After purchasing the Stand with Ukraine Humble Bundle (it has many great games for just 40 USD - check it out!), I was itching to try some of the new games in the bundle out. One of the games that caught my eye was Ring of Pain - I realized that I had previously wanted to buy it but had forgotten about it. Now that I have it, I thought that I would give it a try and it has been great fun so far! It's a dungeon crawler turn-based roguelike, much like Slay the Spire, but has its own unique style of gameplay. I've been hooked on it for the past few days.

The Ring of Pain: A New Way to Crawl Dungeons

Instead of scouring through a large dungeon and finding monsters to fight like in other dungeon crawlers, each dungeon level in Ring of Pain is represented by a bunch of cards that are connected into a ring shape. You can choose which enemies you want to battle; you skip enemies by rotating the ring! However, you can't just skip every single enemy and skip to the end. Defeating enemies will give you Souls (the de-facto currency) which will help make you stronger, and trying to bypass an enemy might result in them attacking you for free.

In each dungeon, you'll find equipment, potions, and stat boosts that will help you along your journey to the deepest depths of the dungeon.

Equipment is how you'll get enough power to beat the game. Each equipment comes with its own stat boosts and some other nifty effects that may or may not help you in your journey. If you don't like the equipment you find, you can reroll them for a small payment of a few Souls. With the correct equipment, you can become unstoppable later!

Another way to make your character stronger is to find stat boosts. You get to pick a main stat to increase - Attack, Defence, Speed, or Clarity. They all serve different purposes and getting the right balance of stats is essential to success. For example, you might find yourself becoming somewhat of a glass cannon, being able to 1-hit KO every enemy you meet. In that case, Defence is useless and you probably should pick Attack or Speed instead.

You'll find yourself in various different rooms, each having its own twist. You might find a bunch of gravestones that may contain rare equipment. You might find a room that traps you in if you don't find the exit fast enough. You might even find a room full of frogs!

True to the Roguelike Genre

Like Slay the Spire, each run carries nothing over from the previous runs. You start afresh each time, although you'll unlock new pieces of discoverable equipment as you play. At the end of each run, you'll see a summary of your run. Each run usually lasts less than 30 minutes, although most runs will probably end before the 20-minute mark.

My First Impressions

I've played Ring of Pain for a total of 7 hours so far and I'm enjoying it a lot! It scratches that roguelike itch that I have while managing to differentiate itself at a fundamental level from Slay the Spire and all the Slay the Spire clones out there. Although there is a decent amount of RNG involved in obtaining good enough equipment and stat boosts to last you through the game, I think the level of randomness is still manageable. Most of my deaths usually came from user error anyway.

It's a fun game that holds its own very well and I'm looking forward to playing it more in the future. I've finished a run successfully only once so far, and that's because I got some absolutely broken equipment and stat boosts.

After I finished the run, I was greeted with an additional difficulty option - Medium. I haven't had much luck beating the game on this new difficulty yet, so I'll be trying my best to do it in the next few days. Damn, some of the rooms are just brutal!

Conclusion

If you haven't given Ring of Pain a try and do like playing turn-based roguelikes, do give it a try. Although I don't think it has the same level of fun as Slay the Spire, it is great in its own right and will provide hours of enjoyment for sure. It's also currently included in the Stand with Ukraine Humble Bundle alongside 80+ other games and is also on sale on Steam!

Steam Store link: Ring of Pain

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Post Header image source: Ring of Pain Steam Store Page