Sunlorn: Open-world fantasy ASCII RL by Tesselation9000
So we recently had Sunlorn up for r/RoguelikeDev Feedback Friday, and I streamed it a couple times since in order to provide feedback (starting here, more to come), but I've also been playing off stream as well, because this game's pretty neat!
Having not been widely noticed or played yet, it's no surprise there are a fair few QoL issues, but Tesselation's been pretty receptive to that feedback and already released a couple new updates incorporating suggested improvements.
Despite its WIP status, there's enough to do to keep it interesting for a while, and the world does a decent job of making you want to explore it since it's got enough going on with its systems and interactions, and looks pretty. There are minor survival aspects, like you do need to worry about food, light sources, and basic resources running out (and don't forget to find a cloak to cover yourself in poor weather if wearing metal armor!), but your friendly starting village is often enough to get you up and running.
The itemization and spells/skills aren't going to blow your mind, but there is some good variety with quite a few items, all useful in some way. The complete lack of XP for character development is nice, although you are probably forced to kill a lot anyway. Improvement instead comes from flowers that allow you to pick from a subset of stat increases, and you get can get more spells from your god. There are faction relations and individual relations with NPCs, and charisma in general actually has some meaning, which is nice in a role-playing sense.
Overall I find Sunlorn definitely has some interesting story potential, for example in my run from yesterday:
I started out in a large-ish village with a sewer. Sewers kinda suck because there's almost nowhere for flowers to grow, so my stats remained mostly unchanged, but there is plenty of treasure down there to sell in the village for coin. Too much treasure, in fact--both treasure dealers in town ran out of money to buy my stuff, so the rest of my treasure I loaded onto a pair of donkeys I bought from the local herder to take with me later.
Despite all the rumors locals gave me regarding artifacts down in the sewers, I couldn't find any way to get below depth 2, no matter how much searching I did... Sucks because the boots of speed sounded great. I had even found several unused keys, but nothing to unlock. Funny enough I did find one locked door, but had no key for that one, haha...
- [Sewer depth 1 cleared](https://www.gridsagegames.com/images/sunlorn/sunlorn adventurer 1.png)
I spent a while clearing the second depth, because the sewers are no joke until you've got some more serious armor, and even then you can get overwhelmed if not careful. Sunlorn dungeon difficulty scales very quickly!
All this time I needed a source of food, which there's only so much of in town, be it for sale, or NPCs giving it to you because they see you hungry, or hunting wildlife in the nearby woods. Shops don't restock.
But hey, I'm kind rich from all this sewer diving, right? So I notice the herder has a few extra donkeys... Yum yum, those guys are stacked. When I needed to eat I'd buy a donkey, chop down a tree for firewood (axe is good but you don't need it all the time--get your non-food donkey to carry it hehe), then enter an unused home, shut the door, chop up the donkey and cook it over a nice fire. Any extra meat I'd salt up for my future journey into the wilderness.
I eventually gave up trying to find a way deeper into the sewer an decided I was done with my home village, so I used my fortune to load up on supplies from the local shops (your typical walk around and browse, picking up items then paying the shopkeep type of shops). I also bought a horse, which I could supposedly ride but that feature didn't seem to work properly. That's okay, horses can carry stuff. Also they have another use we'll see later ;)
Before I left I also found a map in a shop, so I bought that and it helpfully shows the locations of villages, forts, and various other features across the land.
- [Our caravan before heading out from the village](https://www.gridsagegames.com/images/sunlorn/sunlorn adventurer 2.png)
Based on the map I wanted to head to a village to the north on my way towards the story goal (you do have a mission!), though that village looked like a different color and I expected that direction to be unfriendly. It was, indeed.
My first encounter outside my home village was a lone man in the forest. He clearly didn't like me much and threw a rock at me, which my horse and donkeys didn't like so they chased after him. I called them back, but then got curious where he was headed off to even though he was to the west, not my desired direction. Well he wasn't too far off--apparently he had a house in the forest, just him, and I didn't have to consider what to do since my horse immediately charged in and trampled him to death in his own house hahaha
As we were leaving a woman came by, presumably his wife, but fled after seeing us. (Maybe the blood on my horse's hooves gave it away.)
To go back a bit, before leaving my village I was planning to hire some mercenaries to accompany me on my journey, a true caravan, but I'd spent so long in the village looting the sewer, and all those guys are wandering around outside in metal gear with no cloak, so they lost all their gear to attrition by the time I left. (I believe the dev will do something about this eventually :P). Anyway, I'm not going to spend my money to hire a bunch of naked guys to escort me through the wilderness. (Technically if I really wanted to I could buy leather gear and wooden/stone weapons to give them, but I didn't want to be bothered. Cloaks are not incredibly common, by the way.)
Anyway, it turns out that horses and donkeys are fairly decent mercenaries in their own right, with lots of HP and trampling capabilities, and they can't miss and aggro their friends! I've tried hiring multiple mercenaries before, and every time it turned into a free-for-all when one of them throws a rock or spear and inevitably hits his friend on accident...
I eventually did find the village I was headed towards on the map. Good map. Then things got even more interesting...
I had circled around and came at it from the northeast (completely by accident--I had passed it up a bit and came across a road with a sign telling me it was a little south of my position). This is a rival culture that does not like me one bit, and I'd already found one local who I scared off as I approached.
Leaving my donkeys and horse in a group further out of town, I spotted a shop on the east side so I thought I'd investigate that first. No one saw me slip inside except the shopkeep, who was not pleased, so I hit him a couple times until he ran off. He wasn't exactly fighting material, and I've got decent protection. So I happily looted away, just a general store so nothing of great value, but across the street... a fully-stocked potion shop?! Lemme in.
I waltzed into the potion shop and of course the guy didn't want to sell me anything, but that's okay I wasn't really interested in buying them anyway (potions are expensive, even if you're rich!), so I closed the door and chop chop goodbye potion salesman.
Now this was jackpot. There are a ton of potions in this game, and I don't have many of them identified, so this is a good opportunity to start, yeah? Well, it's dangerous but also fun. So I picked most of them up (there's over 20 different kinds in this one shop) and started chugging.
I knew I couldn't stay for too long because the shop has a window, and if I'm spotted by someone wandering by, they're gonna tell their friends and come after me. One of the potions was apnea, so great I don't need to breath, and as luck would have it, the one immediately after that was poison gas xD. So the shop quickly fills with gas, and I thought here's my chance...
I open the door and yeah there are several villagers outside but the gas continues to spread. Not massively so, but a good few spaces outside the door in every direction, and I noticed that everyone outside is mad but hanging just outside the edge of the gas. So of course I pulled out my bow and start filling them all with arrows. There's not a lot they can do, but also I'm not quite killing them because I'm not some amazing marksman and they're all a little close. I just tried to hurt enough of them to get them to run away, but then the poisonous cloud eventually began to subside, so I backed into the doorway to bottleneck them and try to scare them off with skillful use of my mace, and the frenzy magic of my god Nikitis.
Side note: Enemies generally seem fairly smart in terms of whether or not they're willing to fight or flee, taking into account you, your friends, your condition, their condition, their own friends, etc... If you are much more powerful than a creature or enemy, they'll just run away even if they are angry with you.
These weren't just regular villagers though, they had some Warriors with them with actual gear, and I wasn't in great shape after a little while. I was definitely afraid I'd get overwhelmed.
- [Me inside the potion shop, door closed.](https://www.gridsagegames.com/images/sunlorn/sunlorn adventurer 3.png) You can see the dead shopkeep
%, a couple bad potions I didn't want, and outside to the east a whole lot of+, the arrows I was shooting at folks before retreating to plan my defense.
Well I had this Lyre of Peace I picked up in the sewers earlier, and I'd never used it before, but supposedly it can make enemies forget they hate you. I thought I'd try that out. I strummed away. It started working! I could see my attackers getting wary instead of hateful, but... the problem is there were a few too many of them, and I'm pretty sure they were reminding each other how much they hate me. So Lyre bad for crowds, maybe better for individuals, who woulda thought. I don't exactly have the greatest charisma, either. (It does matter in Sunlorn... these people could very well have been my friends! But no, we must face off as enemies!)
Fortunately, my raid on the potion shop netted me two more potions of haste on top of the one I already had, so I ended up using both to make a hasty retreat, a throng of locals at my back as I fled into the forest.
I met up with my pack animals down the road, and that is where my intrepid Adventurer stopped for camp last night...
