HyperRogue Gold

★★★★★ HyperRogue is a staggering, genius game. Do not be fooled by its humble appearance. This is no ordinary lamp. Like other games in the roguelike neighborhood, your sense of progress in this game is not measured by a gradually more powerful save file, but by the learning process that occurs in a failure, death, and retry loop. Also like its genre, you have the benefit of infinite thinking time, and the game even helpfully forbids you from making simple mistakes. The things that kill you are complicated mistakes. The genius of this game is, first, in its hyperbolic landscape. The player begins with very bad intuitions about its nature. It branches in infinite possibility. Second, in its difficulty. As the player succeeds by collecting treasure and unlocking orbs of power, more enemies spawn and the player must deal with emergent bad situations. Third, in its variety. As the player masters an environment and its rules, the game unlocks more environments with more complicated rules. Every environment plays with the hyperbolic landscape in different ways. HyperRogue's simple graphics and presentation belie its extremely gamey systems, putting almost nothing between the player and the systems. When you matter the traditional game, there are many more modes to master. I would try the non paid version to see how you like it, then buy this one for more frequent updates and achievements.

★★★★★ Unique. Surprisingly simple. A great game that somehow taught me a lot about hyperbolic geometry.

★★☆☆☆ You really need to fix it for certain devices please, it won't open on my android.

★★☆☆☆ OMG HORRIBLE DESIGN FLAW. PLEASE FIX. I BEG YOU.... In portrait mode, if I tap "MENU" twice the game will restart!! That's because the restart option on the menu happens to be lined up with the menu button itself. And the game doesn't even ask you to confirm you want to restart!! What an infuriating way to lose your progress in a game that has no saving (I like the no-saves feature, but PLEASE protect us from accidental restarts.)