I was gonna review this on The Save Points but I never got to it before deciding to close down the site. And it’s one that I took some time figuring out exactly how to talk about it because it’s definitely weird.

Let’s go!

Developer: Twice Different
Publisher: Humble Games
Release date: October 15th 2020
Platforms: PC, Switch (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Roguelite card-based dungeon-crawler

This is a dungeon-crawling roguelite (so if you die you start the whole game over). It’s pretty unique, I can’t think of games that play quite like this with the ring system. Each floor has a variety of things in them, with the goal being to get to the last floor of the dungeon (where you’ll get a choice of an ending, either the darkness or the light). The game features pretty funky creepy visuals, with characters that have dark empty eyes and unsettling body shapes. Like, vaguely human but there’s always something off. Even Owl, the weird bird chicken thing is partly human-like. There’s weird coloring too, characters and objects have these random-looking lines, it looks pretty cool actually. There’s not much story that I can really gleam here, maybe I’m wrong. Owl and other characters talk in vague sentences that don’t feel like they mean much.

Each floor of the dungeon will give you a ring… a ring of PAIN. Surprisingly fitting game title. The ring is basically a circle cards, pretty much. You get 2 cards directly in front of you and the rest of the cards gonna be at a certain range based on how far away on the ring they are. At first, unless you have equipment that does so, you only see the cards right in front of you. You can sometimes see what other cards are, either if they’re moving or attacking you from afar, though you will see at least what kind of card they are. On your turn you have several options. You can attack/interact with a card in front of you, use a spell or a scroll, or move which basically rotates the ring by one space.

Attacking an enemy deals damage based on your attack stat and their defense stat. If you have more speed than the enemy you attack first, if it’s a tie it’s random, otherwise you’re hit first. The game will give you a preview of the result of your action when you attack which is very useful. If you have enough defense you might cancel all damage, though most enemies have a pierce value, giving them a chance of damaging you anyways. If you decide to move, if there’s an enemy in front of you on the side you’re moving, the enemy will attack you as you move. You have a stealth stat based on your speed and equipment, giving you a chance of not being attacked as you move. Some enemies also have special effects, sometimes when they attack (such as poisoning you), or when they die (they might explode and deal damage to both you and surrounding enemy spaces, for example). There’s a pretty good variety of enemies that do all sorts of different things. And killing enemies gives you souls, more on those later.

There’s spaces in the rings that don’t have enemies. They can be stat boosts, healing potions, treasure, mimics, dungeon shuffle crystals, scrolls (these are basically single-use spells) and exits. Stat boosts, in the current version, give you a selection of 3 stats to boost. Some of these stat boost spaces give extra stat boosts but will decrease other stats. Stat boosts and healing potions might have curses. Based on your curse resistance stat (which is based on Acuity), there’s a chance that, instead of getting the stat boost or the healing, you might get curse damage. Treasure gives you 2 pieces of equipment to choose from. There’s a bunch of slots for equipment. Candle, hat, boots, gloves, armor, pants, necklace, gem, token, weapon, shield, mask, spellbook… and maybe I’m missing a few others. When you get a piece of equipment you see what it does (there can be plenty of effects other than just stat changes, like the glove that gives you bonus souls when you kill enemies), what stats it changes (either up or down) and you decide if you want it or not. Hovering gives you a preview of the stat change. If you already have something in that slot you can decide to replace it with the newly-found item. There’s different rarities based on the color of the item’s background. Mimics also give you equipment the same as treasure, but they cost souls. The equipment system is the big thing here, it’s how you customize yourself to try and beat the game.

Exits are a big deal. That’s how you progress through your run. There’s different kinds of exits that lead to different places. The standard exit tends to send you to the next numbered floor, sometimes it also brings to a store (where you can either get a free healing potion or buy one of 2 pieces of equipment using souls) or one of Owl’s rooms where he may give you a piece of equipment. Other exits will have different icons. A skull is a combat room, usually having some equipment rewards. Based on the room’s name you get different types of enemies/challenges. A frog leads you to a companion room. In there you kill small cute animals to get souls, very nice (sometimes there’s a big monster dude that will give you a fur coat if you kill all the animals, it’s pretty good). The Ravager room gives you a bunch of equipment. The 3-exits exit brings you to a room with several more exits to choose from which is pretty useful. The Owl exit brings you to a room where you can get some healing and talk to Owl… and try to kill him if you want, that’s never easy though. There’s wells for different effects (healing, sacrifice, throw away a piece of equipment to get the stat boost permanently). There’s burial grounds where graves can give you souls (or damage you). Your room selection is very important, as you can take risks to try and get more good rewards.

Honestly there’s not much else to talk about gameplay-wise. Each run plays very similarly but the gameplay design is quite good. You can attempt different kinds of builds focusing on speed or defense, even acuity has its uses even though that’s what I end up getting rid of more often than not… at the cost of healing potions not being super effective. It is very random as is the nature of roguelites, sometimes you just don’t get good equipment and lose because of that, there’s cases where you just can’t progress because enemies get too strong for you, or you get stuck between too many explosive enemies. And there’s things you can do, basically an achievement system, that unlocks more equipment for later runs, so there’s some overall progression too which is good.

Overall

Ring of Pain is pretty interesting, it’s really difficult though. Sometimes I feel like there’s situations it puts you in that you can’t really do much about, and as far as presentation I can’t really figure out what’s actually happening here, but the gameplay loop is fun. Plus the devs are, so far, consistently updating the game with some QOL upgrades, new content or gameplay design upgrades (like being able to choose your stat upgrades, the original release didn’t let you do that). That’s quite nice, they seem to listen to feedback quite a bit.

A bit of a strange one but I recommend it.