Fatal Labyrinth™

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Fatal Labyrinth is a top-down somewhat turn-based action-RPG thing. And it's rougelike. Albeit maybe not fully. But compared to everything that was on Genesis, yep, rougelike. It was made by Sega of Japan for their modem thing for Sega Mega Drive in Japan, which probably had space limitations and thus only could be used for smaller game. Thus it's 1 Megabit in size, while Phantasy Star was 6 Megabit and Sword of Vermillion is 5 Megabit. Yep, not much.
And Sega also decided to bring it into West outside of modem in 1991, with awesome cover art for once. I am pretty sure that it dissapointed many traditional jRPG fans who expected something more along the games that I mentioned previously and didn't care about randomization. Nope, no in-game saving in this one.

But hey, rougelike is quite a trend nowadays so I am pretty sure that people are going to appreciate this one more now.

The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version.


Now, technical part about Sega's emulation here:
The Sega Classic games that you purchase on Steam count as DLCs for "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics" game that should appear in your library.
It has Bedroom HUB which is the one with many features yet lags for many and Simply Launcher which lacks Workshop and Online but at least it works just fine for everybody.
However, Simple Launcher has it's fair share of glitches as well. It can crash. And it does the second time you go to main menu, so always quit after saving there so it doesn't crash when you want to save next time!
Emulation itself, mostly sound, isn't that good but it does it's job. Also, yes, emulator supports quick saves.
As alternative, you can use external emulator to run games that you purchased. Sega kindly placed in all games that you purchased in "uncompressed ROMs" folder that program itself doesn't use, just change file extension to ".bin" or so. The file for this one being "FATALLAB_JU.68K".
I also demand you to read digital manual of this game first. You can find it here on store page or go to "manuals" folder of game root and open "FL_PC_MG_EFIGS_US_150ppi.pdf".


Dragonia castle has risen and Dragon stole the Goly Goblet which is probably the only source that illuminates the light. So no laundry. Tsykaar, brave swordman to rescue all, must take it back. And thus he has to rise through the 30 floors and then dance the hell out of dragon.
The little nice detail is that when you start the game you are placed in sorta playable prologue. More exactly, tiny village where you can just poke at few NPCs. The cool thing is that you can skip it all immeditly to main gameplay by pressing start. I wish Doom 3 had that.

The gameplay it sorta turn-based. More exactly, the monster move in same time as you do, so you don't get annoyed by waiting while moving. But when they always attack before moving. You also attack by simply (unless throwing or using bows) trying to move at the square where the enemy is. At which point you will do attack and then monster will counter-attack.

There are three weapons that you can carry: spears do less damage but hit most often. Axes do heavy damage but miss more than hit. Swords are middle grounds. And bows have to be equipped and used, though they miss a ton and don't do much damage so eh. Just don't forget to reqeuip shield after that. Though, you will notice it because the game actually has graphics for some equipment, showing hero holding shield for example, which is pretty nice for 1 megabit ROM game. None the less, damage and hit chances for everything are heavily randomized so good luck, don't be surprised if you do 1 damage few times in a row.

There is actually no shops of any kind in this game, you don't leave this single dungeon at all. What do I do with all the junk, you might ask? Got too much leather helms? Well, gee, just throw it all at enemy. Quite refreshing from usual "hog up inventory and portal to shop".

We also got the maigc items, that are scrolls, rings, wands. They all have different effects, including cursing you. Though, there is a protip: some rings are supposed to be thrown. Like, the flame one. Even if it says that "you start to feel better" when you wear one. But nope. Ring of Heal also has strange effect of stopping working after a while, gotta reequip it sometime.

There is also food that you have to take care of. You can't take one with yourself, just pick when you need it. It depletes slowly every few steps which in turn slowly heals you. Which means that in final levels you do nothing but run around in circles between each enemy encounter, which does bring game down there. Grind-walk of health regeneration, yay! Oh, and you can overeat and thus die. Just resist picking everything up.

Though some enemies do annoying things like putting you to sleep or melting equipment. Gotta try to limit it to 1v1 at anytime. It also respawns enemies few turns after you kill them all for some reason. How nasty.

So yea, simplistic design. But none the less, rougelike, or rougelite, whatever, are still keeping it interesting. Here is what it does:
- It's not exactly all that hardcore rougey. There is no perma-death, as you can continue game every 5 floors starting with the 5th one. Also, the gold that you pick up only impacts how much people you will have at your grave. Joy.
- Levels layout isn't randomized. Around 27 levels are just shuffled around, aside from 10, 20 and 30.
- The objects on the levels are randomized. Different enemies placement, items spread all around, even player's starting position. But not exit stairs.
- The stats of items or enemies themselves is always same.
- However, magic items are color-coded and what each color does is randomized every play. Yellow potion might curse you to be hungry one play, for example, but be different in another. No worries, game will fill a description of what it does after the first try, don't have to write it down.

Well, graphics and sound and music are nothing much though. Graphics don't even change, they just color pallete swap it around. Hero also walks hilariously stupidly, like simply spinning legs forward and back. Music is pretty much 10 second loops as well, so eh. Kinda catchy, but maybe because you hear it all time.

Anyway, in the end, at first I wanted to call it the worst game ever because you can kill The Shinobi in this game, but then I realized that it's not Joe Musashi but random ninja and was OK with it. So, overall, a pretty cool budget game there. At least for a single walkthrough. Probably the only game on Genesis with Rougelike elements. Aside from maybe Toe Jam & Earl random mode.
Then again, this game kinda sucks at the last five levels. And not entirely fun. Just a dat enjoyable.

Great roguelike. Easy to pick up and play.

It's a retro roguelike... except that as an emulated game, it's actually retro! A brief but fun game. The only downside is that it's part of Sega's annoying emulator, that actively gets slower and less useful the more games you buy.

The Hardest Dungeon Crawl you'll ever play. Tell me, name any other game that you can both STARVE...and EAT yourself to DEATH?

( at the time of posting this review; there were very few if not at all any sort of games like this where in you could either STARVE or EAT yourself to DEATH on the Genisis in which I originally played this game. Thank you, however, for pointing out games that had been released either after this review, or no at all on the SEGA Genisis. <3 )