Enchanted Cave 2 - Indie rogue-like released

The Enchanted Cave 2, sequel to a popular roguelike flash game from 2010 by developer Dustin Auxier, has recently been released for PC & Mac.

The Enchanted Cave 2 is an RPG with heavy roguelike elements featuring a randomly generated 100-floor dungeon of monsters and treasure. During a run you'll find both normal treasure and special items called artifacts, with the difference being normal treasures last for that run only, while artifacts and other stat increases, exp, and gold you keep permanently to use on future runs when you successfully escape. The paid versions differ from the flash with 20 more floors + extended story, 4 playable characters, a new game+ feature, longer and higher quality music, higher resolution, and of course more npcs, items and monsters.

Features

• Randomly-generated floors of loot, monsters, and minibosses
• Secret areas hidden in the walls of the cave with loot + plot details
• A thriving town of tourists and eager explorers to talk to and trade equipment
• Over 300 items, equipment, spells, and crafting ingredients
• A soundtrack by the legendary Grant Kirkhope

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Reviews

Review @ RPGFan, 81%

The Enchanted Cave 2 is absolutely worth a look. It's a huge step forward from its fun but flawed predecessor and features a ton of new features, abilities, skills and more to keep you playing.

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Review @ TouchArcade, 4.5

The Enchanted Cave 2 is one of those games that pulled me in to the point that I lost track of time, unable to resist taking just one more dive into the cave. It's impressive that it manages to be a relatively gentle example of a dungeon crawler while still having enough teeth to keep from becoming a grind.

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Review @ Hardcoredroid

Overall, Enchanted Cave 2 offers loads of loot, dungeon strategies, and the tensions of a roguelike, without the punishing forced replaying found in many roguelike games.

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The game's free version is available as a flash game on Kongregate. The premium version includes playable characters to choose from, more NPCs, items, monsters, spells, longer music, fullscreen support and is available for PC and Mac on Steam, as well as for Android and iOS.

More information.

Looks nice.
While I like roguelikes I was a little sceptical when I saw the trailer, as it seems like a game you can put dozens of hours into.
But after skimreading the reviews it only seems to be a roguelite, meaning a checkpoint system for every 10 levels or so, which imho is a good decision.

Not too thrilles of playing anything in a browser though. Let's see if they release the premion version on steam as well.

While I am normally not a fan of manga graphics and weird enemies, this game's style comes with a kinda unique charme. Maybe it's the pixel graphics. In any case I don't find the graphics off putting as in japanese games.

Lovely design and excellent UI!

Kordanor said:

Not too thrilles of playing anything in a browser though. Let's see if they release the premion version on steam as well.

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Yes, rogue-lite is what I heard. Don't really know much about the distinction I have to admit. Rogue-lites are still rogue-likes, aren't they?

Also, the premium version was released on Steam actually, earlier this month, and is still part of the Summer Sale at 4$. Or did you mean the free version? The latter is only available as a flash version AFAIK.

Ah, cool. I didn't read about it and when I checked on steam I didn't find it as quicksearch autocomplete.

Well, regarding the term roguelike...there isn't really a fixed definition for that.
But for me and probably for most others roguelike implies permadeath, as this is one of the core elements. Some people wouldn't call it roguelike anymore due to that. Others wouldn't call it roguelike due to graphics better than ascii symbols.
There was a very nice discussion on Three Moves Ahead (Podcast/Audio) regarding roguelikes, which can be found here: https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/roguelikes

Some nice arguments which stuck into my head were:
-If you are unsure about the term roguelike, just add another "like" to it (so it's called roguelike-like). With just enough "like"s you can basically include all games there are.
-If I order a black coffee, I want a black coffee. If someone serves me a coffee saying "here is your black coffee with some milk and sugar in it", it isn't really black coffee anymore.

In the end it's important that the term transports the message I guess. But for me it is centered around permadeath, even if there is some meta progress. So I would rather call FTL or Invisible Inc. a roguelike than a game without permadeath.

The original, web only game from years ago was pretty solid and spiffy for what it was trying to do---so given that this sequel seems to be superior in pretty well every aspect...

Absolutely great to see a series emerge and grow in a pretty well universally positive direction as opposed to sidesteppin' or the dreaded 2 steps forward 1 step back.

I've been playing this on my tablet for a couple of weeks. It provides a nice challenge and the game mechanics are really well thought out. It's perfect for a phone/tablet in my opinion, but it's definitely a 'casual' roguelike.