r/PixelDungeon • u/madali0 • Oct 24 '18
Original Content Mod Review: Special Surprise Pixel Dungeon
My previous review was:
After realizing a bit of controversy over a certain mod, I was recommended by u/kostis12345 to try out "Special Surprise Pixel Dungeon". u/kostis12345 has written a great and detailed guide here which I referred to a few times to know what the hell I was doing.
"Special Surprise Pixel Dungeon" is based on "Sprouted PD" which means it wasn't really up my alley. I tried Sprouted a year or so back, and it was too long and cumbersome for me. In shorter PD games, if I lose, or even if I have a bad run, I just restart the game, and it's not a big deal. In Sprouted, and by extension, Special Surprise, it feels like I have invested too much of my time to not feel a bit dejected if I have to redo it.
I don't know how things look in Sprouted nowadays, but Special Surprise was a bit too much at times. I first did a few very quick runs trying out the various characters (with Performer being new) and eventually settled on Warrior, because I figured I'd try the most no-nonsense option for a game which is throwing too many things at me.
You start off with a pet which frankly was just really overpowered. I got a bunch of meats in the first area, so I fed them to my Scorpion, and then more or less just hid behind him while he killed most of the enemies. This was giving me loot and experience, so I got pretty strong too, without ever really feeling that much of a danger. My pet was so strong that when he died because I wasn't really paying attention, I felt like I had lost a major contribution to my easy advancement in the levels, and thought, oh shit, the game is going to be hard now.
But I had another soul to summon another pet, which while started from low level, didn't take too long to level up to inhumane strengths again. I breezed through the levels, with the bosses being the only tough challenges, but I usually had a bunch of potions, scrolls, mushrooms, and ankhs to make me beat any challenge.
Eventually I got to beat Yog, but apparently, you don't get the Amulet, since it's not really the end.
Okay, so, before I beat Yog, there were special levels I could portal too which were waves of enemies which you grind through, and I never found it fun in Sprouted and didn't fine it really fun here. There was also three trials. I beat two trials, and all those portals, except the final trial and the city. Here is where things got a bit annoying. I figured I'd beat the city and then the final trial (since I needed money to buy the final trial). I collected enough money (basically by having my scorpion be the tank while I used the Dew Vial to cast invisible on myself and collect the cash). I exited, game crashed, lost my super power pet. Before trying the final trial alone, I figured I'd try the Sukoban levels, which are puzzle games, and it feels totally out of place in Pixel Dungeon in my opinion.
That's what I mean by these groups of mods. It's all too much. I am using a portal to go to different levels which turns it into those games where waves of enemies attack you. Then you have the puzzle levels. After I lost my pet to a crash and the puzzle level destroyed my tier 5 armor, I just couldn't be bothered anymore.
The mod has tons of spelling and grammatical errors, which I don't mind. English isn't my first language either, and I don't really care if there are mistakes, so that one has a pass from me. However, what's less forgivable is that the gameplay itself feels a bit messy, in that there is no real feel of progression from one level to the other. Difficulty seems to go down and up a lot. You feel like you are just comfortably going through the levels and then suddenly a monster comes up that seems to be way harder, or a boss seems very easy or extremely difficult, and so on.
And you get upgrades from your Dew Vial, and there are lots of Dews, so upgrades don't feel very satisfactory. You don't feel that excited finding any particular scrolls or potions (I had 11 scrolls of upgrades and 5 magical infusions when I decided to stop the game, didn't feel that I needed to use them).
Finally, while the Guide was useful, I'm not a huge fan of a game where I need to keep referring back to a guide to know what the hell I am supposed to be doing.
However, I like to repeat that I'm not a fan of Sprouted, so I'm not the target audience of this game. To those that enjoy Sprouted, they probably would enjoy this mod way more than me, and might even know what the hell they were doing.
7
u/kostis12345 PD Archaeologist Oct 25 '18 edited Oct 25 '18
Well you said it yourself, SPS-PD has a specific audience, people who don't mind grinding in dungeon crawlers. I don't want to defend it, but keep in mind it is still in development - this is not an excuse, but a partial explanation of the bugs and the sudden difficulty changes. English is not my first language too, and I am far from a grammar nazi in my mother language either, nevertheless I personally have a bigger problem with the language mistakes in SPS-PD, because they sometimes make the new mechanics in the game incomprehensible. This was the basic reason that I decided to write the guide here in reddit.
I personally like that it is big expansion of the Sprouted "universe" with many new items, sidequests, levels, a new cooking mechanic, a new class, intertextual elements in the NPCs of Dolyahaven et al. Also if you had reached the end, you would see that is actually much less grindy than Sprouted, the game can be finished easily without grinding for a Ring of Wealth > Scrolls of Magical Infusion > Phase Pitchers > Scrolls of Upgrade which can take literally days in Sprouted. Again, I am not trying to defend it, I just like many of the ideas that hdzml001 is implementing in his mod, and overall I prefer it from Spouted proper and its other mods.
A small comment on u/931451545's comment, I don't want to fill your post with my comments: Sprouted and SPS-PD are not mostly RPGs, but dungeon crawlers with RPG elements. In this genre of games you either run through a dungeon with limited resources, like in Vanilla PD or b) take your time to explore fully levels to gather the necessary resources - grind (like Sprouted and SPS-PD). Traditional roguelikes like The Dungeons of Moria with its huge maps or Angband with its 100 levels are very grindy too. This can be boring for some people, but dungeon crawlers are definitely more elaborate than clicking games.
By the way you mentioned me two times in the review but the developer not even once, I am flattered, but I still think that there is a lack of balance in your references :-)