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VARIABLO, by Rat King

A very simple dungeon-crawler with a very important distinction: you move the map itself! I greatly enjoy the concept at work here, and it reminds me that roguelike play a lot like puzzles with variable interaction, which this does extremely well. In fact, it makes the really great point (which I don't get until the very end) that spending the time to solve the map movements is better than randomly throwing actions around hoping things work out.

On the other hand, aside from this very novel concept of terrain-orientation, the game itself is small. Technically this was true of last year's game, but I think it's the case here even more-so. Considering the puzzle nature in arranging maps to descend, allowing the player to choose difficulty of a map set would invite a great deal of replayability here. Naturally there are lots of ways to expand on the ideas presented, but merely "giving more" of what already exists would clinch this as something to pick up over and over again.

Play/Download: http://ratking.itch.io/variablo