GRUEL Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Another one for the “2024 was the start of a second indie revolution”. A score attack roguelike, never seen anything that does the concept this well up until now and holy moly, I don’t even know where to begin. What the game does right is plain as day, if you don’t see it, look up gameplay or watch the trailer again. I will touch on something that most reviews might not: Sauces. Sauces are basically your score mods that you can activate before doing a run that boosts your score accumulation in return for some challenge or gameplay change. I tried to optimize my score a LOT during the demo and I realized the first few sauces you pick up actually don’t change what you’re doing much if you have already optimized play to earn score, and that is brilliant. You can get a high score on the leaderboard without sauces, sure, but a person with sauces will get score quicker and with more skill comes with less of a negative impact on your gameplay with them active, it is a simple and effective way to encourage and reward skill.

Gruel is “thin” and could not be more self-aware of it. Confident that this is exactly what some of us are looking for: a quick, in-and-out FPS roguelike with decent weapon variety and a surprisingly well-conceived gallery of baddies to use them on. Its the bright, legible, and familiar spend-and-grind gameplay of a Binding of Isaac through an endless series of simple arenas.No elaborate interacting resource systems. No trudging through empty levels hunting keys or tapping “use” on every available surface. Just a straight forward score attack with challenge modifiers. I’m not expecting dozens and dozens of hours of unique gameplay here– I’d love to see more enemy types, more arenas, more weapons/upgrades… but you’ve got to be reasonable with a small team’s labor of love, and what we do have goes down smooth and is filling enough. Its quickly replacing POST VOID as my go to “I’ve got 5-10 minutes” arcade game. Ascending Inferno

Really fun, short and compact game. Gameplay is punchy, fast-paced and to the point. A lot of weapon variety which makes exploring and finding each gun a real treat. Enemy designs are very cool and have a ton of personality. Props to whoever did the sound design, it’s excellent. Love the noise the skeleton-spawning dude makes when he spawns, always catches my attention. Game has an awesome vibe. Fair to say that the game is a bit limited in content though, while there are a ton of guns that are all very unique the amount of relics is fairly sparse, which is a shame because the ones that are there are usually pretty fun. The game seems to have 3 distinct environments, but it seems like you spend most of your time in the “default” blue one, which is a bit of a shame.

“Late game” of this game feels a bit one-dimensional as far as your viable options go. A lot of weapons drop off in viability drastically which only leaves you with a bit of a limited pool of worthwhile guns to go for +10k scores with. I feel like for the kind of loop intended it would’ve been better to really make it an impossibility to just stick with a loadout for ages. Nevertheless, super recommended. Love me some gruel.

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: GRUEL