I think I shall do this thread in time-honored Q&A format.
Q: What?
A: Deadly Rooms of Death is a series of puzzle games starring one Beethro Budkin and his continuing quest to smite inconvenient monsters and get to the bottom of this shit.
Q: Huh?
A The best way to describe it would be kinda similar to how the old Adventures of Lolo games. The gameplay is overhead view, tile-based and kind of chess-like, where-in you take a turn and then the enemies do. If the enemies touch you, you die and either restart the area or go back to your last checkpoint. You clear it one room at a time. However, it's not just a linear crawl, there's branching paths and secret rooms and all kinds of funtimes.
Q; Uh?
A: There's a bit more to it than the puzzles. There's also a fair amount of Pratchett-esque humor about. You get to know poor Beethro and understand his trials, and you get to see fun Discworldy things in action.
Q: Buh?
A: Well, there's some other aspects to it as well. Among other things, DROD has a map editor, and from this a fairly sizable community of people have arisen to make their own maps and crazy shit. To further this along, the makers released the source code. One can imagine how hog wild some people have gone with that.
Q: Pardon me?
A: Is it hard? Sadistically! However, it avoids twitch reflex stuff, as it's turn based and you can have all the time you need to think about a situation. The pain it inflicts is entirely mental. There is a solid variety of enemies that can do a solid variety of cruel and unusual things to both you and the map. Generally, the way puzzles work is that you have a general idea of what to do, and a relative amount of freedom to get things done. There is, however, a competitive metagame among players to solve things the most efficiently.
Q: Okay?
A: You can find them at
Caravel Games main site. One of the major reasons I'm bringing this up is that they presently have the first four games on sale for 75% off until April 18th; five dollars for a shitton of puzzle is nothing to sneeze at! As well, there are demos of several of the games, which do allow access to the player-made content (though some have some custom stuff the demos don't support, so be wary of that.)
So there you have it: cruel puzzlings and humor for a discount. I recommend starting with DROD: The City Beneath to get a nice idea of all the various puzzle elements out there and quickly get an idea of just what they can do with this stuff; there is much more to it visually and atmospherically than just running around single screen rooms.
