Nanosword, and a remote controlled boomerang top hat that could pick up distant items and bring them back to the hero. Oh, he’d also awakened an ancient evil hell-bent of doing some particularly not nice things to the people of the planet Ekzera. Then Roq went into a dungeon and was blown up by some traps. Within moments of starting a second run at Songbringer, Roq had found the Nanosword, awakened the evil and got himself killed fighting a room full of demons, traps and hovering drones while trying to get to an enticing looking chest. Before starting a third run of Songbringer I switched off permadeath. Then Roq found the sword, top hat and a charmingly low-fi world to explore.
The pixel graphics of Songbringer aren’t the best we’ve seen, but even so they manage to evoke not just a retro sensibility but also a real incentive to explore. There are multiple biomes on Ekzera with swamps, plains, forests, deserts and more to explore on the overland and a number of natural caverns, sci-fi dungeons and other places to explore underground. Some of the dungeons are combat based, others are themed, others again are puzzle rather than combat based. What you get is up to the whims of the Rogue-like gods.
The simplistic art style makes these different areas look extremely disparate, so it’s always fun to see what is changing from one screen to
they manage to evoke not just a retro sensibility but also a real incentive to explore
the next. The old fashioned flip-screen scrolling makes every new screen surprise. Will it be more desert? A new dungeon? A quest? A monument to a culture long dead? While the biomes look pleasantly different the layout of the screens often feels overly familiar thanks to the patterns used by procedural generation. As such, exploration lacks the impact that comes from carefully curated level design, but on the up-side there is way more replayability. There are something like 300 million possible permutations of Ekzera for Roq to make his way through. When creating a game, players input a word of up to six letters, this input is used as the generating force for the new world and can be used across platforms, ensuring that lore and progress remain constant.
As enjoyable as Songbringer is, there are still some issues that can get in the way of enjoyment. The Nanosword is a great weapon against a few foes, but it’s not the most effective against groups due to the difficulty of judging angles on a 2D/3D plane. After you die for the umpteenth time due to not being able to accurately hit an enemy, it wears a little thin. The fact that enemies don’t have health bars is also something of a pain because you’re never sure you’re having an effect until they die. Despite the niggles I’m hooked, and after the issue is done I’ll head back to Ekzera for another journey into mystery. DANIEL WILKS