House of Necrosis
The Idiot Box! You opened it! I came!
One of the great stand-outs from the June Next Fest, House of Necrosis is a roguelike in the Mystery Dungeon/Shiren the Wanderer vein, but styled very distinctly to 32-bit survival horror flavor. You play as a grim-faced woman with no name, waking up in the titular House, and forced to make her way through its tattered halls, into the surrounding gardens and caves, and, naturally, descending to an underground research lab, all full to bursting with nightmarish horrors and the means to dispatch them.
Your first attempts are generally pretty pathetic, with the damage from trading blows and getting cornered gradually chipping away at your resources, and the tight inventory limit keeping you from holding onto hexes and unidentified potions that are just as likely to make your situation worse rather than better. The combat is simple – you can bash anything immediately adjacent to you, and if you have the ammo, you can fire your gun at range from a few tiles. The ammo management is a big part of what makes the early game a compelling fusion of Mystery Dungeon and survival horror, as softening up or picking off the right enemies without wasting shots can make all the difference in whether you make it to your next boss or not.
The camera controls are worth noting, because it’s initially surprising there are any, then confusing why they exist, and finally, essential to success. The game is mostly presented in a top-down grid fashion, with the player and all enemies taking turns moving, attacking, and using items, but at any point, you can rotate the camera 90 degrees to reorient, or drop into a first-person view with a panning camera. The reason for both of these is to play with restricted vision – you can see a tile further moving horizontally than you can vertically, so when moving into a hallway especially, it helps to turn your view so you get a bit more heads-up warning and don’t trip into an attack. Later, the first person mode comes into its own, letting you cautiously pause and spot serious danger even further away, but with some constraints that again play well into the otherwise superficial nod to survival horror.
You level up during a run, improving stats and most importantly, your max health, but those levels are lost on death or retreat. Retreating also lets you save your equipment and inventory, and you can then have an NPC in the hub identify and buy your found booty. Your weapons and armor can come with various modifiers, mostly whole mechanical changes rather than simple stat boosts, and can also gain some XP through use to slowly improve their base values. Finally, the mode of progression that’s simultaneously the most important and least relevant moment-to-moment are the spells.
Each enemy type, and there are plenty of enemy types, has one spell associated with it, with a Grimoire to learn it as a possible, very rare drop on death. Once you learn a spell, it’s permanently unlocked, though each one can only be cast once per run. That’s a good thing, as some of them are incredibly powerful – even ones found in early areas can bail you out of a shitshow or give you a much needed edge against a boss. Even the ones that have an effect exactly replicated by a common consumable aren’t to be overlooked – inventory limits mean that you aren’t actually going to be toting around every single possible type of consumable, especially if you’re trying to improve your gear or build up some generational wealth to pass on to your later runs.
Speaking of inventory limits and gear, those are the other two main routes to ‘permanent’ progression. Actually, only the inventory limit is truly permanent – finding or buying ‘small pouch’ items allows you to expand your inventory size by one each, eventually giving you two full pages worth of items to juggle. Those items can be stashed in a universal box that appears between areas, and is also available at the hub room with the shopkeep NPC, letting you save promising gear, dump loot for sale before moving on, or accumulate a backstock of worthwhile hexes, ammo, and consumables. The stash doesn’t have infinite capacity, but it’s plenty. Being able to stash gear also means you can keep backups of items with good random effects, and you’ll need them, because even if you’re pretty careful, you’ll eventually cop a death or two, and losing the weapon that’s been carrying you for three zones can set you back significantly, and potentially force you back to the beginning if you don’t have anything in reserve.
Each zone is only a few maps long, punctuated by a unique boss fight, and a unique spread of enemies, all with their own quirks and hazards to grapple with. The first zone, for example, has a lot of zombies, which must pause between each action, and allow you to land a safe melee hit and retreat, as long as you don’t get cornered. Later zones switch this up – the tree monsters in the second zone knock you back, meaning that you have to allow THEM to approach YOU, lest you be trivially batted away each time you try to get into range. Some enemies cast spells, explode when near death, or buff and heal other enemies in range. Enemies can even be persuaded to hit each other, albeit only with ranged or channeled attacks – and it doesn’t always work in your favor. Enemies that land a killing blow on another enemy get that XP, and it’s always enough to level them up, first to red, then to a Necrotic purple, and each intimidating aura granting increasing HP and damage bonuses. A single Necrotic enemy can be as difficult to kill or even survive tangling with as a full boss, but it can be worth the trouble, as the increased XP rewards and chance for much more and stronger loot drops are fair compensation. You can even save Experience Serums to spend on enemies, or bosses, to intentionally ramp up the challenge for the chance at high quality gear… and it’s another reason to NOT test unknown serums on random enemies, at least until you’ve identified that one for the run.
Once you get to floor 20 and defeat the final boss, you can roll credits and then get started on the real game. There are a few post-game dungeons, each with their own mechanics – random floor modifiers, more enemy combinations, an item that gives enemies a chance to spawn leveled up, and so on. Each dungeon has unique rewards, and they’re fun twists on the format, especially the ‘pure’ roguelike one. The last dungeon is a bit obscure to get into, and I don’t think anything in the game really hints at how to enter it. It’s also the least satisfying – basically a very long, unscaled slog through dozens of floors that you’re mostly incentivized to skip entirely.
The game has some issues, and the number one problem I have with it is its balance. For most of the game, the main difference between runs that sputter out and runs that have a chance of completion resolves to your ability to kill enemies in as few traded hits as possible. And that equation is primarily affected by two factors – the pure combined damage of your melee weapon/gun combo, [obviously] and the appearance of two or three very specific modifiers on your equipment. Among the bonuses to drop rates, life leech, and even interesting effects like guns that can consume your health to fire when out of ammo, there are a cluster of mods on melee weapons that allow them to hit enemies that AREN’T directly adjacent to you. One lets you hit things a second tile away, though with slightly reduced damage. Another causes enemies you hit with normal melee attacks to propagate shock damage to anything adjacent to them, effectively multiplying your damage and allowing you to hit things indirectly, though with some situational positioning required. The most problematic, though, lets you hit the two tiles diagonal from you as well as the tile you’re facing, simultaneously.
That single mod means you can ensure at the very least, a free hit on the vast majority of problematic enemies in the game, and can freely chip down some that are otherwise very definite resource sinks, requiring health, ammo, or other consumables to kill or avoid if you don’t have that one mod. As soon as that mod appears on a melee implement, it’s incredibly difficult to find any rationale to trade it in, and rolling that mod on new, higher level gear [once you unlock mod rerolls] becomes, frankly, the only logical use of any amount of money earned from that point on. To add insult to injury, the armors ALSO have a single dominant mod – the ability to ignore all traps. I’d not mentioned traps to this point, because they’re a fun thing to discover on your own and learn to work with – a bit of risk and reward, they can be revealed with melee attacks to learn what they’ll do, and manually revealed traps can also trigger when enemies are tempted onto them, dealing a massive amount of damage. However, most of that goes out the window when you can safely ignore them, even walking directly over them to pull enemies to their deaths, and occasionally intentionally taking off your armor to step onto a healing or stash ‘trap.’ No other armor mod is as useful, and it’s beyond useful, utterly trivializing a big part of the game.
Such imbalances are common, and probably not easy to perfectly eliminate or smooth out from a development standpoint. But when a single bonus is so overwhelmingly desirable that it all but obviates any other option when available, I think it’s worth suggesting some changes. I’d love to see more interesting modifiers for all equipment, perhaps giving the three melee weapon ‘types’ different attack patterns inherently rather than as modifiers, and maybe even reasons to swap or ‘turn in’ maxed gear for some reward like the donation mechanic from Nioh.
One other minor note is that I do wish traps were a tiny bit easier to spot. You can see them on the minimap if you walk adjacent to them, and once you understand a few rules regarding them, it’s not too hard to keep from stepping on them often, but I did find it a bit annoying to constantly have one eye stuck on the corner when there could easily have been a slight visual ‘tell’ on the main playable view too. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it does make me more testy now when I do go on a run without my ignore trap armor.
But as it is, I think it’s still pretty good. House of Necrosis is a solidly engaging little roguelike, with enough meat on the bones [once you find all the dungeons] to not feel lacking, but also not dragging its feet or forcing you through a slog. [except in the one dungeon] The progression is satisfying without completely ruining the tension, the items and enemies all have just enough quirks to their mechanics to reward you for paying attention and experimenting, and it absolutely nails the style and presentation. If you’re a fan of Mystery Dungeon style games, you might not find anything innovative about House of Necrosis, but I bet you’ll still have a good time with it. If you’re new to the genre, it might be a good starting point that initiates you into the basics of true roguelike games without totally busting your balls. Just don’t come expecting authenticity from the 32-bit survival horror angle – this lady can carry keys without emptying her purse.
House of Necrosis can be purchased on Steam.
Very happy to have this on my radar now. Will definitely be checking this out, thanks!