A card based roguelike where you take the whole of a someone that doesn't know where they are or what they are doing but are seemingly being guided by a strange owl.

You travel through 15 rooms, along with any alternate additional rooms to enter, with the goal of each room being to use one of the exits to progress or potentially to kill a boss in the room. Everything in the room appears in a circular fashion with each item, enemy, exit, etc appearing as a card. You will have a card to your left and right and can spend a turn interacting with or attacking with a card, or by attempting to sneak past it to rotate the circle, stealth being a percentage chance that allows enemies a free hit if you fail. Many enemies do nothing but some will actively try to move towards or attack you in different ways, one type has a ranged attack, and many have passive effects like exploding on death, poisoning you, stunning you, etc.

You have 12 different kinds of equipment slots that you will fill by finding random cards or treasure chests that have over 300 possible items. In addition to that you have a spell slot where you can equip a spell that can be reused after a certain number of combat turns, and a slot for a one use item. Potions can be found to heal you and stat boosting shrines can increase your health, strength, defense, speed, and clarity. Skills have additional effects like defense allowing you a chance to parry piercing damage that would otherwise get through your defense, speed effects who attacks first but also your dodge and stealth chance, and clarity allows for more healing, a higher crit chance, and allows you a higher percentage chance to avoid the curses that are part of some shrines and potions that can lower your health instead of giving you the positive effect you want.

Card and build options are varied with there being a lot of different ways you can try to steer your character. It has a good and easy to understand AI that will clearly highlight the damage you will do or take from your actions and makes identifying enemy abilities fairly simple. It has a unique and nice looking presentation and art style in addition to being organized well.

The negatives come from the game being highly randomized equipment so it can be difficult to really plan a build out, getting slightly better if you complete one of the game's endings (the light ending) which will allow you to start with a normal rarity item of your choice, allowing a faster start or to have a weaker kind of item that is at least leaning towards what you want to do. As you play you can unlock new cards that will spawn in the game, and like a lot of games that do that that can be a bad thing if it starts making it even more difficult to get what you want. Where the game isn't as random is in the actual gameplay, you are going to see the same short story, with the same goal, and the only differences is going to be spawns and possible side paths but each type of side path has a name that signifies pretty much exactly what you will run into if you go that way. Other than the new cards, there isn't much new between playthroughs other than unlocking higher difficulty options, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of interesting secrets to find. There is a daily dungeon mode that starts you with a more unique set up in a shorter game.

In the about 17 tries it took me to play through both endings on the normal difficulty and unlocking around 223 of the cards I'm not too interested in playing the same kind of thing over again.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1486255016507699200

An interesting tactical, permadeath dungeon crawl with the feel of a Slay the Spire-esque deckbuilder but a totally new take on the mechanics. Ring of Pain is all about upgrading your character attributes and bonus abilities, and then fighting through tactical, semi-deterministic paths of enemies, loot, and dangers.

It's got quick but clever tactics in the gameplay, and engaging longer term planning in your items and equipment - though perhaps lacks the spice of similar titles without huge focus on powerful synergies and builds. Not the best in class, but a solid entry with a wonderful design and theme.

Endlich wieder ein Roguelike, dass es begriffen hat, endlos viele Entscheidungen einzubauen.
Man kann oft die Ausrüstung im Run austauschen und je nachdem wie der Raum aufgebaut ist, kann man eben auch nicht einfach drauf loshacken.

Ähnlicher Suchtfaktor wir Slay the Spire, auch wenn die Kartenspiele komplett anders funktionieren.

Ich würde vermuten, dass der Glücksfaktor etwas größer als bei StS ist, aber doch geringer als es in den ersten 3 Runs wirkte.

There's this really fun game on itch.io called Forward! You basically choose between two cards every round. Some cards are monsters; other cards are items that increase your health, gold, or attack power; a few cards are special events or wild cards. Ring of Pain is basically Forward! with a surrealist horror vibe, a few added elements, and a $20 price tag. It's another game that would be fun for short mobile sessions, but honestly, I don't see the point in buying it since you can play Forward! for free.

Ring of Pain is a quite challenging and unforgiving roguelike.
I like the puzzle energy some moments bring, but it's an overall painful experience.
For some reason I kept coming back to it though, and it plagued my day with an urge to play more.

My biggest problem with the game is that it's very RNG based.
There are a ton of items, but most of them don't go very well together.
Similarly, there are a lot enemies, and sometimes they go very damn well together.

Still, it's very unique and well done.
There are a lot of mechanics, and they interact with each other perfectly.
Some items are exceptionally creative with their effects, and that keeps the game fresh.
There is a lot of pain and suffering, but I don't regret it.

Ring of Pain is consistently identified as a card game, because enemies and items appear as, well, rectangles that quite honestly look an awful lot like cards. But I think this sort of misses what's actually going on: Ring of Pain is a one-dimensional dungeon crawler. At each given moment, you only have two choices of where to go: left or right. This leads to a kind of quick, frictionless pace that feels really effortless to dive into. This doesn't mean the game doesn't have depth; the game adds a lot of wrinkles and complexity through both deterministic and randomized variables thrown in and offers more kinds of junctures through equipment and path choices. Still, there is sometimes a feeling that there is something lacking, not necessarily in strategic depth, but in ideas. The narrative felt to me to be yet another pseudo-psychological puppet show and at a certain point it felt like the game didn't have much more to surprise me with. It felt at the end to be a numbers game. That's fine, but it does dull the experience. Ring of Pain is good fun, and a creative twist on the dungeon crawl. It's a nice diversion, but unfortunately, that one-dimensionality isn't just spatial.