When I was a kid and a holiday rolled around, the most obvious gift for me was some random video game. I can't remember explicitly, but it was either the Easter Bunny or the Leprechauns that brought me Fatal Labyrinth. I had never heard of the game, but the cover art was fantastic. And by this point, I was already a fan of RPGs. And so I loaded this sucker up and got really into it really quickly.
I have a pretty funny anecdote about Fatal Labyrinth, though. Like I said, I knew nothing about the game. So I started playing and started diving into dungeons and I wasn't making much progress. So I decided to start drafting my own maps of each stage so that I could get deeper. I spent all this time making a map and notes and then on my next attempt I realized that this map made no sense. Which brings me to the description of what Fatal Labyrinth actually even it is. This is an early - very early - console roguelike. And in many ways, it's probably the game that made me enjoy the genre, even though I didn't even know what the genre was back then. Rogue of course hit computers about a decade earlier. And then you had all the clones. But there was very little representation of roguelikes on console. The earliest I can find that fits the bill is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game on Intellivision. Maybe? And after that was Dragon Crystal on the Master System and this game on Genesis. My understanding is that they are very similar games, even borrowing sprites. Though I don't think that they are straight ports of each other. While Fatal Labyrinth looks like a 16-bit RPG, it's roots are much older school. It very much follows the logic and brutality of Rogue (1980), Hack (1982) and so on. You enter a dungeon made up of thirty randomly generated levels. Everything happens in turns based on your own movement. Thus, you move and every enemy does as well. Your goal is of course to make it level 30, defeat the end boss and retrieve the ultimate macguffin. Along the way you'll slay enemies for experience points, find loot like upgraded armor and a variety of weapons, and stay alive via food and potions. It's a basic game, honestly. But it also retains what's great about roguelikes. The internal logic is always the same, so you can learn how the systems work. However, there's infinite levels thanks to randomization, and the RNG of which color potions do what really makes the game highly replayable. One clever and funny touch in the game is that while you can collect gold, it does absolutely nothing in game. Instead, its only purpose is to determine how big your funeral is when you die. I don't know if this is some kind of commentary on capitalism, or just really silly. But it's definitely unique. The music is generally worth talking about here. Which is to say, the music that plays during the opening credits is actually pretty good. But the music that plays within the game is a cacophony and bafflingly bad. But whatever. The difficulty is really something, though. Fatal Labyrinth is a really hard game. And that's fine. That's what a roguelike should be. You should learn how the systems work and die a lot and learn from your mistakes and ultimately, become competent enough to beat the damn thing. A victory in any roguelike is something your learn from trial and error and at least a little luck. And Fatal Labyrinth fits the bill. There is at least one little cheat that you can choose to exploit if given the chance. The way it works is something like this: when you equip a sword, it adds +1 to your armor. When you equip a bow it gives you a -1. But if you have two bows and keep switching between them, eventually the numbers will glitch out and basically give you maxed out armor. So if you're lucky enough to find two bows in a run (not a guarantee) then you might want to give this a spin as an easy way to plow through to the end. At any rate, it's interesting going back to Fatal Labyrinth for me. It is undoubtedly my introduction to the roguelike genre. I played it at a young enough age that it was weird, mysterious and a mix of intriguing and punishing. I didn't understand it fully at the time, but it definitely planted an appreciation for the genre within me. And that says a lot because in far more recent years, I've fallen hard in love with several games that have borrowed liberally from the roguelike formula. I'm talking about things like Spelunky and Dead Cells and Slay The Spire. These are all huge games for me that I may have bounced off of if I didn't already have the inner workings of Fatal Labyrinth in my DNA. On top of that, Fatal Labyrinth is still a genuinely good (if flawed) game for its time. Though it wasn't breaking new ground exactly given the lineage of roguelikes before it, it did make the genre more possible on a console. And that's historically important anway.
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