Mercury (Beta 1.1)

By: Derek Yu

On: August 3rd, 2012

Described as an “experimental, winner-generated arcade roguelike”, Mercury is a simple dungeon crawl that allows the two top-scoring players at the end of each 4-day cycle to permanently add something new to it. Released as beta last month, the game began with only one monster, item, and class, but has since been expanded by the leading players in its community. There’s also a Chaos Mode, which allows anyone to add new entities to the game at any time (this is an easy way to see how the creation system works).

Combat is handled like any other roguelike: you deal and receive damage by stepping into an enemy’s tile. The scoring system, however, is based around killing bosses for multipliers and clearing a floor of monsters for a large point bonus. The player also has to manage a finite pool of actions that is only replenished by descending to the next floor.

Mercury was created by James Lantz, with artwork by his father Frank Lantz (Drop7). Since the game’s in beta, it’s still being worked on actively – in his latest blog post, James says that future updates may allow players to create private servers.

(Source: Jason Rohrer)

Posted in Freeware, Macintosh, Multiplayer, Roguelikes, Windows | Tags: FrankLantz, JamesLantz

Mooseral

This game is pretty rad, just wanted to put that out there. Excellent concept!
Bigwindow

Cool game but the window is too big
Keith Burgun

Hi there! I’m a roguelike developer and I also am a frequent guest on roguelike radio, so THEREFORE I’M AN AUTHORITY!!! And by the power vested in me, I say that Mercury is *the* best Roguelike ever made – particularly in Classic mode.
idiot

this game is actually terribly boring and shallow, peace
http://squidpony.com/ Eben Howard

Neat idea, hope it goes somewhere interesting. With the winners setting the new content there may be some serious balance issues, but time will tell.
News

meritocracization of ineptitude
http://www.facebook.com/people/Paul-Gay/100000748347181 Paul Gay

This is a brilliant idea; wish I’d thought of it. Reminds me of the card game ‘M**’
Alex

Anyone else getting a warning from Chrome that the windows download is unsafe? I’m pretty sure it’s a false positive, but it’d probably be best if the sit runner gets this sorted out…
Chisel

I love the visual style of this
News

GRIDS: The Videogame
Anonymous

Very nice graphics, interesting idea, really boring game. Timer is too strict for a beginner, and thus annoying and stressful. The only reason anyone would be motivated to win this is to try and add content, but the ultra-high scores are discouraging. The content doesn’t seem to fit into any kind of theme; starting classes seem unbalanced, mechanics seem to be ‘dumbed down’ to not have any kind of aesthetic yet there’s a lot of bloat that doesn’t fit into it. Just look at the screenshot – what the hell is “Thorns” and “Karma”? Why the hell would I gain health from attacking a bat and lose turns when killing it?