Publisher: Soldak Entertainment
Developer: Soldak Entertainment
System requirements: Windows 98\ME\2000\XP\Vista\Win 7\Mac OS 10.4, 1.5 GHz Pentium IV or better CPU, 256 MB RAM, GeForce 2 series or better graphics card, 200 MB hard-drive space, DSL or better Internet connection for online multiplayer
Genre: RPG
Release date: Available now

There’s an old saying: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Not necessarily so in the gaming world. For many years, most new first-person shooters were usually described as “Doom clones,” yet we bought them by the millions of copies, especially when developers made an attempt to not just duplicate the tried-and-true shooter formula, but also to add a slight but remarkable gameplay tweak. In the RPG realm, Diablo is the granddaddy of the dungeon-crawler. Many similar games have come and gone, while Blizzard’s seminal hack-and-slash and it’s sequel are still avidly played after more than a decade since they were released. Indie developer Soldak Entertainment has joined the crowd with Din’s Curse, adding a fast pace and an extra level of depth to the traditional RPG formula.

You’re dead, and the selfish life that you lived was certainly less than heroic. Din, champion of the gods, has decided to make a better man out of you. He has plucked you from your eternal slumbers, stuck you in an isolated town and given you a task: become a hero, make everybody love you, and gain redemption for a life well wasted. But there’s a catch: the town has an entrance to a multi-level dungeon in its courtyard, and occasionally the horrors that live below make their way to the surface and try to snuff out the lives of your new friends.

After creating a character and choosing a difficulty level (both for yourself and for the monsters you’ll be facing), Din’s Curse generates a randomly created town and dungeon. Three of the residents (and the god Din himself) offer you quests to complete. Your job is two-fold: complete all of the mandatory quests offered to you, and stop enemies from killing the three mortal quest-givers in the town. Succeed and you receive a special gift from the town before you move on to another hamlet in peril. Fail and the town is destroyed, and you start all over again, but you retain your character’s level and all of his attributes and inventory items. You continue saving towns until you have raised your reputation high enough for Din to release you from his curse.

Anyone who’s played Diablo or any of its look-alikes will be instantly comfortable with Din’s Curse. The top-down perspective, the button-mashing combat, the loot drops and inventory management are all here. In the dungeons, a map is gradually filled in as you progress through the corridors and mazes (a button on the HUD gives you access to the entire map as you reveal it, while a minimap in the corner of the screen gives you a low-res look at what’s ahead). You move your reluctant hero by either left-clicking the mouse on the desired destination or holding the left button down and dragging the cursor around the map. Place the mouse pointer on an enemy and click the right mouse button to attack. Items that you find and collect are placed in a 12-slot inventory, which can be expanded by four items for each cloth bag that you find. Frequently used items and spells can be placed in a hotkey bar at the bottom of the HUD for ease of use. While you’re in the dungeon, a sound effect plays when a baddie has reached the surface and threatens the town. You must find and activate the dungeon level’s gateway and travel back to town to help defend the citizens, who, surprisingly enough, are not shrinking violets when it comes to combat. Sometimes they actually manage to finish off the invaders without any help from you. In a departure from the usual quest mechanic, you can complete quests without having been assigned them, so taking the time to eliminate all of the enemies from each dungeon level can save you time and trouble later on, especially when quest-givers have more than 100 assignments for you.

Din’s Curse is an effectively crafted, down-to-basics RPG, with just a few little problems to mar its retro-gaming goodness. Randomly generating dungeons ensures that no two games will ever be the same, but randomness does have its drawbacks. Locked or stuck doors will sometimes have nothing inside of them, and monsters at levels significantly higher than you and your townsfolk can spawn unless you remember to set their levels before you generate a new town. Most of the weapons you collect during your adventures are useless to you, since you have to get to the bottom of the skill tree to unlock the skill necessary to use them; I leveled a character all the way to Level 11 and still didn’t manage to get the skill points necessary to unlock the Mail skill, forcing me to sell every mail and chain-based item I collected to make room in my inventory. The game only allows you to have up to six quests in your queue, which makes it all the more important to be able to complete quests without their being accepted by you. And it’s good that NPCs join in the battles to save their town, but when they gang up on the enemy, it’s can be very difficult to find it in the pile so you can right-click to attack.

After a long, hard day at work, it’s cathartic to come home, load up a game such as Din’s Curse and blast away at orcs and fire-tossing goblins for a few hours. Its combination of old-school RPG gameplay with a quick pace and combat that’s focused on more than just the dungeons give it the uniqueness it needs to stand out in the crowded dungeon-crawler genre. At $24.99 it’s a little pricier than most download-only indie games, but for that you get infinite replayability and a money-back guarantee, so it’s hard to go wrong. It’s a “just one more level” time-suck that’ll have you playing much longer than you intended.

Our Score:
Our Recommendation: