I really want to recommend this game, but I can't quite bring myself to do so. I have 18 hours but it feels like more because the gameplay feels so slow. Necropolis is a randomly generated dungeon crawler where you carefully descend each level against enemies that increasingly scale in difficulty. It's in a pretty grey area for the definition between a roguelike and a roguelite in the sense that in each run you can do favors to earn tokens from the Brazen head which you can spend on pretty, but useless color schemes for your characters, or books which have varying effects on your character, but don't ultimately change your playstyle.

The Lore : It's not really there, what is there is a bunch of useless babbling that doesn't give any insight into the world or the lore, it seems more like a poor attempt at some kind of humor. As far as I can tell, you're in another dimension run by the Brazen Head, a kind of fallen god who lures adventurers in to die and clean up some messes for him, and that's about as far as they got. You can find heiroglyphs on the walls depicting characters but you'll have to decode it to make any meaning of it, and even then with no world building to reference these characters off of the purpose of it all falls flat in the end.

The Combat : It feels slow, repetitive, and sometimes downright unresponsive once you start an animation and if you're not careful you can get yourself into some rough situations because of this. Enemies have an aggro range, sometimes they ignore you other times when your in an area for a bit they naturally start to drift towards you. Enemies on a stage frequently spawn out of thin air, I've seen them pop into existence a few times, this can cause enemies to flank you without you noticing when you thought you've cleared an area but these enemies are generally lower level. You have light attacks, heavy attacks, and charged attacks which drain alot of stamina. You'll usually find yourself using light attacks because heavy and charged leave you open for so long that you'll be punished for even trying.

The Items : The game likes to leave you guessing on what you're getting, not just for unlabeled potions or scrolls, but everything. Flavor text is generally more useless uninspired babble, those books you worked so hard to unlock for the bonuses, the game doesn't give you much to go off of, some books people still haven't figured out what they even do. Luckily some players have made some helpful guides for this issue. Weapons and Armor, they also have their bonuses but you're left guessing exactly what it is, some are minimal damage bonuses, or special heavy attacks, or maybe you do just slightly more ranged damage.

The Layout : The tile sets don't feel super varied, you can make multiple runs and never run into the other variants of levels that there are. Level secrets aren't very well hidden once you know the very few tile sets you'll always recognize "Oh, there's a secret room here." which are clearly marked. Your player speed mixed with the size of the levels and occasional scarcity of enemies or bundles of enemies can make levels really drag on as you scrounge for as much material or items as you can to get a step up on the next level. As for the design sure the game is pretty, but it still feels relatively empty, the only real interesting stuff to look at is outside the level floating around in the sky.

The Ending : Don't expect much It's disappointing, you've spent a good hour or two, or even three trudging through these repetitive levels, fought the end boss, and all for a useless bauble. It's lackluster and you never feel like you've accomplished anything other than being deceived and wasting your time, a little like buying this game.

All in all the game is about a 5/10, it feels like they had a great idea but they just couldn't execute it well enough to make something truly unique.

I really want to recommend this game, but I can't quite bring myself to do so. I have 18 hours but it feels like more because the gameplay feels so slow. Necropolis is a randomly generated dungeon crawler where you carefully descend each level against enemies that increasingly scale in difficulty. It's in a pretty grey area for the definition between a roguelike and a roguelite in the sense that in each run you can do favors to earn tokens from the Brazen head which you can spend on pretty, but useless color schemes for your characters, or books which have varying effects on your character, but don't ultimately change your playstyle. [b] The Lore [/b]: It's not really there, what is there is a bunch of useless babbling that doesn't give any insight into the world or the lore, it seems more like a poor attempt at some kind of humor. As far as I can tell, you're in another dimension run by the Brazen Head, a kind of fallen god who lures adventurers in to die and clean up some messes for him, and that's about as far as they got. You can find heiroglyphs on the walls depicting characters but you'll have to decode it to make any meaning of it, and even then with no world building to reference these characters off of the purpose of it all falls flat in the end. [b] The Combat [/b]: It feels slow, repetitive, and sometimes downright unresponsive once you start an animation and if you're not careful you can get yourself into some rough situations because of this. Enemies have an aggro range, sometimes they ignore you other times when your in an area for a bit they naturally start to drift towards you. Enemies on a stage frequently spawn out of thin air, I've seen them pop into existence a few times, this can cause enemies to flank you without you noticing when you thought you've cleared an area but these enemies are generally lower level. You have light attacks, heavy attacks, and charged attacks which drain alot of stamina. You'll usually find yourself using light attacks because heavy and charged leave you open for so long that you'll be punished for even trying. [b] The Items [/b]: The game likes to leave you guessing on what you're getting, not just for unlabeled potions or scrolls, but everything. Flavor text is generally more useless uninspired babble, those books you worked so hard to unlock for the bonuses, the game doesn't give you much to go off of, some books people still haven't figured out what they even do. Luckily some players have made some helpful guides for this issue. Weapons and Armor, they also have their bonuses but you're left guessing exactly what it is, some are minimal damage bonuses, or special heavy attacks, or maybe you do just slightly more ranged damage. [b] The Layout [/b] : The tile sets don't feel super varied, you can make multiple runs and never run into the other variants of levels that there are. Level secrets aren't very well hidden once you know the very few tile sets you'll always recognize "Oh, there's a secret room here." which are clearly marked. Your player speed mixed with the size of the levels and occasional scarcity of enemies or bundles of enemies can make levels really drag on as you scrounge for as much material or items as you can to get a step up on the next level. As for the design sure the game is pretty, but it still feels relatively empty, the only real interesting stuff to look at is outside the level floating around in the sky. [b] The Ending [/b] : Don't expect much [spoiler] It's disappointing, you've spent a good hour or two, or even three trudging through these repetitive levels, fought the end boss, and all for a useless bauble. It's lackluster and you never feel like you've accomplished anything other than being deceived and wasting your time, a little like buying this game. [/spoiler] All in all the game is about a 5/10, it feels like they had a great idea but they just couldn't execute it well enough to make something truly unique.