Curse of the Lich King

The evil Lich King, Raq'zul, has cast a life draining spell on the world -  in hopes to become immortal. Many heroes try to find him deep in his lair, but all have fallen to his army of monsters and devious traps. Now it is your turn!

Curse of the Lich King gives you tactical grid based combat in a roguelike dungeon crawling setting. A cast of monsters will try to stop you, all in their own way as you descend towards the Lich King's crypt. Loot everything you see to make sure you find food and weapons to help you on your journey. But beware, not everything is what it seems...

Are you ready to solve the tricky battles and master the Lich King's lair? Can you save the world? Good luck!

Support more games like this -> Check out my Patreon!

CONTROLS
Use the arrow keys to move and navigate menus. 
X opens your backpack and select items. 
C closes the current window.

CREDITS
Design/Art/Code: Johan Peitz (@johanpeitz
Music/Sound: Chris Donnelly (@gruber_music)

Special thanks to the good people at my discord for testing the game!
Why not join? https://discord.gg/pF76upS


StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.7 out of 5 stars
(109 total ratings)
AuthorJohan Peitz
GenreAdventure
Made withAseprite, PICO-8
Tags2D, Dungeon Crawler, Perma Death, PICO-8, Pixel Art, Retro, Roguelike, Roguelite, Singleplayer
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard
Mentionsitch.io Recommends: roguelikes, puzzles...

Comments

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top craftsmanship

much appreciated!

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Great game. a challenging find

Finally beat it!

I had a great time playing this cute game. Kinda like the adventurer mode of Dorf Fortress, but with a pico-8 style.

Great game! Love every part of it, especially the sound effects

thank you so much!

endurance check

perseverance tick

increase knowledge about game 

wait and see my hopes and dreams came true wait and see remember the name. You are an inspiration Johan peitz

(+1)

This is a fantastic game. It has that old school dungeon vibe, feels action-y even though it often has you standing still, doing calculations, hanging on for a stroke of luck. I've come back months later to run through it a couple more times :)

(+1)

gg

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   This is a pretty good roguelike with some nice design! I'd like to note that the lack of a wait button, although sometimes a bit annoying, makes the game a lot more strategic, which is nice.  This also gets complemented with the fact that you can interact with doors, pots or bookshelves as a wait button, effectively turning the wait button into a resource.
   The animations are surprisingly expressive for a pico-8 game. As soon as I see an entity or tile I understand what it is supposed to be, which really speaks to the quality of this game's art.
   The game reminds me a bit of a simpler version of "Pixel Dungeon", an open-source Roguelike Dungeon crawler. Stellar work!
   Now time for some things I don't like as much: I only figured out that I can break pots after it was my only option to move where I wanted to. It would be nice if the graphics somehow hinted at the pots being breakable, maybe a bright coloring or a glint every once in a while could help with that.
   Also it would be nice if there were descriptions for items when I open their context menu, because the lack thereof made me make dumb mistakes like not drinking a max hp up vial "because my health is full", and drinking holy soup at full health to see what it does.
   I've also read from the comment right before that the upgrades for weapons are actually effective downgrades, and it seems weird for luring an enemy into spikes to not give you XP.
   Overall, a very solid pico-8 project that could be better. 8/10

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Nice little roguelike you have here with effective, minimalist design. The only complaint I have that hasn't been brought up or addressed already is how two of the "improvements" for weapons are actually terrible. Blight is awful because in the rare instance its damage actually means anything, it robs you of exp and potentially items if it kills a fleeing chest. If you made it so any death of an enemy netted exp (and items if applicable) or made it so items could appear on the ground to then be picked up, you might solve this one (if you were to implement something like this, you could also make it so the Lich drops an object that triggers the end, avoiding the problem of being cheated out of an ending if the Lich wanders onto spikes). Confusion is also an awful thing to have on your weapon because it makes a monster walk away, which potentially sets them up to get a free hit on you thanks to the lack of a wait button. While I think the lack of a wait button is perfectly fine if you're going for for that, these two weapon affixes being so negative is a bit of an oversight.  That said, I know this game is now an old project. Perhaps you have considered issues like this in some of your more recent projects. If not, I hope these tips can help you make some even more wonderful games in the future.

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After 2 hours of straight gameplay and many many tries, I have finnally beaten the game (I think). I'm on the nineth floor and I cannot find another staircase. Thinking about it, I killed this teleporting man, have I just won withouth knowing it?

(+3)

Well done! There’s a bug where the victory screen doesn’t trigger if the Lich King dies by spikes. Probably what happened. Sorry about that!

(+2)

I think there should be an endless mode if you can develop that.

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Wow! That was very good! Having to return  to the good stations was a brilliant idea! This is the very first game that I was excited to find cursed stuff! enemy variety was low, but that is ignorable and I wish there was more use to the blessings on weapons because I always found myself going with the one with the bigger number. Battling with the lich king Raq'zul was very exciting, so this game is a solid 9/10!

(+2)

Thanks for the detailed feedback, glad you enjoyed the game!

My last run ended with me being killed by an imp on floor 3! This is really well made and I've had a lot of fun seeing how far I can get. Thanks for making Curse of the Lich King, it's obvious that you've put a lot of effort in to it and it shows. I know how hard it is to make a roguelike game, so I really appreciate how much work has gone in to this!

(+1)

Glad you liked it, and thanks for the kind words!

Wery well made!

Thanks!

Won on my 3rd try, great game, once you'll learn how to how to lure your enemies you can get pretty far, found a holy spear that did 18 damage on floor 7, it was so good.

Good job!

Beat it after a week. BOI it is hard. But with cracking the mechanics and a bit of luck, I defeated the lich king
Keep up the good work!

Thanks! Enjoy the pride and accomplishment!

Really, REALLY like this. Very slick. nice and simple, pure gameplay and well done all round :)

Thanks! Glad to hear you like it!

(+1)

Just died on Floor 7 with a freshly upgraded Sword of the Leech. So devastated. This game is super fun. Can't wait to dive back in and give it another short. Hats off to the dev.

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Hey, thanks for the kind words. Not much left now, keep it up!

Finally managed to best that Undead bastard. Had an absolute blast playing.

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Well done!

I've been playing more recently, and it's had me wondering. Did you intentionally omit a map or way to look at overall floor layouts? I occasionally get turned around on the later, more complex floors and was thinking it might be helpful to get a bird's eye view.

(+2)

After 27 consecutive days, I finally finished the game. I was incredibly unlucky until today and the feeling of sheer accomplishment overwhelmed me. Is this how people feel when they beat a boss in Dark Souls? I can see how that'd be addicting.

That being said, very well done! It's not often I come across a game that's challenging, but not too hard that it frustrates me. The procedurally generated rooms/floors kept things interesting, and I really enjoyed learning the various monster and environmental hazards. The first time I walked into a spike trap was quite memorable.

"Why is this tile different than the others?" Steps on it and dies. "Ah."

10/10.

(+2)

Wow, I’m so glad to hear that this game could inspire such determination. Thanks for sharing your story!

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Wow, thank you so much for your kind words. I never planned for the game to be such a time waster but sounds like it was time well wasted!

This is a good game and tough to make it alive till the end. I died over 7 times and I still have not met the lich king. Over all good game with good art style and graphics. Good luck.

Glad you enjoyed it! It is indeed tough to make it to the end but if you use the sparse resources you have there is usually a way to make it. 

Very cool game

(+1)

Happy to hear you liked it!

I really enjoyed, thank you! Love the simple xp display, would be ocd perfect to sort items haha. Kind of makes me think about Orc & Elves

Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed it! Afraid I’m out of tokens so no more changes! :)

(+1)

the animation is so squishy <3

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 Nice play through! Thanks for spreading the word!

This is amazing, really impressive how much animation you've managed to fit into pico game.

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

(2 edits) (+1)

I got to the last floor, traded blows with the Lich King a few times... and then he warped behind a bunch of other mobs. I lured those mobs away, killed them, and cleared out the rest of the floor, but never saw the Lich King again, even after going around the whole floor again three more times. Is it supposed to be possible for him to escape and render the game unwinnable? (Might he have stepped on spikes while I was dealing with the regular mobs?)

(1 edit) (+1)

Sorry about that! 😳

The mechanics for the teleport are are shared with the Imp and only works for actual floor tiles, so they cannot leave the game space. 

I just checked the code though and it could be possible that a spike killed the King,  which would result in not triggering the end sequence. :/

(1 edit) (+1)

Ok, I beat the game on my third or fourth attempt. Here's a guide for how to beat it (don't read if you don't want any help!):
* The key is to get the mob to move next to you, so you can strike it on your turn
* To do this you will often have to sacrifice a turn, for instance by using inventory objects
* Save interactibles in a room to use for turn-skipping (pots, bookshelves, etc). Only interact with these immediately if you direly need a power-up, otherwise you'd better clear the surroundings of mobs first.
* Wells, anvils, book stand etc only skip a turn if you have the correct inventory.
* Levelling up will replenish your health; try to time this with an almost drained health not to waste power-ups
* Vials can be used right away, they increase the max health so no point in saving (unless for, again, turn skipping). 
* Identify the traps, and lure your mobs to walk into them. This does not skip a turn btw.
* For mid-levels, save a cursed food item to use with an untampered weapon to upgrade the weapon on an anvil. 
* The most annoying mob throughout the game is the red, teleporting mob. It will hit you and then fly away a short distance. This means that without turn-skipping objects, it can hit you repeatedly. If you have no turn-skipping objects handy, lure it into a tight space or a space with untriggered traps.
* The Eyes will shoot a confusion beam upon line of sight. Approach it diagonally. If you can't get right in turn, lure it into a safe room, preferably a tight space where you may attack it by chance.
* The toughest normal mob is the large ogre. He will hit you for 3 and has 20 h.p, which means until the last level he'll probably hit you at least twice.
* I think the scimitar is the hardest-hitting weapon. A Holy Scimitar on lvl 9 (your xp lvl, not the map level) hits for 20, and can one-shot even the ogre. There's no point in using other upgrades for weapons unless in the window where you can't one-shot the Ogre, but you'll still comfortably one-shot other mobs; in this case you may want to have a Basilisk-weapon ready. This has a chance to stun all mobs and you might beat the Ogre in two strikes with no counterstriking on his part.
* Carrot, bread, soup, steak (might have missed one) all heal double the HP with Holy as a prefix. Holy Steaks should be saved until level 8, if possible. 
* Identify a mysterious weapon before using it; it might become stuck to you so that you can't discard it if it turns out to be cursed. 
* Save some 10 HP or so before engaging with the Lich King, which is a mob somewhere on map level 8. 

(+1)

Wow - that’s quite a write up! There’s a few things you haven’t found I think but I’ll leave that to someone else to discover. :)

I should probably add some of this to the main page, but I also think part of the challenge is learning the game so just enough to get people started I guess. 

Thanks!

cool game.

Thanks! :)

(+1)

PICO 8 BABBBYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

was hoping to see if this would run on my pocketChip, but it’s not in the bbs/splore. Is there a url I could dl the cartridge from?

(Btw, you mobile UI has issues, the discord link is triggering underneath the control overlay)

(+1)

I’m planning to put the cart on the bbs once the onslaught of LD entries has subsided. :)

You can get the cart from the discord in the mean time. 

The issue with the links is known. Try playing in landscape mode. :)

Great addition to the PICO-8!

Thanks! Let’s build that library!

Damn I really enjoyed that, didn't quite make it to the 8th floor but perhaps I'll try again later!

Love the look of the game, and the sounds are good and crunchy as well. The item prefix system is simple, but it made me think twice about what I should use, discard, or carry to identify later.

A couple things I found myself wishing for: faster movement (by tapping the key perhaps?) and a "wait a turn" -key. Do you reckon the latter would've made the game too easy?

I did eventually figure out I could walk into interactible objects to force enemies to move within range, so as to not give them a free attack. But then there were times when my inventory would be full, and I couldn't walk into objects if they would give an item. The exception to this rule was altars (and anvils, water wells, etc.) which would always advance a turn when walked into, even if you didn't meet the requirements to make use of them. So this could be used as a cheesy way to pass turns. I resisted the urge, feeling this may not have been intended.

Great work overall!

(+1)

Thank you for the kind words and feedback, I really appreciate it.

The movement speed was brought up a number of times during a development but due to some decisions early in the development it was hard to tweak it in a sensible way. Eventually I accepted that it would be a bit slow when backtracking, but in favour for battles to feel deliberate and thought through. Same reason for not allowing players to skip turns, every action counts.

The cheesing is definitely a bug, the idea is as mentioned above something must be done each turn - no skipping! :)

I'll go and make a new version now. :D

Great little Rogue type game ctreated using the amazing PICO-8. I made it to floor 4 and here's the video.

Good Luck

wobblyfootgamer

http://www.youtube.com/c/wobblyfootgamer

(+1)

Thank you for this game. I am not making much progress but having fun. Floor spikes are cruel!

(+1)

Lure your enemies into the traps instead! :D

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Awesome game!! but the font is a bit hard to red maybe its a bit pixley but i guess thats the style of game :)

good job!!!! 

want to see may game? its called 10 blocks? just looking for some feedback

Thanks - and glad to hear you enjoying it. Good feedback on the font, definitely need to look into that for future games. 

nice :)

still want to see my game? just looking for feedback so i can improve it

I’ll try and find the time to have a look!