Fatal Labyrinth

Playin' some Fatal Labby on the Sega Genny

I'm having a hard time writing this review. This is the third time I'm restarting it now, and I'm thinking that the problem is I don't really know what to say about Fatal Labyrinth that wouldn't just be like a laundry list of features common to nearly all Roguelikes.

I don't mean this as an insult to Fatal Labyrinth, of course. I do actually like the game and would recommend it, but if you've played pretty much any other traditional style roguelike, like Nethack or, uh, Rogue, you'll already be intimately familiar with the general gameplay framework of Fatal Labyrinth within about one minute of playing it. It's actually a great entry point for newcomers to the genre.

Most screenshots of the game look vaguely similar, so I got one here that had a bunch of enemies in it to get you PUMPED UP LIKE YEAAAAAAH

I suppose I should describe Roguelikes for the six to eight people out there who somehow don't know what it means. This'll especially help in navigating the modern indie game market, as "Roguelike" is probably the third most-dropped advertising buzzword after "Retro-styled" and "crafting." The genre actually has a fair bit of breadth now, depending on how liberal your interpretation of the "-like" half of "Roguelike" is. Consider that Spelunky, The Binding of Isaac and Angband are all considered Roguelikes (in some circles), despite playing nothing like each other.

The most salient features of Roguelikes are that they have permanent death and the levels are randomly generated. These features work well in tandem together, because they really capture what it might actually feel like if you were going on a quest to get some artifact from a dungeon. You have no idea what the dungeon layout is going to be like and moving forward brazenly might very well end up killing you. This can lead to you having very unsuccessful runs through no fault of your own (or vice-versa), but by and large, this is a good thing.

More traditional Roguelikes (which Fatal Labyrinth most definitely is) are also top-down, turn-and-grid-based RPGs. Generally, any action including movement will take a turn, and after you've done whatever you want to do, all of the other enemies on screen will do their moves, and then it'll be your turn again. This all happens very quickly, though. It's not like you're playing XCOM. Really, aside from some delicate combat situations when you're going to want to finesse things a bit, you'll be plowing through the rooms like you're playing Zelda, but confined to a grid. Many Roguelikes like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup even have auto-explore functions, or functions that let you pick a direction and have you move generally in that direction until you hit a dead end, a wall or an enemy.

Open spaces are cause for alarm, as being surrounded will quickly kill you dead.

In Fatal Labyrinth, as with most Roguelikes, your primary goal is to get to the end of the dungeon, grab some artifact, and then get back out. Along the way, you'll get new equipment, level up, discover what various unlabeled potions and magic rods do, and generally pray that some innocuous-seeming item isn't cursed, ruining a hitherto successful game. Combat is par for the course, for the genre: attempting to walk through an enemy will have you attack them with your melee weapon. You then continue to trade blows until one of you dies. Bows and throwing weapons are also available, but they're clumsy to use, requiring you to open two menus every time you fire. Given their generally low damage output, this can get old fast.

Fatal Labyrinth doesn't have spells the way a typical Roguelike might, but it does include rods (which are like wands from some other games), which will give you a one-shot magic spell that can really help in a pinch. One nifty trope of the genre that I'm glad made it into Fatal Labytinth is that you can throw your items. There is little more satisfying than whipping a cursed potion at an enemy and having them suffer its effects. Well, that's not true, but it is nice.

In an effort to keep you from simply regenerating health between each minor fight and taking your sweet time getting to the next floor, Roguelikes generally require you to monitor your character's hunger. It's pretty embarrassing to be a mighty knight who starved to death because you didn't plan ahead. Where Fatal Labyrinth differs is that you're unable to carry food along with you, instead relying on cartoon ribmeat bones you find laying around on the dungeon floor. Your food level is on a scale from 1 to 100, and if you go above 80 you become bloated and it starts taking you twice as long to do anything. This can be very bad, as you'll end up essentially taking double damage for every round of melee combat. If you get double-teamed while you're bloated, you're going to be one sad fatass. I was also surprised to find out that if you break 100, you die on the spot. Your character, like a dog, will literally eat until his stomach ruptures.

I'm a battleman now.

One thing I've always liked in RPGs is when your class title changes. Even when it's just a cosmetic thing, like in Fatal Labyrinth, it's nice. Leveling up (Or more accurately, ranking up, as the floor of the dungeon you're on is referred to by level) only affects your max HP and the amount of HP you gain while walking or waiting. This is okay, though. Getting upgraded from "Beginner" to "Valet" will still make you feel full of warmth and accomplishment, like breathing fire.

Though I've already mentioned that Roguelikes typically feature permanent death, Fatal Labyrinth only half follows this rule. Every five floors, the game saves a checkpoint for you. Upon dying, you'll go right back to your last checkpoint stage with the rank and gear you had when you reached that stage. After I discovered this, a bit of the tension of dying forever was alleviated, for better or for worse. Notable upon death is that your funeral will be better depending on the rank you achieved and the amount of gold you collected. It seems that rank responds to the number of people who show up, while gold is related to the quality of your tombstone on the game over screen. So that's something.

Fatal Labyrinth doesn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to Roguelikes. In fact, it scales back on a few features found in the giants of the genre. Again, though, this is not a complaint as much as it is an observation. It is a good game, and it's worth playing, especially if you're new to games of the Roguesque persuasion (I'm sorry. My thesaurus doesn't have anything for "Roguelike" so I had to improvise). It's even, bafflingly, available in legally emulated form through Steam for like two or three bucks. I dunno if it's worth that much when games like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup are more fully featured and entirely free, but I certainly wouldn't dissuade anyone from playing Fatal Labyrinth by cheaper means.