A demo code was provided, and many thanks to Hero Craft PC.
The dungeon crawler and the roguelike are some of my favorite video game niches. Lord Ambermaze, a new indie game under development from Potata Company, is looking to take on some of the best bits of both those niches. It’s a roguelike — or mystery dungeon, if you prefer — in how it plays. Each move you make progresses time in the dungeon, allowing for a tactical approach when enemies threaten to overwhelm you. But the prologue demo for Lord Ambermaze proves it’s taking a slightly different yet still familiar angle: each room is a puzzle for you to solve.
The demo level is a meaty chunk of the game that took me about an hour to beat, taking me through dozens of rooms and figuring out the gimmicks of several different enemy types in order to beat them without getting my own rump, um, you know. So, what do I think overall? Honestly, I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with this, with a couple of minor caveats.
The Maze of Lord Ambermaze
If you’ve played a roguelike before, Ambermaze’s trials will be familiar to you. If you haven’t, the mysterious dark lord has prepared a perfect tutorial for you, courtesy of our hero, Zeyn, regaling his little sister with his tale to date. The only major difference between this prologue and most other roguelikes is that every room appears handcrafted, not randomized. This decision emphasizes the puzzle-solving aspect of the roguelike more than most, and many rooms have more than one way to solve your way to the next gate.
As you begin, you’ll be introduced to new mechanics at a slow enough pace to understand what they do. Basic movement and sword combat are your bread and butter, and knowing when and where to move around falling tiles and spike traps will do more for you in the long run than the special tools you’ll have in hand. Of those, you’ll get arrows — best for popping bombs and gate levers — bombs of your own, and a shield that’ll let you take one full round of damage on the chin with no harm to your HP.
With good tool use and a smooth set of button controls, you can safely fumble your way through a few mistakes. And even if you do use up all three of your hearts in a puzzle room? You’re shunted back to the last room you completed with almost no loss to your holdings. That’s a pretty good prologue to the world of turn-based dungeon crawlers in general, to say nothing of whatever Ambermaze’s problem is.
A Lush, Pixelated World
Some gamers may be tired of pixel games, but I am not. And, of the modern indie game love for the humble pixel, Lord Ambermaze offers up a colorful, lushly designed dungeon to explore. Metals gleam with gold and silver, the critters are vibrant even when they’re trying to kill you, and verdant greenery and jewel-toned pots often border the map.
Even your hero and his sister are bright and cutely designed, with their chatty sprites offering up the best of the SNES era on your PC or Deck. All this color earns another laurel, too: none of it clutters up what you’re trying to figure out. Spike traps are always clear, an explosion radius is always brightly lit in red, and monsters are definitely not hiding from you in the open. Only Lord Ambermaze himself remains in the shadows, leaving us with the question of what exactly is his problem? We’ll have to wait for the full game to know for sure, but meanwhile, we know young Zeyn is on the case.
A Couple Quibbles
All right, like one semi-major quibble: The prologue does an excellent job introducing you to the pace and mechanics of the game and gives you plenty of opportunities to get comfortable with each special tool you have in hand. Yet the final boss and his four underlings are handed to you with no guidance on how to approach him.
The obvious answer is, of course, ‘use all of what you have learned to take it on.’ However, the boss’s underlings regenerate after a turn and, once angered and activated, can hurt you no matter how far you’ve moved away. You also have very limited uses for what you have, so it’s easy to wind up in a mental spiral of just trying to find a place where you can whack at it and not die before it does.
It’s a puzzle I did ultimately solve, partially by semi-cornering it and hoping what I was doing would halt respawns and give me enough time and movement to chip the thing down. I expect there’s more than one way of doing it, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out I did it the hardest way. But it was a little disheartening to toss myself at it and not even receive some hint narration from Zeyn on how he bravely took the thing on. Is it a dealbreaker? Not at all. But this demo boss, and maybe the first couple of bosses in the full game, might benefit from a little bit more help offered to new players.
Final Thoughts
I’m very hopeful to see how the full game of Lord Ambermaze turns out. It’s bright, colorful, and charming, and I admit I’m hoping to see Zeyn’s little sister become playable. Not to be a little fond of tropes, but giving her a magically themed skillset could offer another fun way to solve the dungeon’s puzzles. Then again, it’s the magic sword that’s here to help Zeyn save the day, so who knows? Either way, it was a fun jaunt through a highly accessible version of a genre that isn’t always so welcoming, and that’s a good thing to see.
The prologue demo is its own self-contained story, which makes it perfect for anyone who’s even a little curious about this style of game. It’s up for free on Steam with a gently reasonable request for you to wishlist it if you beat and enjoyed the prologue, and, all told, it was a lovely hour spent. Give it a whirl while you’re chilling after a holiday meal.
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