REVIEW : Crown Trick (PC)
If there is a genre in vogue among independent studios, it is roguelikes. Overthrowing even genres as in demand as action adventures, platform arcades and even battle royale (whatever type they are), countless works of this same nature are dropped week after week. So much so that it is difficult to attract the attention of users with such several titles very similar to each other accumulating without stopping, so we believe it necessary and fair to praise the work done by the small team NExT Studios, since we assure you that his new work called Crown Trick it stands out from the vast majority of titles of the same nature and it is also really good.
A production that transports us to a fictional fantasy world called The Kingdom of Nightmares. And what happens there? Well, this world has been taken over by monsters of all kinds under the command of a certain Vlad, who is supposed to be the bad guy on duty that we must pursue. That task falls to the protagonist of this play and character we control, Elle … although she does not face this mission alone. Nothing less than a kind of speaking and the omniscient crown becomes our great ally, also serving as a guide as we explore the environments that come together in this world. Well-set scenarios with a “dungeon” conception that, as you may already suspect, are full of creatures and traps we have to deal with.
In this adventure, the classic elements of roguelike productions are combined with the basic premises of the dungeon crawler. And the result is very striking.
A twist on the genre
So far, nothing that surely you have not experienced in dozens of previous works of those belonging to this genre. However, Crown Trick has remarkably different gameplay that, among other things, integrates other ingredients rarely incorporated in this class of works, such as the dungeon crawler essence. Indeed, one of the tasks that we have to carry out is to go through a good number of scenarios with a more or less labyrinthine design and find a way to advance, showing on the screen the map of the shift that is going becoming tangible as we explore each room. But that’s just the icing on the cake of an approach that brings together the best of roguelike and dungeon crawler, as it works incredibly dense, deep and quite absorbent.
As it happens in this type of works, death is part of the gameplay and we will clap without remission dozens of times.
To start with the most basic, the movement of our character, this must always move through square tiles, that is, we do not have a free movement, something very characteristic of dungeon crawlers… Like the issue of shifts. This characteristic is fundamental in this work, starting with our character’s movement, since each time he moves or executes any other action, a turn is consumed. That is, both the enemies and the mobile elements and traps that come together in the scenarios only come into action after we do something (including giving up our turn). And as you may already suspect, battles win a lot in terms of their strategic factor, precisely because of this fact, resulting in very suggestive and tactical combats that contrast quite a bit with those that usually occur in a classic roguelike.
We can use a good amount of objects and skills, some of them very useful such as teleportation.
So what elements of this type of production are part of Crown Trick? Well, to start with, randomness in general. First of all, every time we clap and return to the Nightmare Kingdom, the environment layout changes completely, that is, the rooms are procedurally generated and the enemies do not appear in the same order or follow any set pattern.
The layout of the rooms we visit changes in each game, something very common in roguelike-style games.
Much care and effort have been invested in giving life to this work, also integrating a large amount of content that ensures a fairly long useful life for this production indie, especially if we want to discover all its secrets and squeeze it 100%. An adventure that already from the introductory cartoon-like sequence makes it clear that it has been developed with an exquisite taste for detail since in the aesthetic field it also stands out despite its humility. What we liked the most is the atmosphere in general, very appropriate and “warm” despite being quite dark, while the soundtrack and the well-captured sound effects make up a more than decent sound section.
The atmosphere that surrounds this adventure is very good, highlighting the design of both the scenarios and the enemies.
