Prefer to watch or to listen to a long review rather than read one? You can view this review down below; I aim to please everyone when it comes to giving out reviews.
Out of all gaming genres, rogue-likes and rogue-lites have perhaps the most abusive relationships towards players with an added touch of Stockholm syndrome to sate everyone’s inner masochist. Sometimes you can hardly tell what the entertainment is from what is meant to be punishment, but the ever-increasing likelihood of success after countless failures is what makes these genres so tantalizing. The real challenge for a review of a rogue-style game is to explain why one form of flagellation is more favorable to the countless other experiences that cannot maintain this balance of fun and hardship. Every once in a while, however, you do manage to find one means of torture that scratches a particular niche, and suddenly everything you once couldn’t articulate is now clear. Like painful memories from my subconscious worming its way into my thoughts, Sword of the Stars: The Pit is the self-inflicting-abuse for me.
Before we continue on with the reviews, note the plural form of the word, there are a few pieces of information to preface. First, if the title-screen or the name of the video wasn’t your first clue, this video will discuss the Osmium Edition from the original Pit, which is a complete game, as well as the Early Access state of Pit: Infinity (or if you want to go by its original name, The Pit of DOOM.) From here onwards, and for the sake of simplicity, these games will be referred to as The Pit and The Pit of DOOM. Second, and you probably have noticed the sudden increase in quality of The Pit of DOOM footage taken from Kerberos Productions, the footage I am using does not represent the actual visual or technical quality of the game. This aspect is something I will delve into more detail with the second review, and I was able to squeeze out a more stable framerate for recording with Unreal Engine 4 tweaks, but I state this information upfront if you were concerned that the game was poorly optimized. In reality, the game runs incredibly well on my low-end hardware without a significant impact on performance—with the proper tweaks; I had to further degrade the game so that it would run better for recording. Finally, there is footage of the vanilla version of The Pit as well as with the Quality of Life mod, which adds only UI and other technical polishes to the vanilla game.
With those disclaimers out of the way, pack your Sotswiches, an extra Hiver Multi-tool, and a whole lot of duck-tape for your organs as we delve straight into 95.9%-almost-certain death in… The Pit.
What’s NOT to Rogue-Like?
Given the prevalence of rogue-lite titles with numerous deviations, it’s harder to recall what it means to experience a proper rogue-like such as The Pit. Now I won’t belabor this subject in any great detail as I had already brought up the topic in my last review of Bad North. What I do want to illustrate is that what is often acceptable in rogue-lites does not mean it’s also applicable to rogue-likes, and this fundamental disassociation is what will make or will break this game for many people who go into The Pit with the faulty logic that these genres are the same.
Whenever you hear the topic brought up about the problems of rogue-lites, people are often concerned with the reliance on luck-based mechanics that can take away from rewarding raw skill. However, if you really examined the heavyweights like The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, I would argue that more people would probably say they prefer sessions when the game gives them items to lower the threshold for the hardest challenges. This is why so many players who enjoy these titles focus on optimizing their builds, finding an item to make them over-powered, or learning exploits to achieve a greater chance of success. It’s only these players who rely on the RNG elements that are cheating themselves of getting better at the game, but this solution is also not at the cost of making the game easier for players who do get better at understanding the core mechanics. This balance is what most rogue-lites strive to accomplish when finding an equilibrium between skill and luck.
As a result, the key to a great rogue-lite is the following: If you design a rogue-lite by first making the game built around its highest skill demands, such as the original Binding of Isaac that made all rooms the same size and all enemies (including bosses) have avoidable attacks, you can then design the rest of the game to lower that threshold with the randomized items and luck-based rewards.
Rogue-likes, on the other hand, besides sharing the premise of making a game built from the top-down in terms of skill, go about this means of accessibility in a completely different manner. Or, to describe the situation with a cheeky phrase, rogue-likes are all about being skillful of your odds. Now rogue-likes do employ similar meta-gaming strategies often found in rouge-lites such as loot drops or optimizing builds, but what separates them is the core gameplay. There is no FPS bunny-hopping mechanic to evade danger like in Immortal Redneck; there is no bullet-hell screen nukes to avoid taking damage like in Enter the Gungeon; and there are no invincibility-frames or platforms such as in Rogue Legacy.
Instead of building the gameplay off other genres, rogue-likes have very little, if any, skill attributed to the actual mechanics, which are almost universally turn-based tactics—and you simply cannot win by mashing the attack button. What this changes for the rest of the game are the type of skills you foster to become better, except now all these skills are determined by luck, and your role is being the one who calls the shots when and where. However, it would be foolish to suggest there is no skill in playing the odds as there is a world of a difference between someone who plays the lottery and a professional poker player.
Coming back to the actual topic, if you understand this fundamental distinction between rouge-lites and rogue-likes, then you’ll be able to decide whether The Pit is worth playing. The real skill that you have to master in order to overcome The Pit is learning the game inside and out, which can be as difficult as surviving. This aspect is more than a metagame quality of getting better as the SotsDex (the in-game encyclopedia) is constantly being updated with new information about new enemies, new items and new recipes you either can discover from trial-and-error (and risk losing your ingredients) or you can decipher them from terminals. In addition, there are thirteen—sixteen, if you include the Fan Mod—classes to master across five difficulty modes that will keep you constantly relearning the game just when you thought you knew it all. Even if you perish—and you will if the Suul’ka are living up to their reputation—your deaths are a means to learn from your many, many mistakes that you will make as you play. Eventually, you’ll be able to use your own deaths to make your later runs more profitable—all of these, and many more, strategies will come with time if you choose to invest the patience and the curiosity to keep trying against the odds.
Unlike real-life, however, there are various ways to streamline the learning process such as the improvements added to the Fan Mod (as well as with the Quality of Life Mod) that will let you unlock all recipes, all items or both. Personally, given how much these options impact the reward system of dying and how much information there is to take in from the start, I would not recommend unlocking these options unless you don’t care about having everything available to you. Even if you don’t wish to use these features, I would recommend installing the Quality of Life Mod before you begin because, if you install it later, it will wipe all your saved progress, so you’ll have to start over again or, more likely, you will choose to unlock everything. In addition to this suggestion, this next section will go over what I would suggest for newcomers to get the best experience as well as to inform you how some of the underlining mechanics work. This information will hopefully help you from scratching your head on numbers that are within your control, from wasting your time on the simplest of mistakes, and from suffering the journey that comes by experience.
Knowing Truly is Half the Game
Since audiences to rogue-likes and rogue-lites are more sensitive to spoilers, especially gameplay-related ones, I would ask that you listen until the Blue Rooms are discussed. At that point, you can skip to the timestamp on the screen so you can learn the game on your own. These other pieces of information are more so general knowledge about the game such as the various modes you can choose as well as the game’s structure.
With that warning out of the way, let’s begin where all misfortunes in life start, the beginning. As the introduction cinematic illustrates, you are one of innumerable adventurers sent into an ancient Suul’ka facility known as the Pit in search of a cure for a deadly virus. Although the story is framed as being a concern for mankind, there is little explanation as to why other alien races are seeking the Pit. (The most likely explanation is this discrepancy was a development oversight since the game originally only had three classes of humans.) Furthermore, there’s not much storytelling about the Pit itself. Outside of lore entries that add some colorful humor from the Sword of the Stars universe, the story never expands on the set-up other than providing you a simple goal: Survive.
The original release tasked you to survive thirty floors that progressively became bigger the farther down you went. After the Mind Games expansion, all future versions pushed the final floor to floor forty as well as added new mechanics like the Psionics system, ten additional characters, and tons upon tons of new items into the Pit’s arsenal. However, in terms of how this change affected the game’s progression, these ten additional floors smoothed out the difficulty curve since the game could be balanced around a longer session. What was once a five to ten-hour journey could now take up to fifteen hours if you took your time, which was most likely due to the player shuffling around his or her inventory. Consequently, this added length also created new starting locations to unlock, new modes to play as well as a way for the player to game the system.
Now the original release did have starting floors where the trade-off was that you could start on lower floors without having to progress through the entire game. These checkpoints were located every five floors until you reached level fifteen, but with the Gold Edition those checkpoints now start at floor ten and stop at floor twenty. This method would effectively let you start halfway through the game with all your starting gear perfectly intact, and the downside would be that your character would always start at level one. This trade-off wouldn’t be worth it if it wasn’t for the implementation of the Blue (Safe) Rooms, but we’re not going to talk about those mechanics yet.
The other major change from the Gold Edition was the addition of Game Speed modes, which are time-saving ways to play the game more quickly than normal. These two modes, Fast and Quick, offer a distinct way of playing that can cut off a lot of the fat by giving you XP boosts in return as well as address some of the game’s shortcomings. For a side-by-side comparison, if I were to B-line a Tarka warrior from the entrance to floor ten, it would generally take me a little over an hour on normal, forty to fifty minutes on Fast, and Quick would take me around thirty to forty mins at most. Quick mode has the shortest time due to the fact that you are skipping even number floors if you start from the entrance (and odd number floors if you start on floor ten or twenty.) These advantages, while it may sound simple, can be used in various complex ways to make the game more streamlined, and the Quick mode makes the game more like the original release since you only have to complete twenty levels. It’s not until you combine these game modes with the Blue Rooms where you can see their full potential.
Now the Blue Rooms themselves are fairly straightforward: You can store items and XP that you have not spent on floors ten, fifteen and twenty for future playthroughs. The real catch is how you can use them to your advantage, although they also come with some limitations to keep the game balanced. At first, you will likely ignore these rooms because you don’t want to give up anything you might need to complete your run, but you may store any weapons or armor your characters cannot use because of their race. If you decide to cash any XP, you’ll realize that you receive five XP points for every one point you invest—meaning you get five-times of an investment whatever you deposit—and you’ll soon learn every character needs the same amount of XP to level-up, but each character earns them at different rates. The catch with these cached items and the XP storage is that you can only withdraw from these containers ONCE when you start a new game on the same floor, and each cache on floors ten, fifteen and twenty are independent from one another as well as by difficulty.
If you play the game the way it is intended, by depositing these rewards every now and then, you could easily accumulate more than enough resources either because you cannot use them, you don’t know how to use them or you’re going to lose. Conversely, you can make corpse-runs for XP, ammo or other useful items for a weak character or for your current character to be more prepared for the rest of the game. However, if you think you can simply win the game by dumping all your stats and gear on floor twenty to make a level fifty character, then you’re not seeing what you’re trading off in return. You could probably get by with this method on Easy and Normal difficulties, but then you would be ignoring how exactly the skill and the stat system works.
If you have ever felt the cravings of progress when leveling up during tabletop games or CRPGs, The Pit’s leveling-up system is a distilled, tactful concoction of tried-and-true RPG mechanics. Surprisingly, the skill system shares a lot in common with Oblivion, but without all the negative aspects. Every skill has an associated stat (Might, Finesse, Brains or Power) and you can progress every skill naturally through continued usage up to level forty-five (for Psionic abilities you can naturally level them up to one-hundred.) Even if your current skill is above forty-five, if the grey stat is less than forty-five it can still naturally level-up, and every five stat points invested improves related skills. Now when you level up, and what separates this system from Oblivion, is that the amount of skill-points and stat-points are always the same per class, but the cost to improve a skill depends on if you have used them. What this system boils down to is that when you use a skill you can naturally improve it or you can improve it as you level up for a lower cost (and a higher reward.) As a result, if you want to use the Blue Rooms, you want to withdraw just enough XP to match the floor level plus one (so level eleven for floor ten, level sixteen for floor fifteen and level twenty-one for floor twenty) so that you can still allocate all your points as well as benefit from the natural level-ups.
Now, if you’re still following along, you are probably thinking that all sounds like a grind—and you are half-right—but it’s how you go about a grind, which is purely optional, and what you set at your goals that can separate learning how to become better at the game rather than making it easier. Here is what I would argue is the best way to enjoy The Pit:
First, play your preferred character on either Easy or Normal and try to unlock either the tenth or the fifteenth floors as starting points. You might want to start out on Easy, but don’t get too comfortable because all skills start out with an extra fifteen points and you won’t be able to unlock all the recipes unless you are on Normal. Afterwards, try out the other classes and attempt to make it to floor ten without leveling up so you can get an idea of each character’s strengths and weaknesses. By this point, all of your stockpiled XP and gear will be more than enough for you to decide if you want to start your favorite character on floor ten or continue foraging certain items like armor to tackle the next thirty floors. Additionally, you could also try the Quick mode from the Blue Rooms if you want to speed the game up further, or you can play the mode from the entrance to experience the game “legitimately.”
Whatever method you wish to experience the Pit, legitimately or otherwise, if you are willing to accept your losses when you make a mistake you will likely not make that same mistake again; or if you do, you’ll be better prepared to handle the situation. With the addition of the Quick mode that cuts the game in half (or even more if you start on floor 20,) I don’t find this game inherently flawed as it could be given how long these sessions can last. If you can enjoy this game whether you are winning or losing, then you truly have overcome the mental gauntlet that is The Pit—still probably means you’re going to die, except this time you’ll face death with a smile.
”Maybe I’ll Win; Maybe I’ll Lose… Maybe I’m Crying the Blues."
As you might expect, I have yet to finish the game as the closest I have ever reached was floor thirty-seven on Easy. The fact that I have not won, but I desire to go once more into the fray, even with fifty hours across seven years of playtime, has to be an indicator either of my declining mental health or the game’s extraordinary quality. Even in cases where I made the same mistake, such as not treating poison or disease seriously after my last demise, these moments are something that was my error rather than from bad fortune. (Once you have enough recipes or stockpiles to counter these types of problems—or you don’t forget that you have plenty to use—the game’s cheapest deaths can be circumvented.) In reality, unless you are making a floor-one-to-ten run, it can often be harder to die than it is to actually keep pressing onwards with little to no hope for success.
Now do all these explanations and defenses of the game mean that it is perfect? Ab-zuul -lutely not!
If I could count the number of times I stepped on a wormhole that sent me two floors ahead, then I would have more of these blunders than copies of myself in the multiverse. Durability, while not as much of a problem if you plan-ahead with back-up guns or armor—or if you play on Quick mode—can have too much of an effect on the early-game where it encourages you to remove your armor and to punch enemies so you don’t degrade your gear too early. AI basically boils down to melee and projectile threats with different stats and status effects. Inventory management, which is made somewhat more bearable with the Quality of the Life mod, creates too much micromanagement when the game could automatically rearrange items for you. Food cannot be used to their fullest without having the full recipe list, which is a problem when food becomes incredibly scarce past floor thirty. Finally, while there are boss-like threats, the last floor is a fixed gauntlet of enemies as you make your way towards the center, and the payoff is anticlimactic with no real final antagonist.
You might look at some of these problems more strongly than I do for others. Despite these numerous grievances, none tarnish what is ultimately one of the best rogue-like experiences out there besides Tales of Maj’Eyel—and you will find far few fewer sci-fi rogue-likes as polished as The Pit. Sometimes, as Jack London once said, when life deals you a bad hand it’s knowing how and when to play that is the key to success rather than lamenting when you don’t have the best cards.
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