FACTS:

Oneshot is such a good game

i love oneshot

play oneshot

Shout out to Dwarf Fortress for introducing “taken by a fey mood” into my lexicon, because it’s hands down the best way I’ve found to describe what being under the thrall of a hyperfixation feels like.

I never get tired of the thing where fantasy books name something by just calling it a word but capitalising it. Like oh shit, that person is a Wielder. The supernatural ability to see beyond matter called the Sight. Forces of Light and Darkness. The prohibited art of Knowing. A place simply known as The Blight. Awesome and horrible forces. The Force. You know something's getting bat shit wild when Fantasy Capitalisation comes into the picture. As in capitalising the letters, not the unholy act of seizing fantasy itself in order to churn profit off of it.

That is the work of evil creatures, like The Mouse.

Why are you buying missiles at the Soup store!

I am making chainsaw noises with my mouth every time I see this weapon.

ok its hyperrogue infodump time because boy do i have a story to tell

so, hyperrogue as a game is incredibly open-ended. there really isn’t a set goal for ANYTHING – it’s really an open-world, choose-your-own-adventure game with over 60 different biomes each with their own mechanics and quirks. however, it does have a few major quests that are kept track of by the game.

one of these quests is the Yendor quest, which involves collecting an Orb of Yendor, which needs to be unlocked with its Key before it can be collected. you do need to do some work to make these things even spawn in the first place, but that’s beside the point. once you touch an Orb of Yendor, a beacon will activate telling you which direction the key is and how far away from your current location it is. it looks something like this:

your goal during the Yendor quest is to go get the key and fetch it back to its orb, at which point it will be consumed, you will gain the Orb of Yendor (and a hearty helping of various orb powers, along with the orb itself worth 50 points), and formally win the game (with your turncount and real time recorded on leaderboards and the like). and the key is a mere 100 tiles away! how hard could it be?

the answer is: incredibly fucking hard.

hyperrogue’s whole thing is that the world is based on hyperbolic geometry, and in hyperbolic geometry, big things grow exponentially. the number of cells at distance 100 from you would have been around 600 in a flat, euclidean hexagonal grid, but here it’s to the tune of 700 sextillion (the same order of magnitude as avogadro’s constant)! if you don’t know EXACTLY what you’re doing and retrace your EXACT steps (such as by dropping a breadcrumb trail on the way there), the slightest deviation from your path will almost certainly lead you hopelessly astray – you have no hope whatsoever of getting back to where you came.

or do you?

see, the thing about hyperrogue is that its many lands tell the story of its geometry in many different ways. and this could not be more true for gravity lands like Ivory Tower.

the mechanic introduced by this land is artificial, magical gravity, which makes objects and non-flying monsters (and also you) unable to move upward (which, in Ivory Tower’s case, means away from the Great Wall). tiles within the land are colored in a way that reflects this - the alternating color “bands” in the screenshot above are horizontal from the viewpoint of the gravity mechanic.

and because this is hyperbolic geometry, things grow exponentially as you go higher and higher up. the numbers work out so that, for every two tiles in elevation, the number of tiles approximately triples. this means that, once you’re a few dozen tiles up the Ivory Tower, the horizontal movements you make barely have any effect on your movement left or right relative to your entry point back at the bottom. and usually, you’ll come back exactly the way you came.

another gravity land is Yendorian Forest, whose gravity works the same way as in Ivory Tower, except on the tree trunks where movement is unrestricted (except birds can’t fly through them):

just like elsewhere in the world, under the right conditions, Orbs of Yendor can spawn here. and the key will be generated further into the Yendorian Forest. and you may think, hey, since descending in a gravity land takes you back where you came, doesn’t that mean getting your Yendor here is basically trivial? and you’d be right to think that… if The DevTeam didn’t Think Of Everything.

when you travel to the key in YF, you will at first see the beacon take you up the tree trunk, perhaps taking different turns at the branching points sometimes, but still a very easy path to follow back.

and then at some point you’ll see the beacon point directly upward, out of the canopy. which, if you are unprepared, it will be very hard to continue your journey to the key from here.

and about 20 more tiles up, high in the Yendorian Forest sky…

there will be the key, sitting atop a single-block platform placed there with the sole purpose of ensuring the key won’t just fall to the canopy.

this sort of thing happens in Ivory Tower too, in which the key is placed on a platform unreachable by normal climbing, but it’s easier to pass that off as natural terrain generation there. here, however, it is a special exception made specifically to ensure the quest never becomes trivial. and i think that’s both beautiful and kind of funny. one of the many things that gives hyperrogue this je ne sais quoi that makes it so addictive.

[ LINE ARK OPERATOR ] : DaAaAmn, are we doing any damage? ...PRIMAL ARMOR?!?! First we have to break down that Primal Armor!

I GOT CHROME HEAD FIND IT, POUND IT I GOT STEEL HEART TURN IT, BEAT IT

[ SERENE HAZE ] : We've confirmed all targets destroyed. Mission complete. Well done. Almost perfect. But don't get too high on yourself yet, rookie. These enemies were nothing to write home about.

from Armored Core: For Answer Original Soundtrack (2008)