Ring of Pain

Easy mouse-only clicker with quick and fun replayability,

I wish more people talked about this game

Card rouge like, make cool build with whatever you find, and weigh risk, in here a simple rat can be a powerful foe, or just chump food, but after a while you learn that if explodes it kills you

Easy to learn, addicting to play. Plenty of fun items to try new strategies and synergies with. Not hard if you cheese it but can be nice and challenging if you try to play with a little more finesse. I love the daily dungeons with unique rules and there are frequent updates that have kept the game fresh. The attack sound is also so satisfying to hear, really quality stuff. Definitely recommend checking it out if you love stats on cards.

If you liked Slay the Spire, this game won't disappoint. It's easy to pick up, hard to master.

Fun for a few hours of game play. Doesn't have the staying factor and my few hours have been played over 3? years.

As others have said, RNG is huge here and the game never feels like it gives you a great chance at winning.

Game play just isn't as engaging as other card games or rouge lites.

Fantastic and unique roguelike. Hard as nails but worth putting a lot of time into. Big fan of the huge number of equipment slots and potential combos. I downloaded this first on game pass to try it and loved it. Bought it on switch after it left game pass, and then got if for steam when I got a steam deck. Literally 3 play throughs from scratch and never got sick of it at all....(Although I never had the patience to go after more of the hard achievements again on steam lol).

Definitely a no brainer purchase. If this game looks interesting to you at all then it's a must buy.

This game drives me absolutely crazy - I want more.

honestly i love this game i dont always have wifi and besides mtg this is one of y most goto games when my internet is out its just hard enough to be fun and just fun enough to stay installed forever on my laptop. all and all 10/10 game

This game is great. Took me about 20 hours to learn enough about items & tactics to enable my first win. It's been a satisfying experience the whole way through, or around, as it were. Balance feels good, variety of enemies & synergies feel good, visual design is good, simple and pleasing UI. I really can't think of anything to complain about, this is a A+ roguelite that I'll probably play for dozens if not hundreds of hours.

this game has taken away hours of quality family time from me and my wife now yearns for a divorce.
alimony/10 highly recomended

I really tried to like this game, because it is nice to look at and can be fairly absorbing, but there's just no pay off here. The sheer prevalence of RNG, both in your build, and in fights, makes runs very swingy and abrupt, most often dying out of nowhere even with a strong build. The gameplay loop and story are also very grindy and repetitive, leading to a game that you can easily sink hours into without any real progress or reward.

If you're looking for a game to spend hours on there are many better options, and if you're looking for roguelite, dungeon crawler, card game, there are also better examples there too. This game just isn't worth the time.

Simple yet addictive with tons of replayability 9/10

awesome beans

I may have only played a little over two hours but its quite a fun game and I got it because i seen my brother play it and I bought a plushie of owl.

Great rougelike in my own opinion.

the bird is friendlier than he looks i swear. also frogs

neat game. Lacking in run variety because of a lack of synergies or strong items. My wins were from stacking stats using items that helped with that. If you dont build this way the blobs or ranged units will kill you easily. So the game gets samey quifck. Its cool for the price but its no slay the spire or balatro.

Never before has putting underwear on my head made me so powerful

Ring around the poison.
Pockets full of potions.
Darkness Darkness.
Its all stats down.

Fantastic game; slay the spire and brotato lovers should DEFINITELY pick up this game.

play it or owl will eat you

If you liked slay the spire(personal favorite) then I think you'll enjoy this game. deck building rogue. the general vibe is great the story elements bit vague but intriguing and most fun is the level of challenge. did crash once in 13hrs so very little bugs. definitely recommend.

Definitely a challenging, but very cool unique roguelike adventure game! While the designs are all card based, I wouldn't really call this a "card game", I think of it as a strategy turn based dungeon crawler. The reason I say this, is because after playing 3 different "card" roguelikes, like slay the spire, Necroking, and Iris and the Giant, Ring of pain is nothing like them, AT ALL. Some key reasons I see it this way, is because there is no "drawing" mechanic, no "shuffling deck" mechanic, and your primary way of attacking isn't with cards. In Ring of Pain, your goal is mostly to strengthen your own character by increasing your stats, and attacking the enemies yourself, the cards are really just equipment that helps you accomplish this task.

If you disagree, you have a right to, but beyond this, this game is AMAZING. GREAT designs, GREAT balance, LOVE the atmosphere. I have beaten 2 endings so far, and the way they make you feel like you have to overcome an insurmountable challenge, and then you discover how to win anyways is a fine tuned feeling that was well worth my money (I did buy this game on a christmas sale for $5 though). I can't wait to see what else this game has in store.

One last thing, if you plan on playing this game, remember that strategy is a part of every action you take, whether its creating a situation to stall for time by waiting to collect items or by using status effects to pacify otherwise deadly foes, there are a MANY more elements to strategy in this game than you might originally see in the first couple of hours. Try not to spoil the experience for yourself, get the experience fresh!

Recommended if you likes Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and similar games.

The game definitely could be way better balanced, but the base mechanics are definitely good enough to give the game some replayability.

its a nice and relaxing card game :)

A circle turns, the shadows grin,
Where light is frail, the dark begins.
Choices whisper, cruel and sly,
Each step forward, a question: why?

The cards are teeth, they bite, they leer,
A feast of dread, a feast of fear.
What lies beneath? What lies beyond?
A fragile thread, a broken bond.

The pain is sharp, the lessons deep,
A waking dream you dare not keep.
To grasp the ring is to lose your name,
Yet still you crawl, you play the game.

The end is near, the end is far,
A dying flame, a fallen star.
In the Ring of Pain, all paths align,
To find the truth, or be devoured by time.

explaining it doesn't do it justice but its amazing

Good roguelike with different mechanics. Restraint, perseverance and planning required more than predictable builds.

maybe i'm just bad at the game, but I managed to finish very few runs, even at low difficulty. It's always the poison or the exploding blobs coming at you and you can't sneak cuz you lose a turn and die from poison anyways. I like hard roguelikes, but this is harder than what I'm used facing.

Good

Way too RNG. I should really stop playing this game, it's not good

This is pretty much a 1-d traditional roguelike, complete with emphasis on picking your battles, consumables, and gearing up.

That said, it has several modern features like making items actually interesting, having enemy stats be *visible in the game so you don't need to constantly alt-tab to look at a fucking wiki*, limited inventory space, etc.

Technically a roguelite due to achievement-based unlocks, but they're not strict upgrades so w/e.

Manages to cram a surprising amount of depth into a fairly simple set of rules. Fun overall.

This is one of those games that as you play and figure it out, you get further and further. One day you have the furthest you've ever been. You make a stupid wrong click and dead. You won't want to play for a time. But then soon after, you just need something to focus on other than life...

It's really good. Try it.

I like it, but I don’t love it. I want to love it but I’m not getting there.

There are some balance issues in my opinion. Certain builds are way more viable than others. With defense-focused builds, I can usually win a run or at least get pretty far. In comparison, I don’t think I’ve ever had a speed or stealth build make it even halfway. Dodge just doesn’t seem to trigger very often, no matter how many points you put into speed. It seems just worse than parry in every way.

There’s a push towards stealth in the early game, but it’s just so weak. The early game stealth items don’t do much, and because you’re not killing very many enemies you don’t get enough souls to get better items in mid to late game. I think poison is also underpowered, the early game items are just not strong enough.

I haven’t found clarity to be a very useful stat either - I still get plenty of souls with low clarity. The fact that it determines crit rate also is weird, it doesn’t fit very well with other builds in my opinion.

I like that it’s difficult and unforgiving but easy to start back up again. Art style and overall aesthetic/tone is great. But the balance issues and lack of variety in viable builds brings it down.

Not quite a dungeoncrawler, not quite a deck-builder, and not quite Rogue (or 'Rogue-lite' by some definitions of what meta-progression is and isn't), but what is here is a superbly-executed combination of light RPG and Rogue-lite mechanics that is mechanically and aesthetically so dissonant from the aforementioned genres that they are more familiar suggestions than accurately-descriptive terms. There is also the owl.

This is a 'card' game insofar as the deck is the level of the dungeon you are trawling through, with enemies, NPC's, loot, and obstacles visible in front of you at all times, with progression further into a run tied to flipping through the cards in front of you to either 'run' from a threat or to click on it to interact - meaning to usually attack - it. There's very little you can or will do to interact with this 'hand' in regards to what will come up and the game does not emphasize construction in that sense, it is very much *not* a card game in the mode of Slay the Spire so much as in its presentation. There is also the owl.

Very addictive, very quick, and with a very wide variety of items to engage with the spread in front of you or manipulate your stats to accomplish the same end, with several extreme options you can stumble onto to wildly swerve an existing build or course correct into something feasible - with the *real* game starting after you complete a run for the first time, and get to choose different conditions and items with which to start as a result. There is also the owl.

Ultimately I think it's still one of the best things Humble Games has published even four years later, as someone who has come back to the game sporadically since first trying its initial release, and in a solidly polished and complete state as of now, even if it's unlikely to get further updates in the near future. There is also the owl.

Highly replayable based on how many different items you can equip, enemies you encounter and randomness of the rooms. Great game!

Meh.

RNG sometimes sucks, and some achivements I am definitelly not doing, but I really like the game overal. And you can always play easier difficulty if anything, no shame in that. I like the candles each giving different gameplay experience, the variety of items, all the secrets. It is be hard to make certain builds valid, because core items for them are in legendary tier. So you gamble on weak early-mid game to maybe get something strong in end game, not super fun. Still, awesome game, finished all candles on hard except the reverse candle, I dont wanna grind all the spoons for it, it does seem fun though.

It's fun, but falsely advertised. The game isn't a roguelite: there is no permanent progression, just the ability to expand your card pool by completing runs. Because this game is so RNG-dependent, the cards you unlock are about as likely to hurtful as helpful in your runs. If you want Slay the Spire At Home, it is a pretty good game; but if you want a roguelite deckbuilder, it doesn't exist here. It also unfortunately took me more than two hours to figure out that permanent progression would not be forthcoming, so I couldn't get a refund. The game will be good if you go into it understanding that it is a roguelike, not a roguelite, but I'm disappointed.

is good

very funny very painfull

Got the game only a couple days ago and I already sank so many hours into it. It also helps that it's so fast and once you die you can just jump right back into it. It's so much fun! 10 outta 10, I'll definitely be recommending this game to all my friends!

Wow, this game is amazing. A lot of roguelikes have tried the "odd gameplay loop, simple mechanics" route but I feel very few have achieved it to the level of success of Ring of Pain. There are 6 actions at any given moment, move left, move right, interact left, interact right, spell, and scroll. But I really can not say there's ever a moment playing this game where it feels linear and that is due to the INCREDIBLE item design. Runs play incredibly differently every time and there are so many ways to build a run.

And for the completionist like myself this game has some of the best achievement design I have ever seen. I love how much intentionality there was in every achievement and being able to plan a run to complete multiple achievements at once is incredibly gratifying. I just completed 100% and am really excited to go back in and beat every candle on every difficulty just for fun.

If you're a strategy roguelike fan, this game is, without a doubt, one of the greats.

Fun game. Short life on it (i'd say about 10-12 hours before a decent player beats it) BUT great game play design, look, feel, and 'writing'. Played it a lot more elsewhere and bought it again to play it on PC because it is a mix of relaxing fun and strategic, without stressing me out before bed like some strategy games can.

Most of the items are useless or borderline detrimental to an already massively RNG playthrough.
Some of the generic enemies are OP.
Not possible to strategize, its more like gambling and less like a rougelike.

This is my favourite click a thing simulator.

99 min in, I have no idea what is happening.

Is this a game? I'm not sure.