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Beware of Strange Warp Points, by Ed Kolis

If you can, I'd like you guys to forgive the first seven or so minutes of this video for completely reading this game by its cover. Perhaps the GUI isn't the most enticing, but I should have given it a lot more of a chance by, I don't know, trying to play the game before delving into the "don't make it hard to learn how to play" speech. This looks fun! Destroy stuff, explore the known universe, keep upgrading your ship to handle tougher opponents, play the range game against moving targets.

However, I do think I was being too hard on myself. In spite of my blathering before even trying to move, the game is somewhat unnecessarily complex. There are a lot of stats and it overwhelms the player from their goal, sort of like a racing game where you have to make sure the wheels are properly inflated to go fast enough. Were there more things to do in the game it could work, but I think this sort of teeters on the edge of "interactive inventory management": dropping the crew stat alone would make simplify it enough to keep the player focused on the actual goal of the game.

Download: https://bitbucket.org/ekolis/boswp/downloads
Website: http://edkolis.blogspot.com/search/label/roguelike-dev