What happens when you take Diablo and mash it back together with the roguelike genre that inspired it in the first place? Odds are, you'd come up with something similar to Din's Curse, an action RPG from indie developer Soldak Entertainment. Since you were apparently a godless heathen in your previous life, the god Din decides that you need to make penance and save the people and their towns from the monsters who inhabit dungeons that just so happen to have entrances in the town square. Not the smartest move, but it's mighty convenient for our hero.
You can choose from your standard gallery of RPG archetypes to play as, each with three skill trees, or as a "hybrid" class, who can choose their skill trees from any of the other classes, but only get to take two. If you've ever wanted to be a badass warrior who wears mail armor and wields an enormous two-handed mace, but has the nimble grace and stealth skills of a rogue, this is your game.
Just about everything in Din's Curse is randomly generated, similar to your standard roguelike game. After creating a character, you begin by generating a world, which will create a town and its quests as well as the dungeon you will inevitably conquer. Completing quests for the townspeople will earn you reputation points, which will earn you special gear, and just might make Din look more favorably on you.
While hacking and slashing your way through the various dungeons will feel immediately familiar to anyone who's played a PC Action-RPG in recent years, there are some nice twists that give Din's Curse a unique feel. While other games of this type will often throw a trap at you here and there, in this game, you can use environmental traps against the horde of enemies that await you. Flip a lever and you might cause an explosion, trigger a poison trap or even cause the roof to cave in. Named mobs can incite conflict with other monster types, which you need to quell quickly, as enemies will gain levels and champion status when they kill other mobs.
While you're busy clubbing orcs over the head, enemies can leave the dungeon and attack your town. If you hurry back, you can save the townspeople and retain your hard-earned reputation points, but if you dawdle, townspeople might be kidnapped (which triggers a quest to rescue them) or even killed. Losing townspeople causes you to lose reputation, but as a nice side bonus, killed townspeople can be searched for loot. Hey, they don't need it anymore! If the three main questgivers (Warmaster, Steward and Apothecary) are killed, you will "lose" your town and be forced to generate a new town to save.
