I have been involved in the beta of Ring of Pain and this project excited me since day one. I am drawn to card games and roguelites in the first place but the artwork absolutely blew me away and sucked me in.
Not gonna lie… Owl is twisted
The art direction for Ring of Pain draws largely on trying to depict a memory being recalled. It’s not quite all there. It’s raw and graphic with colour accents lining the edges. Simon Boxer
Overview
Ring of pain is a roguelite, card based dungeon crawler (card crawler is what they call it). Instead of having a deck of cards the dungeon itself is represented by cards. Creatures, treasure, potions, exits, items are all represented by the cards. You travel in a circle through the room encountering the objects. When you do leave the room you find yourself in the master ring. There are special rooms for merchants, events, story, and themed rooms that you may encounter.
Runs are somewhat bite sized taking under an hour and a half in general to complete. When you get familiar with the game you can complete them in around 45 minutes. There is no in run save game so its complete the run, die or quit. (they are adding a save in)
When you complete the run one way or another you may unlock cards of various strengths that can appear in subsequent runs. Allowing you to grow in power to get further in the Ring Of Pain.
There is also a daily dungeon mode which is the same dungeon for everyone. There are 2 mutators (special rules) that are selected each day for the dungeon. Scores and a leaderboard track both your first try and your best score. There is a seperate leaderboard for each as well as a separate board for your friends and for global players.
Features
- A large amount of items and item sets to use and combine.
- Normal mode with unlocks and achievements
- Hard mode for the masochist in all of us.
- Daily dungeon mode with scores and leaderboards tracking your first try and best try both globally and with your steam friends. (It is unlocked)
- Twitch Integration where the viewers can vote to choose the items you receive and can also draw the artwork for the creatures you encounter (moderators approve the images)
Value
At $19.99 USD I think it is a fair price. I can see through that one of the complaints that people are mentioning is the price.
So I expect to get 20 hours of of the game at the very least. With that figure in mind this is a good value for the price. Your going to get a lot more than 20 hours and with the additions they have on the roadmap it’s going to get even better. Sure it’s not Slay The Spire 500 hours value but it is good value.
Overall
The developers are not done with the game, they have a feature rich roadmap that is taking into account player feedback and adding and enhancing the game. The initial changes are in the public beta branch and in the game already.
I have seen the complaint that the RNG is ruthless and there is a major difficulty spike. This is the nature of roguelite/roguelike games. They are making adjustments and enhancements to smooth the cure and give the player tools to mitigate RNG while still keeping the game challenging.
I personally am a big fan of the Daily Dungeon and leaderboard chase. It’s a lot of fun and playing with the mutators make it interesting each time.
The game is quite immersive. The story, the artwork, the music (soundtrack is available) all work together to enhance the experience.
A Steam code was provided by the developer for review purposes.
