The Game
The Way Home by CONCODE is a rogue-like dungeon explorer game with some interesting crafting and progression mechanics. You play as a cat named Cheese fighting your way through procedurally generated dungeons as you attempt to figure out how you and your human ended up on a mysterious island. Each time you take on a dungeon you can choose the skills you get when you level up from a choice of stat improvements, passive abilities or modifiers for your bow shots.
At the end of each floor of the dungeon you will have the option to walk away with all resources you have gathered so far or to carry on (risking the loss of 2/3 of your gathered materials). Once you return to your home island you can invest the materials gathered into work stations, permanent buffs or new spells and passive abilities to chose from on your dungeon runs. As you progress you also find out more about the backstory to how you ended up on this island and why it is so cursed.
Worth it?
The game is really fun and aesthetically pleasing, there’s a good sense of progression and it provides a good challenge too. The story and writing are interesting and engaging, there’s a variety of enemies and their attack patterns and a good variety of upgrades and skills to try out. Where this game is let down a little bit is in it’s pricing for the full game.
After beating the first boss you are prompted to pay £5.99 to access the remaining 3 islands of the game OR watch around 15-20 ads per platform (you need to get to the adjacent island) and then watch an ad after every dungeon run. While this model is quite interesting and does allow you to essentially play the game for free, quite a few players feel a bit tricked by the free trial aspect of the first island (no ads). The full game price is possibly slightly on the expensive side – 15-20% less would make it a much easier decision to purchase.
Tips
- Research the work stations first (Resource/Etc page)
- Focus on getting the better pick to get better materials (Anvil)
- Skills that modify your arrows (like Ricochet) are particularly useful for attacking large groups of mobs
- For the boss focus on building up your damage and health, ideally have a potion as well
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