🚀 go-pugleaf

This was free to play on steam this last weekend (now over).  I bought it 
after that, it was on sale for $7, I'm not sure if the sale is over, but 
the regular price is $14, and it's well worth it.

It's sort of a roguelike, though far simpler than Nethack, and with 8 bit 
graphics.  It's obviously also inspired by old Zelda games, the main 
character obviously looks a bit like Link, though female.  It's also sort 
of a music game.  You have to move with the beat of the music which means 
you don't have a lot of time to think about your moves.  

You may be thinking what I was thinking before I tried it.  I don't have 
a musical bone in my body, and it turns a turn-based game into a twitch 
game.  There is a character you start with that doesn't have to follow 
the beat, and instead makes the beat - the Bard.  I found after beating a 
zone with him, I knew enough of the patterns that I could then play the 
main character or another character that does have to follow the beat 
with enough knowledge of what to do to succeed eventually.  

I'm finding it quite fun and addicting so far.  I'm guessing it's going 
to be pretty short as there's only 3 zones, and I've beaten 2 of them 
with the Bard and 1 with all the characters available to me.  

The default controls are pretty weird, you use only the four arrow keys, 
and a combination of them for specials, like up-right to cast a spell, or 
up-left to eat food.  Fortunately all the keys & combos are remappable. I 
remapped them to the num-pad and that's at least a little better - as I 
found I would usually miss the beat when doing the combos with two keys.  
I'd like to get them working with the game-pad, but it doesn't recognize 
them, and I've never used the game-pad for keys, not sure how to do it 
yet. 

As to the music, it reminds me a bit of Mad Moxxi's Underdome from the 
Borderlands DLC.  It sounds like it was pulled from a game with AAA 
production not a little indy game, it's full music, not 8 bit digital 
like the old games it's somewhat based on.  I really like the music, it 
fits the game very well. You can use your own mp3s instead if you want, 
but I haven't felt the need, so I'm not sure the process there.

It's also got a co-op mode, which I haven't tried, as I don't have anyone 
to co-op with.

I'm giving this game a strong recommendation, the steam reviews also rate
it "overwhelmingly positive" which I agree with.

- Justisaur