The heroes of this story are about to be made Demigods! How else would you celebrate by having a massive night on the ales at the local tavern? Unfortunately, these soon-to-be Demigods drink the tavern out of all available liquor. A rumor goes around that the innkeeper has some super-secret beerzies stashed below, and one of the dwarves makes their way down to investigate. Upon finding this secret elixir, trouble erupts, leading to the subsequent destruction of the tavern.

The innkeeper curses the Demigods and forces them to recollect all lost inventory, gold, and materials to rebuild the destroyed tavern. RandoMine is a 2D roguelike platformer with RPG aspects and plays very similar to games like Spelunky. Developed by Bitmap Galaxy and produced by Blowfish Studios, you can pick this game up on Steam in the first quarter of 2023, and other consoles are looking to release it during quarter 2/3.

The hero’s journey begins as these would-be Demigods travel the lands for the lost items. The travel agent will deliver you to your destinations, either being mines to search, resting spots, shops, or unknown locations, and the map is split among 3 paths that intertwine at random intervals. Within the mines, the player will encounter various enemies among 3 special biomes. In each mine, ores, treasure traps, and even boss encounters can be found. Use all your Dwarven prowess to navigate, dig smash and blast your way through the caves and grab all the loot.

At the various towns, the player can upgrade equipment used by their characters, increasing damage output and resilience from those pesky creatures lurking below. Being a roguelike, when you die in a cave, almost all progress is lost and the journey must be started again, but gold seems to be the only item kept upon death, making the startup a little less traumatizing. When starting the next runs, you can interact with a shady character before leaving the tavern who places boons on your run, these boons can increase enemy health, cause damage if on the ground for more than 2 seconds, or only allow 1 of the 3 characters playable, etc.

Although they make the run harder, they also add a gold multiplier to make it so much more worth adding. The 3 playable heroes consist of Kromp, a Dwarven miner who has overall high HP, is slower, and can block incoming attacks. Loppathia, armed with a shovel, is quicker than Kromp but has less HP. They can, however, throw their shovel like a javelin and also jump higher. Finally, we reach Praask, a goblin tinkerer armed with explosives and a drill. They are the speediest character available. Praask does, however, have almost half the HP of Kromp, and their weapon takes time to start up.

RandoMine features extremely clean 2D pixel art, and the vibrant colors made my small ADHD goldfish brain pay attention to what was happening around me. All blocks in the caves were extremely easy to tell apart, with mineable substances either looking like dirt or having ore inside. All walls are scalable if you have enough stamina, which is an amazing feature, and being able to return near the surface was a lifesaver because my OCD made me think I had missed something while dungeon crawling.

The audio within the game was extremely atmospheric, inspiring adventure and curiosity. The best part of the audio, however, was that the cutscenes were voice-acted. Not many indie games have been released with voice acting, and to be honest when playing games, I am too lazy to read. When it comes to long scripts and lots of written dialogue, I tend to skip the majority. I’M HERE TO PLAY GAMES DAMMIT. RandoMine has short, witty, and concise scripting, accompanied by some decent voice acting.

The only flaws I could pick out were that the button mapping was strange, and took time to get used to. By the end of my playthrough, I was still messing buttons up. I found if you were to dig/attack before mounting a wall, you would be unable to scale or move on that wall. This would be easily fixable if you could map your own controls. I played on Keyboard and Mouse, but I see using a controller would be a lot easier. Arrow keys were set to movement, space jump, shift sprint, A was set to interact, ‘S’ was set to using equipment, ‘D’ was set to Attacking, and ‘F’ was set to mounting walls after jumping, so accidentally hitting D before F and being locked out of scaling walls was extremely easy to do.

All in all, the game was great fun. It had an interesting story, and both sounded and looked great. The few control issues I encountered weren’t the end of the world, although they did get frustrating and made the fluidity of the game hurt as I had to continuously think of what buttons I was hitting. If you enjoy platformers and roguelikes, RandoMine is a great game to pick up and play through. There is no set-in-stone release date, but keep an eye out!

Written by: Bigfoot