Medium Rare is an upcoming indie turn-based RPG game where you play as a man who wants to save his wife from corpo-cannibals. While due to their popularity and how the marketing material represents itself, many would think that this game is a rogue-like or a rogue-lite, but it is not. Medium Rare is a dungeon crawler with pre-generated floors with some random enemy and event placements. The game, while borrowing elements from survival horror games, is somewhat more akin to Darkest Dungeon, a game I didn’t finish but will pose as if I did.
Darkest Dungeon was a game where you gather a party of weirdos and send them into missions where they collect some valuables from dungeons. Death of a party member is permanent, so you have some stakes. To maximize the chances of success of a mission and to minimize party-member-gore, you can (and should) have your party take some consumable items which you need to buy with money. At the end of a successful mission, almost everything you collect, including consumables that were not used, will convert to money. In Medium Rare, there is no party or permadeath; death is just a basic mission failure, and you even get to carry back some of the stuff you had in your inventory back into the camp on defeat. There is no item-to-currency or vice versa conversion either; everything you bring back from a run is stored into the camp as is and can be used in future runs. And that is what breaks this game away from the Darkest Dungeon. The consumables of the Darkest Dungeon were essential for the success of a mission, and while they could be bought for cheap at the town, they were hard to come by during a mission, forcing you to buy them and encourage you to use them, as not using them is a waste due to their much lower sell value. While Medium Rare also has essential consumables, it has no shop or conversion system; the game is forced to provide you with consumables you will need during a run while in the run. This, combined with the extraction system, allows the player to stock up absurd amounts of items with no risk.
Medium Rare’s dungeon layout is pre-generated, and there is a fog of war-esque information hiding system that obscures the uncovered tiles from the player. Here is the problem: when a tile is uncovered, the fog is lifted indefinitely, even after starting a new run. While there is an element of randomization in the form of enemy placements, you will know where they will be due to there not being a fog. This eliminates all tension and lowers the risks to nearly none in later runs.
Medium Rare features an upgrade system where you can both upgrade your character’s stats and the individual weapons. The upgrades are unlocked through the use of material collected during the runs. When the previous two points are taken into the account, this makes the game very grindable, like a farming sim or an incremental game, and I am not sure if that was the intention. I spent my first 10 runs running around collecting materials on the first floor just to extract them to the camp. And it is a strat that definitely worked, as I never died even once during these and only died twice after them. I think this game needs higher stakes and risks to prevent excessive farming.
In a forum discussion, while responding to a thread that mentions similar concerns, a developer of the game likened the game’s progression to Elden Ring’s “self-paced” progression, which is a bad comparison. Elden Ring is not a linear game; many areas and bosses can be dealt with out of order, and there are enormous amounts of optional content, allowing the player to get stronger without grinding the same 5-tile area for half an hour.
I know I have been quite negative until this point, but there are two things that this game does quite well, and one of them is the combat. You are allowed to equip only 2 weapons at a time and the weapons are quite fun, I must say. Weapons have skills (including basic shooting and slashing) and every skill requires AP to use, and as long as you have AP, you can use as many skills as you would like in turn. Here is the fun part: the amount of AP per weapon is random per turn. Yeah. This may sound like a negative, but I kinda enjoyed it, even though I almost got screwed by the RNG a number of times. Some randomness can add spice to combat and force some unexpected tactics to be used, which is what makes the rogue-like genre so appealing, even though this game is not one. Just adding pseudo-random distribution to make the RNG feel better, and with better enemy encounters, the combat can be made golden.
Art direction is the other aspect that this game handles so well. All the sprites are just edited stock images, and it looks so good despite that. This is definitely a game of much style.
The demo has no native Linux build but works well under GE-Proton 11-9.
Overall, it could be made VERY GOOD with only a few tweaks on the progression, but my opinions are negative in the game’s current state. I definitely don’t play this game with 10 more floors, but I firmly believe in the dev team to make the game much better in the future and I am absolutely looking forward to the full release.
