Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Kingdom of Rogueing is an adventure rogue-lite in the recognizable style of Kingdom of Loathing and West of Loathing. The game features free-roaming of areas while engaging in RPG-like turn-based combat encounters, lots of randomized equipment and consumables, and an emphasis on taking advantage of events and interactions generated in each environment to gain every possible advantage as you progress through the levels and attempt to achieve a high score at the game's end. The game is complete and refined, with no bugs encountered during my playtime. The controls are straightforward and intuitive. The style is strong and cohesive, the familiar hand-drawn aesthetic and humorous narrative-driven experience from the classic Kingdom of Loathing browser-based game. There is a lot of fun to be had in finding loot with randomized properties and, in a way, putting together the "puzzle pieces" of equipment, consumables, and buffs that are most suited to taking full advantage of each area. I would not consider Kingdom of Rogueing to be a traditional roguelike, but it features heavy use of procedural generation and fills a unique niche of exploratory adventure roguelike with RPG-style turn-based combat and strong narrative support.
• A lot of what feels polished and well-executed about this entry seems to come from it building on the West of Loathing RPG, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it *does* feel polished and well-executed. The gameplay is largely very simple, but its decision points come in with character build and combat choices. I appreciate that in combat there's a distinction between using your standard attack, using other actions (which can sometimes be attacks), and using items. The allocation of action points for doing extra things gives the combat more depth than I initially expected. Of course, there are bound to be questions about how roguelike-ish it is. It's certainly not a pure roguelike, playing more like a cross between a point-and-click adventure and a JRPG, but I'd say it falls solidly into roguelite territory, which is completely fine. Kingdom of Rogueing is a good effort overall. I don't know how much the gameplay alone would support lots repeat play (e.g. the five locations seem to be the same every time) but providing unlocks for completing multiple runs is a nice touch to add incentive to revisit. A solidly enjoyable effort, and good work for a single week.
• Well. I'm both good and bad for judging this game. Bad because I'm somewhat biased. I love KoL and WoL. Good because I have very good idea where SWOL ends and KoR begins. So, let's go. The game is definitely feature complete and feels very polished. Yes, it uses an existing (tweaked) engine. But it's definitely not against the rules! Combat controls could be better, to be frank. Target selection, especially healing by an ally is confusing. It's hard to estimate DoT damage to an ally. But all this doesn't reduce funniness too much. First runs are disaster. But the more you play, the more meta you learn, the easier the game become and hard mode doesn't look like impossible feat anymore. As for innovations. Different parts of this game were already implemented in other games, but all together they provide quite refreshing expereince. It is hard to estimate amount of work poured into the game based on existing game. But I'm pretty sure that a lot of work was put into KoR. Metaprogression, classes, pets, bodyguards, randomized locations. And on top of that it is quite balanced! Not supereasy, not incredibly hard. As for roguelikeness. It's definitely not a classic roguelike. But amount of customization and choices is definitely enough to call it roguelikelike or roguelite.