Cycled

Cycled is a fantasy game developed and published by TwistedNail featuring a mix of role-playing and roguelike elements. This is an extremely chaotic and fast-paced title, it is also very difficult and unforgiving. Set in a dark medieval world, the player must assume the role of two heroes trying to repair two fractured worlds.

A Cycle of Suffering

You arrive on a procedurally generated map that displays your characters in the middle of the screen. At first, your characters have no synergy at all, but as you progress through difficult combats and maps, they become more united. They also become more powerful and will unlock different skills and upgrades.

The extremely chaotic part is that for every ten seconds of gameplay, a wave of energy that intersect both fractures worlds swiper across your screen. This means that every ten seconds, everything changes. Your character, your enemies, and your environment; making quick reflexes and adapting on the fly are valuable skills here.

In terms of aesthetics, the game does what it needs to do to get the point across without getting in your face about it. The colors are vibrant and eye-catching without being obnoxious or distracting from gameplay. The amount of detail put into each object on screen (such as walls) helps make each room feel unique even if they share similar tilesets or themes with each other.

Not For The Faint of Heart

Though colorful and fast-paced, Cycled is still a roguelike game at its core. While it offers a lot of reliability and fun front the very start, the game can be extremely challenging. Any title that offers up the concept of permadeath is not for everyone. The gameplay itself was fun and challenging, but through progression was slow and painful.

For starters, the difficulty curve can be very steep at times. This can force you to restart some runs prematurely if you aren’t satisfied enough with a build you feel comfortable running. Additionally, there are multiple types of enemies with different attack patterns, which makes learning their movements crucial in order to defeat them more efficiently. The permadeath feature is punishing and will drive you insane, which also means that every new encounter requires a lot more time spent studying enemy moves before engaging them in battle. This is a given for most players of roguelikes, but newcomers to the genre might have to slow down and rethink their strategies more often than not.

Still though, despite these difficulty issues, the experience is extremely enjoyable and offers new mechanics, mainly the wave of fractured realities, that really amps the pace up. Despite not being the perfect roguelike, this is an overall great game. Because despite its flaws, it offers some great rewards, such as the difficult duo boss fights, and the pride you feel when you are actually able to advance.

Conclusion

If you are a fan of Hollow Knight, Returnal, The Binding of Isaac, or Hades, you will certainly have fun here.

PROS

• Innovative Mechanics
• Duo Combat System is Fun
• Fast-Paced
• Challenging

CONS

• Very Steep Learning Curve
• Unforgiving Experience