It’s April 3rd weekend, which means a good number of you will be trying out some of the first iPad games to hit the App Store. I, living in Germany, am not be so lucky: my own iPad won’t be delivered until some still unknown date in the farther-flung days of April. Instead, I’m still stuck gaming on my iPhone, but luckily, I’ve got one of the best and hardest-core games on the App Store to entertain me this weekend: Sword of Fargoal.
My gaming life started with Rogue as both a sword-wielding asperand in pursuit of the Amulet of Yendor and a pudgy five year old being gentle irradiated by the cathode bath of my mother’s old Unix terminal. It was love at first sight.
Ever since then, I’ve adored roguelikes, those malicious, randomized, permadeath dungeon crawlers. There are a few for the iPhone like Rogue Touch and iNetHack, but both suffer for being extremely command rich games designed for large, physical keyboards.
Sword of Fargoal is the only iPhone roguelike worth talking about right now.
Like all roguelikes, Sword of Fargoal seems to palpably twitch with a desire to kill you in the cruelest and most random way possible. A typical adventure might see you randomly open a chest to get blinded, only to stumble away and plummet through a hole in the floor to land in the darkest levels of the dungeons below, surrounded by monsters you are incapable to beat. Once you’re dead, you have to start all over again from level one. This is the roguelike’s appeal: they are for the sadomasochist gamer.
Sword of Fargoal is a far lighter roguelike than games like Nethack, but that’s why it works so well on the iPhone: where as in a typical game of Nethack you have to wrestle with hundreds of arcane text commands like dip, rub, or engrave, Fargoal is all about killing monsters, quaffing potions, zapping wands and reading scrolls. There’s a limited number of things to do, and the developers have perfectly adapted the game’s controls to the iPhone: in fact, most commands are automatically performed situationally (e.g. if you find an “Enchant Weapon” scroll, your weapon is blessed automatically without having to read it)
The graphics and synthesized retro sounds can’t be overlooked either: Sword of Fargoal is a truly gorgeous game, and simply the best looking roguelike I’ve ever played.
Fargoal’s price isn’t cheap: it costs $4.99 at the App Store, but it is endlessly replayable, and the developers are committed to further updates. If you’ve ever journeyed through Nethack’s Dungeon of Doom, or even loaded up a game of Diablo, you owe yourself giving this game a try.
What about you? What are you playing on your iPhone this weekend? Or iPad, for that matter: don’t be shy! Let us know in the comments!
