House Of Necrosis: A Love Letter To Resident Evil and RPGs
Justin Wood
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House Of Necrosis was made in Seven days during the 7DRL Challenge 2022 by developer Warkus. The 7DRL Challenge is a game jam held over on itch.io by its community members, with the overall challenge being to create a complete Roguelike game in just seven days. While submissions were open from March 4th to March 14th, voting for the winner is available for three months.
House Of Necrosis was one of the entries to jump out to me. With a look akin to the original Resident Evil mixed with the roguelike elements of the Darkest Dungeon and Hades. As you being a run, you are through into the middle of a dungeon surrounded by darkness. In each run, the first level always seems to be free of enemies, but you can use this chance to gather up some healing items and ammo, all of which you will definitely need because House of Necrosis is, like other roguelike games, very hard. As you find your first set of stairs leading you further into the dungeon/basement going to level two, you are genuinely thrown into it.
When you emerge onto the next level, enemies are present, and the goal becomes finding the stairs to get to the next level. Enemy variants start off simple from walking zombies and crawling zombies. As you descend further, the enemies start changing and becoming more complex. Around the fifth floor, you will start running into enemies like the “Crimson Heads” from the Resident Evil REmake. Basically, your regular zombies but faster, and they hit harder. At the same level, you will also run into dogs very similar to the zombie dogs from the Resident Evil series.
While you continue down, the enemies start varying, but your only defense isn’t just the ability to run away. If you fight, you’ll gain experience and level up. As you level up, your health points go up, and your physical attack goes up. Speaking of attacking, you have a couple of ways to attack. If you’re brave, you can get right up on the enemies and slash at them with a knife, which gets stronger as you level up. The other way to attack is your pistol, a ranged weapon but with limited ammo, so it’s a good idea to save your ammo for the more challenging enemies or for when you get attacked from multiple angles.
Movement in House of Necrosis works on a grid. Each action counts as a turn, so when you enter a room with enemies, it turns into almost a turn-based combat style game, with eight angles to attack and be attacked from. As a result, it can make for some challenging situations.
Being a small Roguelike game House of Necrosis doesn’t really have a story to be found anywhere, but that isn’t bad. Instead, it makes its main selling point, the gameplay, which does shine in that sense. It’s a simplistic idea with just enough strategy to it to feel accomplished when you come out of an encounter without a scratch.
The music and sounds are fantastic, with the splash start-up screen right out of the original PlayStation and a haunting soundtrack that is very industrial, almost like that out of a Silent Hill game. Each sound of your handgun going off has weight behind it, and the long off moans of zombies is terrifying when you can’t see anything but the darkness surrounding you.
The splashing start-up screen of the original PlayStation House of Necrosis allows you to hook up a PSOne controller and has a control setup exclusive to that. It just kind of help keeps this vibe of the old-school PSX games and ties it all together.
House of Necrosis is worth checking out, especially if you are into the retro roguelike style games, it is just one of the games from the 7DRL challenge that caught my eye, and it has me excited to see what developer Warkus can get up to with more time.
Be sure to check House of Necrosis out on itch.io and follow Warkus and get updates from his games on Twitter. For more gaming news, articles and podcasts, check out Dreadxp!
While you are over there, check out the found footage jam going on right now on the DreadXP itch.io!
Categorized:Editorials Horror Gaming
