Din’s Curse

Dallas-based Soldak Entertainment was started by a man who really wanted to make RPGs. Steven Peeler left Ritual Entertainment after working there for six years because there was no chance of him making the games he wanted to make at an FPS shop. It’s a good thing for gamers he made the move to the indie scene because he’s produced some interesting action RPGs which deserve greater attention.

Peeler’s ambitious first design, Depths of Peril, added some fascinating twists to the stale Diablo formula. His most recent game, Din’s Curse, is better focused, more refined and quite good. If you think you’ve seen everything action RPGs have to offer after playing Diablo and Torchlight, you need to play Din’s Curse.

Snide Curs

The thing about Din’s Curse that’s frustrating for its fans is that it’s a very difficult game to recommend to gamers who can’t recognise solid gameplay even if it bit them in the ass and left scar tissue that neatly spelt out “solid gameplay”.

The game may be the best-looking Soldak game yet but it still lacks the kind of style and flourish you’d see in action RPGs from bigger developers. It doesn’t have a state-of-the-art graphics engine, silky-smooth animation or cinematic cutscenes.

If screenshots don’t sell the game, the first 10 minutes of gameplay is likely to give the unconvinced only more reason to be doubtful. On the surface, Din’s Curse is an unremarkable action RPG. The quests are mostly conventional, the randomly-generated dungeons have bland layouts, the character classes and skills are unexceptional, and the clickfest combat is all too familiar.

The nitpicker might find the UI lacking in pizzazz or the screen too cluttered. Then there are the little glitches that might induce a slight shake of the head: foes fall through walls when dying, spell animations curve around corners, activating Stealth while on the move results in a bizarre sliding animation, text spills over boundaries.

Those looking to summarily dismiss the game will find ample reason in short order but the treasures in any dungeon-delving game are to be found in the depths and you need to dig deep to find what makes Din’s Curse special.

Discern Us

The thing that makes Din’s Curse stand out is its dynamic game world and that’s something you can’t really convey through a screenshot or a four-minute video.

In other action RPGs, the game world revolves around you, the star and the centre of the action. Other entities are mere extras milling around, content to wait for you to appear before they begin speaking their lines or executing their action scripts. You can safely park your character in town, step away from your computer and return to find the game world exactly as you left it.

You can never do that in Din’s Curse. If you do not hit Pause to freeze the game, things go to hell really quickly because the creatures in the dungeons have their own agendas and they’re not inclined to wait patiently for you. They fight among themselves (levelling up in the process!), turning entire levels into war zones. If not stopped, bosses form powerful mobs, construct devices to make your adventuring difficult and go on the offensive. The town offers no safe haven from rampant enemies — townsfolk can be robbed, killed, diseased, cursed, shrunken or petrified.

In this action RPG, you must act and act promptly because the consequences of inaction can have a major impact on gameplay. Let the town vendors get slaughtered and you will no longer have a reliable source of healing items. Fail to stop a darkness machine and visibility will be drastically reduced; fail to destroy an earthquake machine and it may just drop the roof on some explosive barrels when you’re right next to them.

If you’re looking for a Diablo-like with fresh ideas, if your appreciation of games doesn’t begin and end with graphics, you have to give this a try.

Din’s Curse is available for PC, Mac and it even runs on Linux with Wine. It doesn’t come with an obnoxious DRM scheme and it doesn’t have limited activations — a single purchase entitles you to play the game on any machine you have in your household. The minimum system requirements are so minimal it runs on Windows 98 so the legions of Windows 98 devotees looking for a fresh challenge after honing their gaming skills for 12 solid years with Minesweeper should definitely give it a look.

There’s a demo which lets you try the game until you hit level 6 and the full version of the game comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee if you buy it directly from the developer.

(Soldak uses BMT Micro for the transaction and it’s absolutely painless. Enter some details, pay with credit card or PayPal and you get an e-mail with the product key and a download link for the 146MB installer. You can then download the 4.6MB patch for the game from Soldak.)