Watching my man in Sunken Realms swing his spear all over the place got me thinking: aren’t spears pretty much just for thrusting? My guy was all but sticking it in the ground and pole dancing on it. I’m not a military man, but I suspect you’ll do more damage by hitting people with the pointy end rather than the wooden part. Unless you’re in a Kung-Fu film, that is. But Kung-Fu isn’t that effective against giant, armoured scorpions. You’ll get a giant stinger up the left nostril while you’re busy twirling the spear around your head.
You’re probably wondering why I’m dwelling on the spear thing so much. The reason for that is because watching it took up about eighty percent of my time with Sunken Realms. I should probably state up front that I wasn’t particularly gripped. In fact, this was one of those games where I had to put it down and be done with it, before it drove me mad. It’s not without good points, there’s some promise to be found at the heart of it. But it’s dragged down by two things: it’s pledge to being a roguelike, and the fact that it’s completely broken.
Down in the Dumps
Sunken Realms opens with our hero, Alric, wandering around some run-down masonry, where he’s accosted by an old bloke. They get to chatting, where Alric reveals his intention to descend into the nearby ruins. After a quick round of spelunking, and an orcish arrow or two to the face, he reveals that he’s searching for his father, who also disappeared down the mines in search of a mysterious orb. The banter between the two main characters is surprisingly good, even if the exaggerated voices and animation make it feel like we’re in the midst of an amateur comedy bit. Still, it injected a level of charm into proceedings that left me with a good first impression.
The visuals kept that good feeling going. When you’re going to dive down into the same place over and over again, you need the different levels to be both pretty and visually distinct. Sunken Realms does well on both fronts. While we start off in fairly bog-standard ruins, we’re soon descending into orc encampments, sewers and scorpion infested mines. The fungal-covered caves are a definite standout. I was blundering around the level when I stumbled into a gigantic cavern full of glowing mushrooms. It stopped me right in my tracks. While the biome changes are quite abrupt, there was also a nice sense of anticipation after beating a boss. I wanted to see what it was going to fling at me.
Unfortunately, the cracks start to appear when we get to the combat. It’s a fairly light hack’n’slash affair, with a basic light attack and a charge up heavy attack. Along with this is a small range of melee weapons, that change attack patterns. The problem is, the combat feels rather unsatisfying. Most of that is down to the fact that mashing light attack will stunlock the majority of enemies, so there’s little reason to do anything else. You can parry, but I found I never really needed to when I just whaled on enemies – including shielded ones – with little drawback. Ranged combat suffers too. It switches to first person mode, which completely disoriented me. Like suddenly being asked to thread a needle in the small space of time before an axe connects with my skull.
If At First You Don’t Succeed…
My main bugbear, from a gameplay point of view at least, is that Sunken Realms strives to be a roguelike when I don’t think it needed to be. Simply exploring down the levels, fighting bosses and increasingly tough enemies would alleviate a lot of the tedium that comes with Sunken Realms. Instead, if we die, we lose everything we’re carrying. So that means all the health items, and foodstuffs we need to make more health items. So losing a long run in a deep level means a brace of shallow runs to gather ingredients, to make the health items to survive the longer runs. Maybe that’s just me not gelling with the high difficulty, but this aspect is ultimately what killed it for me.
The runs are just too similar to each other. You get a consumable item that means you can skip particular levels, but if you’re gathering materials (or have run out) then you need to slog through. That means fighting the same enemies, the same bosses (some of which are just waves of standard enemies) in the same biomes. I feel like a lot of the frustration of repeating runs could be alleviated with the simple addition of basic checkpoints. They can be limited, like one or two disposable ‘campfires’ a run that we can respawn back at. Give us a chance to get back our gear then cut our losses. As it is, every time a run ended and I was faced with multiple repetitive runs to get my potion stocks back up, I found it harder to keep going.
What doesn’t help is that, at time of writing, Sunken Realms is very broken. It’s a one-man-band, so that’s to expected to a point. But Sunken Realms desperately needs some QA testing. I was constantly clipping through the terrain and getting stuck, for instance. I must’ve made it look very fun as the enemies did it too. It was evidently common enough that an ‘unstuck’ button was added. Sequences would often break too. You’re supposed to unlock treasure rooms by clearing the floor of enemies, but sometimes they would just refuse to unlock. At one point, a boss refused to spawn, but the gate out remained open. So I just strolled through a pleasant meadow, a wee bit perplexed. Oh and I had a good few crashes to desktop too, which makes the lack of autosaving even more galling.
Sunken Realms – A Rotten Core?
Bugs can be squashed, though. What I keep coming back to is the feeling I got after I died. A strong desire to just give up and do something else. I wonder if in the pursuit of streamlining, Sunken Realms has ditched something that makes these dungeon crawler games exciting. The lack of loot juggling has its merits, but without the promise of a tasty drop, why would I want to slog through identical combat rooms? Sure, I can bring back gold to improve stats but these are just flat bonuses. Nothing changes in these runs until right at the very end. Imagine reading a book but every time you misread a word, you have to start right at the beginning of the book again. You’d quickly become sick of the opening chapter.
Roguelikes live and die on their ability to make each run fresh and exciting. Switching up the room layouts mean very little, especially to someone with a swiss-cheese memory like me. We need to change how we approach each run; our play-styles need to be re-arranged. Without that, we’re just playing on repeat. Had Sunken Realms stuck to the classic souls-like route, I’d probably be kinder to it. The initial charm began to flake off after the first few runs, and by the end I couldn’t make myself finish it. I died after the camera got stuck in a wall and lost everything. I could see the time stretching ahead of me, and saw how much of it would entail jumping through the same hoops. Sorry, Alric. You’ll have to find your dad another day.
