Ring of Pain

Addictive gameplay but sometimes RNG takes away the fun of it.

Held off on writing a review until 100% because I wanted to explore as much of the build variety as I could before expressing my thoughts, but I can say definitively that this game takes the cake as my favourite rogue-like. The learning curve at the beginning might as well have been a vertical line but it's incredible to experience the steady growth of game knowledge over hundreds of runs. The format is unbelievably addictive and even after failed runs that were upwards of 40 minutes I frequently found myself immediately booting up another attempt. I'm shocked that even on my final run I was discovering stuff I had no idea about regarding item and path interactions. I'll return at some point to get those final 3 hidden items, but for now, great game no notes.

The game was a wild ride. The creepy atmosphere through the art, writing, and claustrophobic gameplay is amazing. If your focus is to mainly get all the items and do all the achievements, I will warn you that there are some extremely nasty ones in there. Going for achievements, I hope you are used to going through the very start of a run over and over again for what sometimes turns into hours. There are some unlocks I wish were not as difficult/tedious to unlock.
The game would have benefited massively from having a workshop/modding.
The casual experience, e.g., playing through the different modes (candles) at different difficulties, is a lot of fun and my main enjoyment of the game.
The gameplay is extremely simple, you can interact with one of the two front cards or move past them. If you have active items, where there are two types, it adds another two options at most to your basic 4 options each turn. The limited interactions work very well with the aesthetics and make close runs feel like you are trapped like a rat in a corner.
It is a very well-crafted turn-based strategy roguelike game, and one I can highly recommend people giving it a try.

Man, it's one of the games that you'll never get tired of dying over and over.
Literally everything wants to kill you or might kill you, even healing potions.

Pretty unique mechanics and simple gameplay loop that hooks you in.

Gameplay: my personal favorite of card roguelikes i've played, instead of ""decks"" you get equipment and spell slots, which basically act as a restricted but more powerful deck in itself. i like that system infinitely more than slay the spire and others where you have to deal with card bloat and discarding for the sake of more hassle and more beginner confusion, and also leads to them feeling more like a card game than actual rpg. it's much easier to learn which means it's much easier to stick to and recommend to people, and is also the only one i've played where i felt like i could learn by myself without needing several guides on how to make a specific cryptic build to work without getting lucky and turbo op to curbstomp. (some of the boss and room gimmicks are kind of cryptic though).

it's very fun in general, especially once you clear a light playthrough and get access to different starting items/modes, and you get enough items to have good variety early so even if you get firetrucked over, it feels more like it's your fault and there's something else fun to try. biggest temporary complaint is i feel like earlier rarity items are gated weirdly, as in quite a few easy achievements get high rarity items, which you get at endgame, and quite a few hard achievements get early game items. id figure it'd be better to restrict endgame items to harder achievements or ones you have to go out of your way for, because generally you're not going to see endgame for several playthroughs learning, and more item variety early on would pull double duty to help keep things interesting and to also prevent having a ridiculous amount of endgame items instead of getting used to them little by little and also having stuff to work towards. it's not a really huge deal and eventually fixes itself, just progression could be tweaked imo. the modes unlock methods also feel weird, imo i'd think you should unlock each one by clearing the prior one instead of having to do increasingly obscure things or very high difficulty, but them as a earned reward is also cool so i guess a "meh".

art: the art i actually have a very specific problem with. in general it's awesome, the default camera effects, lighting, MOST enemies, MOST allies, the color effects on enemies, the start menu etc. a lot of it from top to bottom is great. BUUUUUT i think the direction could have been better in some places. not that the art is BAD, it's great, but i think some things could have been designed better. example 1: the owl. it's basically just chica from fnaf except made less scary. it works with one specific shown sprite, but imo it could have been done better, more intense and creepy. compare chica from fnaf 1 and 4 to the owl, for example, or better yet don't and make it more it's own thing. some of the designs and lower intensity i though were conscious choices to not make it too hardcore, but their next game, winnies hole gets very body horror and intense (which i'm all for) so imo ring of pain could also deal with being more intense, especially in a world of hallucination, fear, panic, pain, weakness etc. i also feel like the dog and frog designs are kind of jarring, i get they're supposed to be cute in comparison to the monster forms, but i feel like it'd be better to have made them a bit more cute by the natural creature design than overly cartoony. would also make saving them or attacking them more emotional. basically: "needs more cowbell."

sound: very very good, fits the ambiences, the random "danger" track with all the strings and intensity is a personal favorite, when it kicks in during high stress moments it gets very zen. otherwise the ost does a good job of not being too annoying and kind of helps calm during deaths instead of being annoying or generic. only thing i'd say is that the ost gets a bit repetitious. any game like this will suffer that to some degree, because if you get into them you may play days and days, but still in a perfect world id've like to have just had "more". like each zone having a few more randomized ambient tracks, more combat tracks. uniques by design should just have their theme etc. but i think more variety in tracks could have went a long way into making it feel just fresh enough when hearing tracks again to be less repetitive. still, the quality is on point and more of a greedy gripe i guess.

all in all, great card rpg, i like it more than sts and maybe the same as monster train. using mass effect as a comparison, like how mass effect 2+ is more shooter than rpg, ring of pain is more rpg than deck builder. i like that a lot, but personal mileage is subjective and may vary. no noticeable bugs or crashes, low spec requirements, very high replayability, all extra steam features that i know of as well. the dream is the devs finding future success with winnie's hole and rop sales and imo ideally adding more to rop, but a rop 2 or whatever would be cool also. very good game that deserves more attention, especially when overrated games get so much.

What a really cool card game. Card games are definitely not my thing. In fact I hate the fad of adding cards to everything. They add them even first person shooters. However this is a pure card game. You burrowing down deeper into the darkness on your journey. This is a rouge-like or rougue-lite. I can never tell the distance. I done several walk-throughs.

Brilliant game. Really good for the price and I hope more gets added because it's a joy to play through and through.