Kalevala
The game, as the name might suggest, is heavily based on the Finnish epic poetry Kalevala and the mythologies surrounding it. The action takes place in a game board where you throw dice to move, attack and eventually delve deeper to the depths of Tuonela.
The game is still very much unfinished and under constant development Albeit a lot slower now that my summer vacation is over. It should be fully playable and relatively bug free though with a hefty handful of different monsters to fight, few unique bosses and dozens and dozens of different items to flesh your character build with. The five different playable characters all have some unique events dedicated to them only.
Not much of a tutorial there yet and probably not even that much needed (I guess we'll see now). Just point and click the dice and then pick a direction (WASD and arrow keys can be used here too to make it easier).
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
when it asked "i am an odd number. take away one letter and I become even. who am I?" I answered "7" but it thought I was incorrect somehow.
If I remember correctly, you need to type the word. Should have probably accepted the numeral too.
Hi hi hi! First of all, what a banger. I've been trying all of your games lately and this one may as well be my second favorite after the tarot! (wish the sudoku one was balanced, it would be my gold pick in a heartbeat).
Sadly... I think I softlocked?
Yeah, looks like it is. Pike’s turn and it’s just stuck there doing nothing?
I think the tarot one is probably my fav too. Been playing dailies of it since last december almost each day and still haven’t gotten too bored of it.
Indeed - it rolled the dice and then just. Stopped.
The possessed crossbow hurts every movement if no damage was done.
Chisel + Wisdom + Two technical dice = A slightly too-long turn...
Apart from the 15 minutes using all of these up, I'm really enjoying the game. Difficulty +3 is challenging enough - haven't managed to get the right item combination and steamroll it like the earlier difficulties (yet?).
Oh nice! I’ve only beat +1 myself. Yeah I really need to figure out a way to fix those overy high throw turns. Maybe just allowing to end turn mid movement if there is 10+ on the counter.
Or perhaps allow ending movement if there are no enemies left alive? Also, I hate to suggest breaking my own strategy, but I think the Piece of Sampo shouldn't work after clearing a level - I won last time because I spent a long time rolling 7s after each level to buy everything in the shops.
Haha yeah, I’m well aware of that tactic too. Not sure if and how I wanna fix/discourage it. That would indeed be the simplest fix and there are some other items that could use the same treatment Might need to buff the item in other ways as it might become underpowered.
Early on I did think of some ways of not letting the player linger on levels too much after clearing kinda like the ghost in Spelunky.
Very interesting game. Kind of reminds me of the other game similar to this—name escapes me—and I find this quite fun. The guy with the flaming sword seems like the best character in the game (in my opinion).
The item pick up in chests on the first few floors seem to have a large impact on run success.
The crossbow character is very powerful if you get the right combination of power ups.
It reminds me a little of Dicey Dungeons but a lot more RNG dependent.
Yeah, the first few pickups indeed make or break the run. There are some crazy powerful combinations and I kinda like it that way even though some of them outright break the game and trivialize the difficulty. But I don't like how it could introduce a "loot 1st chest & restart" tactic. Been thinking of a way to discourage that kinda like in Slay the Spire where you get a better start if you've reached the first boss on your last run. Slay the Spire is by the way the biggest source of inspiration on this game as it was the roguelite I was playing the most around the time I started the development on this. Never really played Dicey Dungeons (yet, on my todo list, love other Terry's games) but I can see the similarities.
The flame sword, crossbow and the hammer/apron are all very potent starting items with some powerful and well scaling interactions. I don't really hate that the different characters have kinda different difficulties but maybe the other two should be nudged closer to these power levels.
I admit I have restarted runs after getting the first chest, random encounter and shop. Being offered "Madness" and a small amount of gold in a chest, finding bread that removes 5HP and not being able to afford anything in the shop just isn't a great start.
Some encounters on the first floor (like someone demanding money) can influence whether anything worthwhile is available at the shop.....although beating someone that demands money is really low probability and I needed slime's help when I have pulled that off.
Setting up the available equipment pool on the first couple of floors to have something beneficial guaranteed might be one way to handle it. Each character definitely benefits from certain equipment more than others.
Powerful combinations are a bunch of fun. Shawl and Shaman Drum or Shawl, Chisel and Wisdom both lead to infinite HP.
It's a very satisfying game, all in all.
A bit more feedback:
By floor 3 the large slime had critical dice and they seemed to roll them quite frequently, more than 16% of the time. That could be perceived confirmation bias and the RNG was just doing its thing. It was a little overpowering when it happened.
When the floor has been cleared and there are no items left and no traps, it would be nice to just have the option to descend to the next level. It's a minor inconvenience to have to make you way around the board to the exit.
There were a few times I unintentionally went down to the next floor when attacking enemies. That is probably by design because the count goes down as you attack and I think the turn ended with the exit being the last count. It made me very careful when entering any combat near an exit.
The Mother's Love upgrade didn't seem to work every time. I was on floor 7 or so with 5 hit points, got killed and didn't re-spawn and I had not died on that floor (or at all) previously. It may have been that the with attacks coming in quick succession I didn't notice the respawn and did in fact get get re-spawned and then re-killed. Perhaps a notification on when you Mother's Love gets used would be informative.
I did get soft locked (perhaps due to the kantele?):
The enemy had no available dice and just sat there. There was another run where I locked all the dice on a slime but it didn't soft lock, so I'm not sure if it's kantele or something else.
I did notice that when I came to a junction like this:
I didn't have the ability to go up even though it was highlighted.
I also noticed on spike traps that certain directions that should have been available were not even if I wasn't trying to go back the way I came. This below spike trap space never let me go left:
A quality of life addition might be the ability to click on the available highlighted spot to move, especially when there were a lot of branches in the path. The mouse is used to select the dice so mouse for movement makes some sense. I know you can click on the arrows. If the available spots were still visible after dice selection, clicking on the highlighted spot just seems like it would be intuitive.
With a technical dice I was having a really "interesting" time figuring out where I was going to end up because of the large numbers available. I say it might be a quality of life addition because it currently does add some difficulty because you have to plan moves a little carefully when there are complex path arrangements.
I parked myself on a enemy spawn point and kept on ending turn because I had the Shaman Staff that heals on 1 (yes..I was cheesing). My kantele notes were still visible after moving away and I could not interact with the shop. The exit worked fine, though.
Oh thanks a lot for these! 🙏 I will surely investigate these and fix them for the next version.
No problem!
The antlers also have kind of a neat bug. If an enemy dies on their own turn (spikes/bandanna/companion) you get a dice given to you that you can use while the enemy is still having their turn and can move around and interact.
Shawl, Chisel and age make for an interesting combination. I had 199 max HP.
Shawl, Chisel and Wisdom is even better. Infinite health and crazy dice values.
Locked on the Pike. At this point I had around 8 dice and was just re-rolling to allow the kokko to inflict damage.
This is really great stuff and a lot of fun. It had a little bit of a learning curve at first with how the equipment affected things, but the tool tips explained things well enough to be able to figure it out.
I liked the fact that monsters would attack each other and that they received damage on spikes. Not so much that they could pick up gold because it made gold feel a little scarce.
That didn't make it too difficult because of the abundant chests and random encounter power ups. It did make the shop a little underwhelming because I rarely had enough gold to buy anything and it was a bit of a tease.
It reminded me slightly of another game that was a bit more challenging but had some similarities, Duntris...and you created that, too :)
I liked the difficulty level of this one...it felt more casual and didn't have to grind at all.
Beat the Pike!
Again, great stuff :)
Sweet! Good to hear that it's enjoyable and that the difficulty curve is pretty decent. I'm pretty sure you're the first person other than me to beat it. I did indeed try to make it pretty easily approachable difficulty wise. Balanced the difficulty so that I'd be able to beat at least half of the runs. Really hard to evaluate how it reflects to first timers (especially as I've had pretty much non-existent testers with this one) but seems like it's getting there.
The gold that enemies pick up is added to the amount they drop on death. And the the gold amounts is a difficult thing to balance. I tried to make it so that you'd maybe be able to purchase an item every few floors or so. And of course more if you are powerful enough to stay and clear the floors. Which in the other hand makes you even more powerful and it spirals completely out of control. 😅
Thanks for playing and the feedback! ❤️