This is a Work of Fiction

Link to game

Oh yes!  You can tell from the title and the title screen that we are dealing with an art game!  Its a puzzle art game, but its an art game nevertheless.  Hooray, yeah, jump for joy!  We have another pretentious art game!  A pretentious art game that has obscure, bullshit, puzzles too!

Ok, so, as the story goes, our friend Eli had a bunch of nonsense dumped on him in an email one day, being instructed to use as he wishes.  So he made this pretentious art game where said works of fiction fit in the game as well as a skinny dork in a bad suit and sneakers making banana daiquiris in pre-revolutionary France.

Or the line "When can the killer treasure a betting knight?" anywhere outside the Black Knight Review.

Now, I did think it was interesting that the first puzzle in the game was the title screen.  Really, to start the game you make that penguin head move click-wise.

Doesn't not look like a penguin head?

Ok, so once you've done that you get a text dump explaining the point of this game, and you go to the select your puzzle screen.

Yes I played ahead.  What kind of reviewer/critic/commentator would I be if I didn't?

So the puzzles are divided into five categories as you can see: route, river, riddle, rotary, and riot.  Each offers a corresponding puzzle, making think it's one of those games: someone's portfolio entry to show a potential employer what they can do with Adobe Flash and actionscript.

So, the puzzles in order.

Route is pretty straight forward: you draw a route out with the arrow keys to direct a ball to collect the coins on the map.  Sounds easy?  Well, the catch is that once you have all the coins, you have to direct the ball to a green spot that opens up... oh, and you can't cross where you have been before.

God dammit!

Now, fortunately, Eli was either feeling sorry for you for the horror that is Riot (more on that later) or the deadline to hand this into his teacher was looming very close because the Route puzzles actually get easier as the 'rounds' get cleared.  Or so I though, I've always had decent spacial awareness and could figure out maps.

River also has an interesting concept.  In River you have circles that produce coloured pixels and the tasks is to route them via little whirlwinds towards squares of the same colour.  The trick with this one is to align the finite amount of whirlwinds so that they fill the proper square.

Those whirlwinds are fucking bitches

This one is simple enough.  After dicking around with the whirlwinds you will be good for the next round and puzzle.

Riddle is a riddle.  I'm serious.

No shit!

Eli you lazy hack!  See what I meant earlier that this is a portfolio game or a class assignment?  "Oh look sir, I have figured out the art of parsing strings!  Give me a cookie!"  The sad thing is anyone with access to google (hint, anyone with a working internet connection, which is anyone playing this!) can cheat this if they have never heard of the overly vague riddle that was likely pulled from some riddle book somewhere.  Though looking up the answer to a well constructed riddle is like reading the walkthrough of a good point and click game: in that it invokes a "oh yeah, why didn't I think of that?" response.

Now, let me pull a River Song here (no I am not getting the picture, there have been enough references to Doctor Who for one post) and spoil the round one Riddle for you: its made of rope.

Rotary is quite an interesting concept.  You have shapes on a circle made of lines and the goal is to rotate the circle, switching out the lines as you do this, until all the shapes are the same colour.

I no lie

Now, I'd admit that I might play a puzzle game where this was it.  I mean, its enough of a brain buster that you will have to think about it, and its simple and intuitive enough that you could just pick it up.  Really, I got nothing more to say about Rotary.

Finally there's Riot.

It can go to hell!

Why?  Well, the premise of Riot is that you keep your cursor from touching the other shit flying on the screen while it turns puke green.

I get the sense that the point is to also imitate the balls as they come flying and falling, while you not touch the others, as if you do the green settles back down and you have to start over.  Believe me, its about has hard as it sounds, especially in later rounds... hard to the point of frustration.

With that aside, we get to the fiction part.  Yeah, you know, the part the game is advertising and shit?  I admit I was starting to forget about that, and you might have too from reading this.

Well, for completing a puzzle you 'unlock' a 'file' that was supposedly one of the files Eli got spammed in his inbox.  I mean, I'll start by saying that the actual 'files' are an interesting read.

Even if it gets into the realm of paranoia fuel from that silly old man in the blue box

Now, I have a question for Eli (assuming that he's reading this).  Of all the uses of these files, why did you think the best use of them was as an achievement system in a puzzle game collection?  No, I'm serious.  Now, personally if I had these files sent to me I would have likely made a point and click game using the files as cleverly constructed hints on how to proceed... but that's just me, and I'm assuming that someone actually spammed this guy with a bunch of files.  However, This is a Work of Fiction is showcasing a problem that a lot of games have, that the gameplay and story are mutally exclusive from one another.

I mean, to prove my point, if the game instead had an obnoxious achievement system like we were on XBLA or Kongragate would it make any difference to gameplay?  No, it wouldn't.  Instead we are forced to put up with gameplay to get to the story.  I might as well be reading a book or watching a video if I am doing that.

Course the music in this game is eerie, its atmosphere building, and its snuck in knocking and cracking to really make me jump out of my skin.  It also has a high turnover rate, changing itself enough that repeated loops don't go into the realm of annoying.  It also does not fit in at all in this game.

The music, by some guy named David, does fit with the writing of this files that go on about some thing called the "Influence" that has been playing with nature... seriously, how is this not good material for an adventure game?  Still, the soundtrack would have been better in a horror game, or something more fitting of the files.

Overall, this is an art game that drips with pretension.  By themselves, every element in the game is good: the puzzles are competently executed with a couple of exceptions, the music is amazing to listen to, and the files do tell an interesting story and give an air of mystery.  However, to compare it to an analogy that I used at the start of this, just picture the 'files' as pre-revolutionary France, the music as this weird skinny dork in a suit and sneakers that insists on being called the 'Doctor' and the puzzles in the game as steampunk robots.  Combined was The Man in the Fireplace, representing This is a Work of Fiction, and it sucked hard, even though it sounded awesome in principle.

Now I'm going to leave the comments to Whotards that are planning to explain to my how that didn't suck.

Endeavor

Link to game

Endeavor by zillx is going to be one of those games, by golly.  I mean, the game is a platformer, and platformers in the flash realm I tend to avoid because most of them are just broken.  Broken as in either platformer hell, or as in the platforming mechanics are awkward... look, long story short a computer keyboard does no justice to platformers for I've always felt that they faired better on consoles with a buttoned controller designed for the fluid movement of thumbs along buttons and analog sticks that a computers arrow key's just don't allow for.

So, why in hell did I take a risk with this?  Well, in the words of Yathzee "I am a unbiased critic (shut up I am) and I should give everything a chance to surprise me."  And by golly was I surprised!

The story goes that you are a mountain dwarf living in one of those colonies being managed by one of those super geeks that can figure out and play Dwarf Fortress.  One day you are tasked by a dead relative via their will (ah, that gaming trope!) to go get some mcguffin.

And get no help from your neighbours

At some point, after hopping your way out of Mt Tutorial you find yourself falling into hell... I assume.  I mean, if that is hell than I don't understand the big deal fundamentalist Christians make about hell and how not following God's law will get us there...

and Malor seems to be a happening kind of guy.

So, once I fall into the afterlife and learning that I'm in the pristine hell I am tasked by this dude named Malor to go gather up some mcguffin for he/she/it in exchange for getting me back up in the surface.

Far enough.  So, platformer controls are straight forward: arrow keys to move, X to jump and C to talk to the various dwarves and mutants that we come across throughout this adventure.

Like that... wtf... conspiring against its mates.

Now, you might be wondering what that blue bar up there is for.  Well, I'll tell you: its an endurance bar.  You need that thing climb ladders, jump, ledge grab (yes, you can do that) swim and shoot thunder!

A dwarf swimming?  rotfl!

Yeah, you can grab a ledge, leap off it, and grab another ledge.  This sounds awesome, except this wastes that blue bar, and if its depleted you fall back to the ground, which makes this darkening effect and freezes you in place if you fall from a far enough height.  While the bar bounces back when your on land, this is used to make you do certain tasks in order, for better or worse.  This means your going to have to collect fruit that ups your endurance.  Murder will also do that once you can zap everything with lighting!

Look at that bee, being all smug despite the fact it can't hurt you!

Now, this game work is a very diverse one.  You will end up in ice land, hill land, pillar land, cave land, volcano land, and jungle land.  All fun and good there!  Each place with its own, ambient music to put you in the mood for epic fun!

Ice land is icy

Hill land hilly

and volcano land is... lava-ie.  HeHe

Now, the game was evilly designed to make the player reply it at least twice.  How?

Its River Song.  That means spoiler territory!

So, there is an arching storyline here that can yield you two different endings.  If you play the game as you think you are suppose to, well, you will get all the gems and Malor will ride you back up home in a beam of light.  Keep going and, you remember that spot at the start of the game you couldn't get to?  Ok, you can totally get up there, you grab a sword, given instructions to kill Malor with it... what a fuck?  The guy that has been helping us the entire time?  That bastard!

Ok, so change of plans.  We go and kill Malor... but as you leave the ground shakes and you get Malor taunting you about how you got tricked into helping an evil deity and the game ends.

Course, when I got that ending I felt that there was something missing, so I went back and tried not to pick up the mcguffin so that Malor wouldn't become all powerful.  Well, I grab as much fruit as I can get and kill as many innocents as I can to get as much endurance as possible and I climb that big fat wall at the west-most region of the map.  I do this to find an item that gives me infinite endurance... so the slaughter becomes pointless.

Sorry

So I get to that point again, grab the sword, be instructed to kill, and Malor tried to invoke his power, and demands that you not kill it.  I totally went back down and stuck my sword into Malor.

It looks more like shoving the Master Sword back into the Pedestal of Time

And then I get a melancholy "I killed the deity, but I've killed fourteen.  I don't deserve to return above."

I can't win!

Course, at any rate, this game is platformer heaven with the focus on exploration and collecting.  While the keyboard controls are awkard as they usually are for this kind of game it isn't quite as bad.  I did get a sense of flying from this game, and that is a good sign for a platformer.  Not for those of us who want barrels of gore in our experience, but it is worth a peek otherwise.

GemCraft: Labyrinth

http://armorgames.com/play/10317/gemcraft-labyrinth

Of course, the magical genre of flash game known as the Tower Defense game, where you build towers along a path to stop monsters from getting to the other end of the tower and wreaking your shit.  Now, like any popular genre of any game, there is a degree of stagnation due to the market being flooded with such games that, sadly, play the same, just with different graphics and aesthetic.

Then came GemCraft, just when one thought the genre went all the places that it could.

Now, I could do a write up on all the games in the GemCraft series (GemCraft chapter 1, GemCraft chapter 0 the sequel cuz Game in a Bottle felt like fucking around with everyone's filing system) but it is really pointless as Game in a Bottle simply rehashed the same game ah la Nintendo.

So, I'm picking on the most recent game in the trilogy: Labyrinth.

Let me start by saying that there is an evil in many flash games that exist from mmos and social games: the Skinner Box.  In laymen's terms this simply refers to mechanics in a game that are designed not to increase enjoyment or immerse the player into an experience, but to compulse* the player to keep playing for the sake thereof.  There is a large amount of reasons why a developer would do this... one being so you will stare at the banner ads on the site longer or have you come back to replay the game so that you can look at more ads.

Its cynical, yes, but unfortunately Games in a Bottle have figured out the art of the Skinner box and the GemCraft games have been designed accordingly.

Like a leveling system... in a TD game!

Now, heres the deal with the game.  You are some wizard in training who goes off on some journey to reclaim some sort of mcguffin... look, you are going to forget the backstory of this fast as you're running about from stage to stage revealing in that one mechanic that separates GemCraft from the other Tower Defense games that are out there.

You see, in the game, the 'towers' are merely placeholders for gems that you craft and can place onto these towers, and its these gems that shoot at the monster as they make their way to your magical orb that is used to make the gems... I guess.  Point is you defend the orb from the monsters, that is all you really need to care about.

That ball is your life!

Now, the neat thing about the mechanics is that it allows for combining gems to yield more powerful gems, and you can have gems of different colours combined, with a gem that inherits from the other gems.  Now, as each gem has a special that separates it from other gems, the strategies get interesting at times, and the ability to swap gems on the fly can be useful.

Now, GemCraft chapter one played more like your basic TD game only with the options to combine gems and put them into tower platforms.  The sequel chapter zero added the option to build traps, which would boost the special ability of the gem placed inside at the expense of decreased firepower.  As you play you will figure out which towers would benefit from that and which would be better off in a tower.  Some maps in zero would also have shrines in them: place a gem inside and enemies die.

The shrines and the traps are back!

Labyrinth adds something known as amplifiers.  These are tower-like structures that you build next to other towers and traps to boost them based on the gem inside the amp and in the other structure(s).

That gem in the center is god!

So, off all the things I can say about this game, at least there is some degree of depth to be had.

Now, like in the past games, the maps can have shit already built on it, so the player can use the structures to their advantage.  Course, sometimes you will still have to build things onto the map, though as an added bonus you can build shrines now, unlike the past title where you had to hope that the map maker was being really nice to you the day that map was designed.

Now, I mentioned earlier on that the Skinner box is implied, and fuck I meant it!  I mean, the game series established the routine of Pokemon-esque grinding that you have to do in this game, and Labyrinth is no exception.  In Labyrinth, the stages are connected to eachother like the various grid point in a maze.

You'd think it was almost like a Labyrinth

As par with the course, when you select a stage, you get a menu with various options you can select and check off that make the game harder, but give you more experience that goes to leveling when you complete the level.

How much of a badass do you feel?

Now, experience is important because enough of it will make you level, and leveling gives you points that you can put towards skills that improve various skill that you have.  Yeah... everything from how much mana you have at the start of a level to how much better a certain coloured gem does uses these skills.

Kinda like the fallout perks screen

Now, the neat thing about these skills is you can reallocate your skill point at will, usually at the start of a stage, where ever you feel is best for a given map.

Mana in this game is like money in other TD games, though there is a cap as to how much mana you have.  Mana is also depleted if monster reach your orb.  If a monster gets to your orb and you don't have enough mana to 'banish' it, the game is over.

Now, I bet you have noticed those locks on some of the stuff.  Well, the development staff at one point decided that they like food and owning their own home, so they created a 'premium' edition that you have to pay for to remove the locks.  Now, that is a growing trend as it is a common practice for development teams to launch a demo of their game in flash and require you to pay for the full downloadable version as either an executable on your computer or as an app on a smartphone.

Now, do I recommend this game?  Well, let me rant about the skinner box for a second.  Doesn't it feel weird to grind in a Tower Defense game?  I know there are other TD games that don't allow you to level towers until they have destroyed enough monsters, but it isn't the same as actual leveling and skill mechanics.  It leaves me the same feeling as hearing about people fretting about their levels... in Halo!

So, if you can stand the grinding this game will keep you entertained, but if not you will get bored of playing the same level for the thousandth time trying to best you score, for your total experience points are the totals of your high score on all the maps (which is smart if you think about it for a sec).  Really, like in many TD games, your mileage is going to very, more so here.

*To do something by compulsion.  Yes, I made up that word.  Deal with it.

The Black Knight

http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/the_black_knight

When can the killer treasure a betting knight?  Here, me thinks.

Well, I've review Infinite Ocean on Monday and in the air of reviewing The Infinite Tower last week this week goes to this game, The Black Knight.  A game about a valiant knight that goes out doing valiant things.

... kidding!  No seriously!  You play the role of a henchmen that works for a loan shark that runs around beating the ever living shit out of people to get money to give to your boss.

Well, ok, fine.  You play this brute who is the title character.  The king is pissed that people are not paying their taxes cuz he, like, needs a new swimming pool or something.

Actually the queen needs a new handbag.  Sire, what did you do?

So, you are tasked to, well, beat the taxes out of the peasantry.  The harder you hit them the more they will pay you.  Pretty self explanatory.

Controls are simple enough.  Your character automatically walks to the right of the screen and you click the mouse to swing you weapon at various people, foreground objects, birds, and shops that you walk past.  Timing is key, as while you can hold the mouse button after a successful hit to charge for an extra powerful swing, missing and hitting the air disables you for a period of time.

Hit everything but the witch!  She'll turn you into a pig!  I'm serious!

Now, I gather that some of you might have figured out that this sounds very simple... maybe too simple, and I can assure you that this is all you do.  Not that there is a problem, except after a while everything starts looking the good damn same.

I mean, which stage is your favourite one?

The sunny day in the town?

The countryside?

Or the night out at the castle... what a second!  I though nobility was except from paying taxes... oh fuck it.

Course, I complain about this, but I also complained about the lack of variety in Infinite Tower, and that was a game that was even more simple than this.  So I am happy that the developer at least gave us different backgrounds, and for what its worth the music for each 'stage' is different, alongside the appropriate aesthetic changes for all the sprites in the game to match the background.

This game was made before everyone had an iPhone I might add.

Though I think its worth mentioning that its kinda fun to listen to people utter everything from "Owie" to "you nasty brute" and even the rather funny "nice shot"  when your smacking them upside the head.

Now, one final point I would like to bring is the fact that this game has an upgrade system.  No, I'm serious.  Aside from an amulat that gives you more gold per hit, a tonic that makes you hit harder, and therefore get more gold, and oils that reduces cooldown for missed swings, you can also upgrade your weapon to hit harder and further.

Which is all fair and good, until you realize that this system is broken.

I'd bet you can get the mace by stage three

Meanwhile you are sitting on a mountain of gold and you have no idea what to do with it other than simply stalk pile it so you can keep playing just to see how much gold you can get before the game is over and the king sacks you.

Now, the verdict.  The game is about as mindless as a Michael Bay movie and about as tasteful as the School Shooter mod for Half-Life, where someone took a kring-inducing scenario and tried to make it 'fun.'  For better or worse, this game's fun fades along with the novelty of playing a bad guy and becomes a boring and forgettable experience.  In fact, I wouldn't be talking about it except I needed an excuse to post an authentication sentence for some service.

The Infinite Ocean

I'm going to reiterate what I said in my review of The Day, some art games are genuine art while others are the product of a hack code monkey using pretense to make us think their garbage is acceptable.  Now, the awesome thing about this game, The Infinite Ocean, is that, while its totally an art game, it doesn't really sell itself as an art game.  This is a good thing for those of us that run away from art games like they are the plague because we hear 'art game' and think "pretentious hack code monkey."

You see, this is an art game wrapped in the more safe point and click genre, which isn't a bad route to go at a development standpoint: if you're good as a pixel artist but suck at programming making 'buttons' and 'scenes' in Adobe Flash doesn't require much in the name of Actionscript.  But wait, there is a hate on point and click games as there have been many poorly made point and click games out there with crappy storylines and no sense of logic to the 'puzzles' within.

So, to the million dollar question: should you play this game?  To properly answer this I will have to look at it from two difference angles.  Angle one being does this work as a point and click adventure title, and the other being does it hold high artistic merit... that an art game should have.

As a Point and Click game

You start the game as some dude with amnesia... yeah, that trope has popped up yet again, who is in this room with computer screens and stuff.

This room in fact

To take a moment to comment on the colour scheme: its black and white.  I'll get back to that later.

Anyways, gameplay involves opening doors, reading computer terminals, finding items, and combining passwords to open up more computer terminals... wait, what?  Yeah, whenever your reading a computer terminal you can scan what you are reading for passwords, or fragments of passwords that you can later put into a computer terminal, to not only get more passwords and password fragments, but to also read up on hints and act one plotline points.

You can get passwords simply by reading paper

As par with the genre you are gathering items and using item A on surface B.  Now, in a bad point and click adventure game, because a bad point and click game uses monkey-moon logic, you find yourself rubbing everything against everything until there is a reaction that advances the game.  Now, are you doing that here?  Actually, not really.  For the most part what you have to do next is pretty intuitive... that is if your willing to read the hints on the computer terminals and on scraps of paper littering the various rooms in what looks like a bunker of sorts.  Even in the password hunt you don't have to scan everything you read, as it will be made clear in the message that there is a password to obtain.

Read this for Autism Spectrum Disorder joke!

Now, there is a degree of backtracking that occurs in the game, but nothing that would make you cursing early Metroid games for popularizing the concept of backtracking... as some of us aren't into that sort of thing.

Now, the music does give an eerie vibe that accompanies the grayscale colour palette with the only problem being that it loops to the point of annoyance.  Sure, hearing a choir of monks chanting has this spirited quality to it for the first while, but, like most pieces of music, wasn't designed for a computer game and becomes annoying after the hundredth iteration.

Overall, as a game it works.  If you hate art games this game's wrapper is well done enough that you wouldn't notice that you're playing an art game.

As an Art Game

Now, for those of you with a taste for the 'finer' things in life, or are a pretensious douche, I can assure you that this game has material in it that is proof that games can be high art.

The point and click mechanics really have much to offer, as not everything that is to be read is intended to be a hint in how to get into the next room (or a place to get more passwords).  You see, there are many things that this game uses to tell a narrative, and a pretty dark one at that.

There are many references to the game title in this game

For one thing, the game tells you to 'ignore the walls,' which makes sense as in the walls of text the game throws at you tell you about a sentient artificial intelligence known as SDGS, who upon first glance is a precursor to GLaDOS from Portal.

SGDS would do well making demotivational posters

SDGS actually becomes a sympathetic character: as sympathetic as the other characters: like Jerry for instance.  The story goes that this development team is contracted to create a sentient AI for the sake of achieving such a goal.  At some point the project gets hijacked by the government and the team was made to weaponize it.

Now, I used the word 'characters' in a loose sense as you do not run into another person while you play the game.  The characters, SDGS, Jerry, Leonard, Alaxandra, Jullianne, John, and General Fields are all told through the notes and computer terminals, each coming to life and serving a narrative purpose.

As I was playing the game, it dawned on me that this game was advocating peace and tolerance, using General Fields as a strawman for those of us who think war is a good thing and that we must go to arms to protect the world from the 'bad people' in whatever form they take, the development team being passive aggressive resisters, and SDGS logically concluding that war is horrible and to be avoided at all costs.  And while I can't be sure, I think the PC was Jerry the codemonkey all along.

Overall, I have to say that this game was the closest to a spiritual moment I've ever had, and I encourage people to play it for that reason alone.  However, I understand that the above statement is going to scare some of you off, so if you must, play it because its a competent point and click adventure game with a solid storyline and doesn't require you to follow a walkthrough to complete.  It you hate reading I don't think you should be playing this, however, as you will have to do a lot of it to appreciate the plotline within.

Infinite Tower RPG

Ever wanted a game that played itself?  Ever wanted to play a game that had several different classes to choose from, but only one that worked?

Congratulations: Infinite Tower is for you!

A game that is clearly a demo game for an iPhone app, the premise behind Infinite Tower is really simple: you are some sort of adventurer going up some tower teeming with monsters and the goal is to travel as many 'floors' of this tower as possible before developing a bad case of dead.

The game is a bit of a simulator, where you pick a character class, and watch him automatically go to battle with one of four monsters, a monster encounter representing a floor of the tower, until the character levels up, which you then go to a screen where you make adjustments to his stats, and sometimes buy him stuff that makes his stats more valueable in one of three areas: attack, defense, speed.  There is also a health stat that can have points assigned to it.

This should be awesome, except there is a major balance problem:  THERE IS ONLY ONE GOOD CLASS IN THE GAME!!!

Hint: this one

Now, in theory Ickabob could be any of four classes he wants to be.  Rogues hit really fast, Axemen hit really hard, Knights can take a lot of abuse, and Paladins can hit hard and take alot of abuse: though they can't hit as hard as Axemen and they can't take as much abuse as Knights.  In theory Ickabob could tweek himself and his stats according to which class he is.

In theory.

In practice however, I couldn't get a character of any class other than Paladin past the fiftieth floor.

Why, well, lets go into the battle mechanics for a sec.  You see, combat works with Ickabob swinging at the speed interval alloted by the speed stat, hitting them with the damage that the attack stat stats is about right onto on of four monsters that are doing the same thing, their damage being mitigated by whatever your defense stat feels right.

The monsters being the knight with a lot of defense, the skeleton who moves really fast and the orc that hits really hard.  Now, these monsters have a strong stat, a mediocre stat, and a shit stat.  Which is nice, as the selectable classes all have the same thing...

Oh... wait

From gameplay experience, the rogue was turned to chunky salsa by orcs really fast, the knight was getting their armor trashed by other knights and the axeman got swarmed by skeletons.  Now, the paladin is, well, well rounded compared to the rest of the herd, with speed being a shit stat but Attack and Defense both being awesome!

Ickabob vs Inakal: the paladin might actually die here

So, with less weakness than the other classes, Ickabob the Paladin was actually quite capable of making his way well past floor one hundred in the tower.

Now, as you progress, the game is paused whenever you level to up your stats.

Paladin stats: overpowered

During the progression I decided to divide my stat points between Attack and Defense, with speed as the dump stat.  You see, the paladin fears no one for any one of the monsters could do me in, it just depended on unleveled my stat assignments were.

To further the madness, every so often there is a shop that pops up that you can sink your arbitrarily gained gold into to boost the stat effects further.

We need to be even more powered

Course, the class you choose does give you bonuses to your stats as you progress, but these really help too, especially for those stats where you get no bonuses at all regarding your class.  Now, you get a bonus for health regardless of class, but you can't buy an upgrade to health (how would you do that?) but the other stats are more variant.  So, the paladin needs shoes, because that is the only stat they have that gets no bonus.  The over powered bastards.

Feel the power!

Ok, so I've established that if you want to waste your life to get on the leader board you should be selecting Paladin as your class, got it folks?

So, I was able to get Ickabob the Paladin to floor 216 before he met his gruesome demiss.

Pictures or it didn't happen

And when I went to submit the score, there is someone on machi.com that got to floor 10000!  I guess he wanted it more badly than I did... or he hacked it, I don't know.

Now, if there is ever going to be an Infinite Tower RPG 2, here are some things I would like the developers to consider for it.

One, give all classes a strong stat, a mediocore stat, and a shit stat.  What those stats are is what varies the classes.  I mean, the paladin was over powered because he had two strong stats while everyone else has only one strong stat.  This will add balance to the game.

Two, vary up the monsters already.  I was getting sick of Bones, Greenie and Tin-Emo at around floor seventy-five on my first paladin run.  Maybe vary up the floors while your at it, with, I don't know, themed rooms that cycle through periodically with like different music.

While on topic of the music, for heavens sake!  I'll give the credit that whomever pick/mixed the background music understood enough that there should be high change over in a tone that is planed to be looped over and over again, but this could be taken a step further.  It could be simple swapping of midi instruments every so often, or do what Gunz did and switch the background music periodically.

While still on the music, there is a fun thing you can do with it.  Play a game and come back and play another one!  The tone plays over itself!  It actually sounds kinda cool... developers, are you taking notes here!

Course, overall, I didn't expect this game to wow me, or give me a deep experience like The Day did, but as a low energy, simple, strategy title, it could stand to use some improvements... like nerfing the fucking Paladin!

Oh, and I know someone is going to dispute my "Paladins are overpowered" claim, and I don't know, claim they got to floor 300 with a rogue or something... for you out there, that's what the comments are for.  I am curious as to how you did it, but I think I found a First Order Optimal strategy with the Paladin... and those in a single player game are not a sign of good design.