KickStarter Soulash - roguelike where you play a forgotten god set on destroying the world

[Technomancer]

so backup your save manually

How?

 

[Haba]

so backup your save manually

How?

%appdata%/Roaming/WizardsOfTheCode/Soulash

#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%d-%m-%Y+%T)
BACKUP_DIR=”/root/backup”
SAVE_LOCATION=”/path/goeshere”

# take each save backup with a separate name, use below format #
tar -zcvpf $BACKUP_DIR/savegames-$DATE.tar.gz $SAVE_LOCATION

# Delete files older than 10 days #
find $BACKUP_DIR/* -mtime +10 -exec rm {} \;

*/15 * * * * /root/backup.sh

 

[Sharpedge]

Anyone playing, how's the game?

To add to what Haba said, so far I am level 9 and have fought the first 2 gods and a few dragons. I have been playing a fallen knight and so far I haven't really found combat particularly difficult. You have enough time in general to change equipment during combat without risking being killed and the way damage mitigation works in the game means that if you swap gear to something that mitigates the damage of what you are currently facing, it probably won't deal more than 1-3 damage. This, combined with parrying (I am more or less playing a sword and board knight) means pretty much everything I have ran into so far has been a breeze. What is also very important to note is that whenever you repair an item, its MAXIMUM durability is reduced by 10 and eventually it will no longer be possible to repair an item anymore, which means that if you find something particularly strong, you want to hold onto it until you actually need to use it (I typically swap to powerful weapons against interesting enemies). Items also degrade fast enough that, at least in my opinion, you want multiple copies of equipment so you can take on many enemies at once without having to worry about equipment breaking. Because of the maximum durability rule, to get the most out of your gear, you only want to repair it after it has broken, so this is also a strong incentive to carry around multiple copies of items.

All of this which leads to something which at first glance might seem counterintuitive, but is in my opinion, seeming more and more like the correct conclusion. As far as I can tell, the most important stat early on is carry weight. Because the more you can carry, the longer you can go on fighting because of how many duplicates of items you can have. It also means you can carry more food, which means you need to worry less and less about food overall. There is still the hard limitation on inventory slots to contend with, but at the start of the game you will hit the carry weight limitation far before the item slot limitation. This has lead me to the conclusion that the Genie is probably the race which has the easiest time early on as a mage and any class which benefits highly from strength comes after that. The genie mage combination comes with the additional advantage that you will have a huge bonus when it comes to crafting items, because of your high intelligence.

Some other general common sense advice is that obtaining a Goatskin and knife early on makes the game much more convenient, allowing you to skin corpses for food and store water respectively. If you are playing a mage (I did try this briefly, before I died, while I was still figuring stuff out), unless you are playing a race with infravision, the light spell is exceedingly good. The light radius penalty at night heavily penalizes ranged characters, far more so than playing a melee character. In addition to all of this, most enemies early on do physical damage, its only later on you start encountering the other damage types. This means that focusing on physical damage reduction makes the experience much smoother.

Now, my main criticism so far would be that the world is too damn big. It really is huge. Exploring it takes forever which highly discourages repeat playthroughs. I would have also liked it if identifying equipment was a part of the game with both blessed and cursed equipment, but considering the game does feature both item durability and hunger (which most games do not feature) I will relegate this to the territory of minor nitpick. The one thing that does annoy me a great deal is that if you are playing a caster, your spell damage scales off of your weapon damage. Rather than designing interesting items for casters, they more or less force casters to use the same equipment as martial characters, in order to keep up on damage. This does lead to unintuitive results, like the Bone Wraith 25% damage for two handed weapons being a strong glass cannon option for a spellcaster.

Other than that, I have been enjoying the game. I hope it does have more interesting fights that I haven't ran into though, because so far I haven't really had much of an issue.

 

[Haba]

Fights are mostly predictable, but sometimes you meet a hero enemy that has an artifact. The skills from those can throw a real curveball. Just ran into a foe that had infinite blades -skill from an item. 60-70 points of damage early on is no fun.

Playing a golem eliminates the need to eat and drink, which makes life a lot easier. Just smelt some gold/silver bars and you are set for life.

 

[Sharpedge]

Fights are mostly predictable, but sometimes you meet a hero enemy that has an artifact. The skills from those can throw a real curveball. Just ran into a foe that had infinite blades -skill from an item. 60-70 points of damage early on is no fun.

Playing a golem eliminates the need to eat and drink, which makes life a lot easier. Just smelt some gold/silver bars and you are set for life.

I was considering the golem route, but I am not sure how the convenience of not having to worry about food and water compares to some of the other racial bonuses. 25% increased damage with 2h weapons is a lot (bone wraith) and the carry weight relying on intelligence for genie is great for casters. Any race with Infravision also has a huge convenience and I am leaning towards infravision being better than not needing to eat or drink when it comes to convenience.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Soulash?
Soul Goulash?

 

[lukaszek]

Being able to repair your gear is a godsend

dumb question but... how?

 

[Sharpedge]

Being able to repair your gear is a godsend

dumb question but... how?

You need to find a grindstone (I think its a grindstone, at least it looks like one). Typically you find them near anvils. When you are standing beside one, if you open your inventory and click on an item, there is an option on the right to repair it.

 

[Haba]

Being able to repair your gear is a godsend

dumb question but... how?

You need to find a grindstone (I think its a grindstone, at least it looks like one). Typically you find them near anvils. When you are standing beside one, if you open your inventory and click on an item, there is an option on the right to repair it.

Or using the consumable item, but that is one use and very rare.

 

[dacencora]

Guys I don’t need to buy another open-world roguelike…but damn if I’m not tempted.

 

[Technomancer]

Eh, got killed at level 11. No way I'm restarting from that. Game is a bit grindy and shallow, not much going on.

Had a phoenix feather that supposed to prevent death but I think I dropped everything before dungeon to have some weight to spare. And then god spawned on top of me on level up and I didn't have enough time to heal. Feels bad.

 

[Haba]

Yup, I am dead again.

Summoning gods is a bad idea, I knew I shouldn't, but I found a new altar for a god I didn't recognize. And before I had been able to flee and/or the god wasn't immediately hostile.

Since the world is hand-crafted, there are actually quite a few interesting locations. Unfortunately there really isn't anything to do in them. I just explore to find more crafting recipes.

Frankly, I'd ditch the RNG from enemies, or at least limit it. The game would be much more interesting with hand-crafted encounters beyond the bosses. Since the enemies spawn with random equipment and wander around randomly, it is too much up to luck. Enemy groups should stick to each other.

And on itemization side, there should be more effects than the current ones. You have some artifacts that grant you a skill, but otherwise equipment is always a linear upgrade. This way even a "lower tier" equipment could have something that makes it worth considering later in the game.

Crafting as well could use some diversity. Expanding on the standard recipes with rare ingredients, or something.

The core engine has a lot of potential, you could make a real fun "traditional" RPG with it.

 

[Sharpedge]

Got my character killed at level 10. Ran into an assassin with 3 legendary items, the first gave it a hard CC and the other 2 gave it so much damage that during the time I was CCd it was able to delete me. I more or less agree with Haba's take on things, combat is shallow, the world has some nice places and the engine has potential, but it does need work to get it there.

Summoning gods is a bad idea, I knew I shouldn't, but I found a new altar for a god I didn't recognize. And before I had been able to flee and/or the god wasn't immediately hostile.

How do you do this? I have had gods randomly appear 3 times, but this makes it sound like there is a way to fight them deterministically.

 

[Haba]

Summoning gods is a bad idea, I knew I shouldn't, but I found a new altar for a god I didn't recognize. And before I had been able to flee and/or the god wasn't immediately hostile.

How do you do this? I have had gods randomly appear 3 times, but this makes it sound like there is a way to fight them deterministically.

Go stand next to an altar and use the summon action. You need a ritual ingredient. It seems that any ingredient works, or it is completely random. Or tied to the ingredient.

The church with vampire hunters / catacomb underneath it has an altar and ingredient. The cultist lair has a chance of getting the ingredient immediately as well. Unicorns spawn near the elvish one etc.

There is something majorly broken with (some of?) them, as it had 1000 hp, took 1 hp damage and hit me with ranged AOE that did 70 points of damage through my beefed up armor. Maybe if you had specific elemental resistances, but then you'd still need to have gear that could survive 1k hits or more...

 

[Kabas]

The concept of rpg in which your usual town visiting routine is murdering everyone, looting shops and then taking a nap in a cozy bed of a freshly depopulated house sounds very appealing to me.
However, judging by what you're all saying the full version is the same as demo in that the only thing it shows is promise of a more interesting game.

 

[jungl]

Soullash is a incredibly long and large game which is not suitable for a roguelike especially with how repetitive the gameplay is. The game needs more random variables like towns at war, weather changes, alien invasion to motivate the player to start another run.

 

[Tyranicon]

Oh, didn't realize this released. Is it worth the asking price? I guess I could just download the demo...

 

[Sharpedge]

Summoning gods is a bad idea, I knew I shouldn't, but I found a new altar for a god I didn't recognize. And before I had been able to flee and/or the god wasn't immediately hostile.

How do you do this? I have had gods randomly appear 3 times, but this makes it sound like there is a way to fight them deterministically.

Go stand next to an altar and use the summon action. You need a ritual ingredient. It seems that any ingredient works, or it is completely random. Or tied to the ingredient.

The church with vampire hunters / catacomb underneath it has an altar and ingredient. The cultist lair has a chance of getting the ingredient immediately as well. Unicorns spawn near the elvish one etc.

There is something majorly broken with (some of?) them, as it had 1000 hp, took 1 hp damage and hit me with ranged AOE that did 70 points of damage through my beefed up armor. Maybe if you had specific elemental resistances, but then you'd still need to have gear that could survive 1k hits or more...

They aren't actually broken and I have managed to kill the 1k HP ones now, as of yet they are the only fights in the game that actually take strategy. They are vulnerable to the skills which are on items, which means that in order to fight them you need to stock up on those. Basically I just rotated between multiple items in my inventory and spammed the skills on them and then they eventually died.

The reason that they only took 1 damage is because of the way damage mitigation works in the game, I suspect (but have not verified yet) that damage mitigation is flat (damage - defense stat), with a floor of 1 (so you will always deal 1 damage to an enemy, even if its supposed to mitigate 100% of the damage).

As far as the legendary items go, the most useful 2, bar none are Angelic Wings (which lets you teleport all over the map) and Vengeance (which lets you reflect damage back onto the enemy). The rest I have seen are not nearly as interesting.

What is kind of amusing is every time you kill one of these gods it changes the entire world. Killing this one made it snow everywhere for example.

 

[Haba]

LOL, necromancer is a BIT strong (at least early game)...

As long as you get a starting area with free corpses, it is basically impossible to die. Then you get the acid spit and you can kill anything you meet.

 

[lukaszek]

LOL, necromancer is a BIT strong (at least early game)...

it reminds me of that steam review

My first two characters got mauled to death by bears 5 minutes into the game.

Then I picked a Lich Necromancer.

Now my zombie bears are mauling everyone else to death.

And so ends the story of my bear problem, and also an entire local village of gnomes.

 

[Joyvankek]

Pixel graphic early access, yeah... I don't think so.
For anyone who plan on buying, see you in 8 year in the future, if by some miracle this won't be just another eternal EA that will fade in obscurity sooner or later.

Edit: Oh, it actually doesn't have EA label on steam.
Now that's a surprise. Still if you have graphic like that, there better be some good interesting and unique system in there to excuse it.
Or is it your normal roguelike, just with shitty, tileish graphic?

 

[Sharpedge]

Died to the Emperor at level 13, I made the mistake of killing most of the gods before I fought him, so by the time I got to him I had exhausted most of my resources and didn't have what I needed to deal with him any longer. For reference, out of the gods I did summon, these were their HP totals and some info about them.

Spoiler

• Fish - 300.
• Rain - 500.
• Sun - 800.
• Moon - 800.
• Medicine - 800.
  
• Fertility (or is it harvest, I can't remember, it is the elf god) - 800.
• Winter - 1000.
• Dwarf - 1000.
• Dreams - 1000.

The forgotten altar also summons winter. Out of the ones with 1000 life, I found Dreams to be by far the most dangerous. Dreams does lightning damage and heals rather fast, Winter does cold and does not heal at all, medicine does poison. The elf one heals like crazy. Moon does death damage, Sun does fire damage. Dwarf deals physical damage.

The most dangerous area I found by far was the Sun Temple in the capital, the Sun Inquisitors spamming fire spells are no joke. I had explored most of the world at this point, with very few points of interest left.

 

[Technomancer]

LOL, necromancer is a BIT strong (at least early game)...

Yeah, unfortunatly it falls off. Later you get skeletons with 100 HP but you need bones to raise them. They also need but don't consume corpses for some reason so you can raise like 200 from one corpse lol. High HP gods still tear them apart. Good sponges but you need to be close to deal damage and it's difficult to cast shit when there are too many. Even later you get banshees but they are timed and duration is relatively short, lame.

His other spells are rather lackluster as well. Most often I spammed that lvl 2 poison bolt because it was the most damaging abilty.

 

[Haba]

LOL, necromancer is a BIT strong (at least early game)...

Yeah, unfortunatly it falls off. Later you get skeletons with 100 HP but you need bones to raise them. They also need but don't consume corpses for some reason so you can raise like 200 from one corpse lol. High HP gods still tear them apart. Good sponges but you need to be close to deal damage and it's difficult to cast shit when there are too many. Even later you get banshees but they are timed and duration is relatively short, lame.

His other spells are rather lackluster as well. Most often I spammed that lvl 2 poison bolt because it was the most damaging abilty.

Yeah, I just had my stack of 40 zombies wiped by a couple of wardancers. If there was a moderate range, single target attack spell it'd be workable. But LOS requirement/AOE ruins it.

Still, the single most useful level 1 ability from all the classes. On higher levels it looks like you'd be better off speccing to melee, or are there purely elemental damage artifacts out there? Elemental damage scales from INT, so genie necromancer would become viable?

 

[Sharpedge]

I tried Necromancer and I wasn't that impressed with it. Whilst the zombies are damage sponges they don't really do any damage themselves, making them only really good for soaking hits. Fallen Knight's level 1 ability is in my opinion more useful, being a single target attack which doesn't miss and doesn't have a cooldown, allowing you to spam it against enemies and ensuring you always manage to hit, even against higher level gods. It retains a purpose throughout the entire game and I have no real struggles with it at all in the early game. Warlock's basic ability is also similar in this regard, however warlock struggles a little bit more at the start. My go to strategy with Fallen Knight, which worked pretty much flawlessly in my experience, was to rush to Duskwatch and kill everything there, then head west and clear out the elves, then go up to the capital. I am pretty sure that if I started another Fallen Knight playthrough I would finish the game, but on the other hand I want to see what the other classes have to offer so I am messing around with them at the moment.

LOL, necromancer is a BIT strong (at least early game)...

Yeah, unfortunatly it falls off. Later you get skeletons with 100 HP but you need bones to raise them. They also need but don't consume corpses for some reason so you can raise like 200 from one corpse lol. High HP gods still tear them apart. Good sponges but you need to be close to deal damage and it's difficult to cast shit when there are too many. Even later you get banshees but they are timed and duration is relatively short, lame.

His other spells are rather lackluster as well. Most often I spammed that lvl 2 poison bolt because it was the most damaging abilty.

Yeah, I just had my stack of 40 zombies wiped by a couple of wardancers. If there was a moderate range, single target attack spell it'd be workable. But LOS requirement/AOE ruins it.

Still, the single most useful level 1 ability from all the classes. On higher levels it looks like you'd be better off speccing to melee, or are there purely elemental damage artifacts out there? Elemental damage scales from INT, so genie necromancer would become viable?

There are. There is a mace which gives a lightning attack and a robe which gives meteor storm. There are probably other ones as well, but those are the 2 I found. The ones I found are significantly less useful than the melee ones though. The body armour which gives Infinite Blades is great and it pales in comparison to Vengeance, which is probably the strongest artifact in the game. Vengeance is a sword which keeps track of the last 5 hits you have taken, then if you trigger the ability revenge, deals them as an AoE hit to everything within 2 blocks. Against gods, provided you have a high enough HP pool, it is the single best weapon you can have. You can easily deal 200+ damage per activation with Vengeance, effectively meaning that against the 1000 HP gods provided you have more than 400 HP, it alone is worth 40% of their HP pool.

Overall though I am not really sure which is better, a spellcaster or melee. I definitely feel like a sword and board fighter has a significant advantage against most enemies in the game, being able to parry almost everything and then the abilities that do land, don't do much damage due to mitigation. On the other hand, the last few enemies that can hit you reliably (gods) don't do physical damage and your elemental mitigation is not high enough to be meaningful vs the 1,000 HP enemies. Speccing willpower might fix that, but that seems better suited to a caster character.