Lenna's Inception Beta
by Malero on July 8, 2014, 12:50 p.m.
Bytten Studio, the developer of Lenna's Inception, has announced today that the game is now in public beta and can be purchased for about $5 USD/£2.99 GBP. The game is a top-down action adventure game and is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. The game features 2 game modes: Story Mode and Challenge mode. The challenge mode is a roguelike game mode with 7-permadeath challenges. The game also includes pets that fight alongside you, beautiful gameboy color style graphics, and a chiptune soundtrack composed by Warfreak2.
Story Mode
As of the current beta release, the story mode in this game is far from being finished. There are a few quests, but once you complete them, they basically tell you to explore and kill the remaining 7 bosses.
The map in the story mode is randomly generated, which in my opinion is a mistake. In the challenge game mode, randomly generated maps greatly improve the replayabilty. In the story mode, I think that designing fun maps and puzzles by hand is the way to go. Unless they come up with a good reason to replay the story, I doubt I will play through the story mode consecutively. This game reminds me a lot of the early Zelda games. When I pop in A Link to the Past, that nostalgic feeling of replaying the exact game I played when I was a kid is tremendous. Even though it's been years since I've played it, my brain has stored away all of the little secret areas and boss fight strategies. That's just my opinion. I think this game has great potential and I'm sure I will enjoy the final release of the game either way. I'm enjoying the beta quite a bit already!
Edit:
Somehow I missed the permadeath option and it being the authentic experience in the story mode. While I think that definitely makes the randomly generated maps make more sense, I guess I was thinking that this was going to be a top-down action/adventure game similar to A Link to the Past or Secret of Mana. Thanks for pointing that option out to me, Shclippy.
Challenge Mode
Lenna's Inception Challenges is a roguelike game mode with randomly generated maps and bosses. There are currently 7 different challanges in the current beta. Click on the image to the right to see each challenge and their descriptions.
While I love the randomly generated levels, I found that the linear equipment progression in the challenges to make starting over not as fun as other similar roguelike games. The bosses are a lot of fun to fight. Each one of them requires you to learn their patterns and then generate a strategy to beat them.
Buy Lenna's Inception
The price of the game will increase to about $10 USD/£5.99 GBP upon release, so get your copy now and save some money! Buy Lenna's Inception. Check out their beta gameplay trailer below and help support this wonderful indie game title!
I think that the randomly generated maps in story mode would be great if there was a new game plus mode. It would definitely make the game more fun to play through a second time.
reply Shclippy on July 8, 2014, 5:22 p.m.