Passtech Games and Focus Home Interactive have once more dipped their toes in the rogue-like pool with Curse of the Dead Gods; an three-quarters (often called isometric) viewpoint and fast paced combat while exploring an ominously dark dungeon, but is it any fun?

The short answer is yes. Slashing your way through hordes of undead monsters and floating mages with whatever weapon you have on hand is immensely satisfying especially when you pull off a full combo and get a huge spray of blood and a brief pause in the action to appreciate the fact you’ve just hit a monster hard enough to re-liquify their dessicated remains. You’re not limited to just slashing either; your equipment includes a primary, off-hand, and heavy weapons that you can mix and match to build a style that either works for your play style or feeds off other items buffs to create powerful effects. Main weapon attacks can be combo’d into the off-hand for an extra effect such as jumping back or knocking an enemy away or even stunning them.

Adding into this interwoven web of buffs are relics of which you can equip five. These generally have one or two effects and range from basic things like healing 1% of your health for each “greed” kill or refilling all your stamina on a successful parry to more item dependent buffs like extra poison or fire damage. Relics can also provide additional stats in one of three categories: Constitution, Dexterity, and Perception. Each increases various stats but we found that you can largely ignore the intricacies of their effects so long as you’re increasing their numbers during your run.

Unlike many rogue-likes however, stats aren’t everything. Your skill counts more towards your chances of success than having a powerful weapon or min-maxed statistics. Defensively you can parry or dodge and both are equally important. We begun to rely on the dodge mechanic for a long time as it was easier to execute but found that parrying, especially if you have buffs that affect it, can be more effective for clearing out rooms of enemies faster and easier.

Those who have played Slay The Spire will be familiar with the structure of each dive into the dungeon. A map screen displays nodes linked by lines and you choose a path one node at a time. Nodes contain brief levels with varying themes; weapons, relics, stats, gold, unknown, and champions. Each node pretty much contains what it says on the tin which makes choosing a beneficial route fairly straightforward but getting greedy can cost you in multiple ways.

The most obvious way it can cost is you getting hurt by enemies in the level. But far more interesting is the corruption mechanic: Exiting every level inflicts 20 points of corruption and you can incur additional corruption to buy weapons, stats, or relics from altars in place of their gold cost. Becoming corrupted will inflict up to five negative buffs that stay with you for the entire run. These debuffs change the way the game behaves; spike traps may become automatically triggered on a timer, gold on the ground may disappear after a short period, or defeated enemies may spawn multiple bats. Every choice around the corruption system is risk versus reward and depending on your skill you may not care about becoming corrupted or you may wish to avoid it entirely.

As usual with rogue-likes there is the availability of permanent upgrades at the end of each run that can be bough with skulls, a currency you’ll obtain from defeating powerful enemies. These permanent upgrades can let you start with lots of money, improve starting stats, or even give you new abilities such as Fury, a state in which you deal extra damage after being hit. You can also buy a one-use favour to re-roll items in an altar for a small amount of skulls which serves as a bit of a low stakes gamble.

Graphically, the game looks good. There’s a solid style consistent throughout and lighting, though basic, plays a large role with visibility shrinking and growing as torches are lit or fire spreads. Traps fade in and out of visibility depending on whether they’re in a lit area or not and some buffs can even apply in darkness or light. An introduction is presented in a comic style, this doesn’t carry through into the actual gameplay, but it works to provide a sense of light-hearted adventure much like Indiana Jones or The Mummy. Enemy attacks are well telegraphed with a bright flash that’s easy to identify in both light and dark and attack areas are lit in a bright orange that stands out in all circumstances save a fire.

Sound wise, Passtech have done a good job of conveying the dungeon’s age. Right from the introduction cinematic you’re treated to whispering that could be the monsters within or just the vagaries of the wind blowing through an ancient structure. Crumbling bridges, skewering spikes, and grinding stones all work well but we found monster and fire sound effects to be rather lacking. We wouldn’t want the monsters to be chatty or make constant sound but the undead are near silent and an audio cue for powerful attacks or the player being spotted would help sell the danger of these creatures far better than they currently are.

Curse of the Dead Gods fits in the same niche as other dungeon crawling rogue-likes such as The Binding of Isaac and A Wizard’s Lizard and, in our opinion, outdoes them both with responsive skill based gameplay that isn’t as reliant on receiving succour from RN-Jesus as other entries in the genre. The ability to choose the length of a run at the start also helps with fitting the game into play sessions of various lengths. It can become a bit of a drag on the longer settings; two dozen nodes in and same-y environments and enemies will begin to grate and grow boring as you nail down your tactics and end up playing almost on autopilot for most encounters. That said, Curse of the Dead Gods is a must-have for fans of this kind of game and with many features will work in progress we can only expect the game to grow and become more refined over time.