Din’s Curse is not on Steam.

Soldak’s first game, Depths of Peril, is available on Valve’s digital distribution service but not Soldak’s second, Kivi’s Underworld, nor Din’s Curse, its third and best yet. The game is available on Impulse and GamersGate but Valve rejected it for undisclosed reasons. Soldak itself has no idea why.

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Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because it isn’t good. Game reviewers with over a decade of experience have been generally positive with their comments. Anyone who puts stock in Metacritic’s subtly massaged Metascores might take something away from the fact Din’s Curse Metascore is higher than a lot of games on Steam.

But then the Metascore doesn’t actually matter because Valve doesn’t seem to have much in the way of standards for games it accepts for its digital distribution service. For example, take this title. Comments from various reviewers include “… it’s best to skip this one …”, “… 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad …” and “… a complete failure … I couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that this game exists.” This “complete failure” of a game is somehow good enough for Steam.

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because it’s a broken, unplayable mess. Soldak has been particularly outstanding with its post-release support. As an indie developer, it cannot afford to support games indefinitely yet it still has put out multiple patches for Din’s Curse in the year since its release to fix minor bugs, fine-tune gameplay and even add new features. There’s nothing in the game that qualifies as a major bug — not a single crash to the desktop, nothing that prevents play. There are buggier games on Steam — the Known Issues thread for Magicka now spans 57 pages — yet Valve has no problems selling them.

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because the digital distribution service lacks physical shelf space to stock it. The game’s installer takes up less than 200MB of hard disk real estate so it’s not going to overload Valve’s servers or strain Steam’s bandwidth pipes. Valve can afford to allocate 1GB for each of Steam’s 30-million-plus accounts to store screenshots so it’s clearly not short of storage space.

So what is it exactly?
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Din’s Curse is slightly more complex than your average action RPG and it may seem overwhelming in the beginning. Here are some hints and tips for those starting out.

• If the town is being assaulted and you’re not sure where the attacker is, pay attention to how the townsfolk are oriented. Use that in combination with the mini-map to locate the invaders.
• If NPCs are under attack in town or in the dungeons, hit P to pause the game and throw them some food and/or a health potion to save them.
• To a catch a stealthy thief in town, move the mouse cursor slowly around the vendors. If present, the thief will become faintly visible.
• Enemies respawn in the dungeons depending on the pace of the world. If you can’t seem to find enough of a species on a particular dungeon level to complete a quest, consider completing other quests. Alternatively, try searching on other dungeon levels.
• If you can’t seem to find a boss or item on a level, it’s probably because there’s a hidden room somewhere. Note that there are sometimes hidden rooms behind hidden rooms.
• If potions and food seem more expensive than usual, it’s due to a shortage. (There should be a flashing icon or two in the vendor inventory.) Visit the Apothecary and make the related quest the main priority.
• Be sure to stock up on potions and food before you leave a saved town. Prices might be prohibitively high in the next town or there might not be any vendors there at all.

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Din’s Curse class system is one of the best things about the game yet it may well be one of the least appreciated elements. Despite Soldak touting the 141 possible classes as one of this action RPG’s key selling points, most players will likely stick to one of the six main character classes until they hit the level cap, a process which could take dozens of hours, then shelve the game because they think they’ve experienced everything the game has to offer.

That would be a shame because those who spend time with the character class system and put some thought into creation and development will be rewarded by a flexible system that lets them create a character that best fits their personal playing style. It’s capable of producing something slightly unusual like a wizard brandishing a sword, a more flamboyant mutation like a swordsman who teleports in or out of trouble and even something conceptually absurd yet tactically sensible like a stealthy warrior tip-toeing around in full plate armour.
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Action RPGs tend not to be deep, complex games — a key factor of the subgenre’s appeal to many. They’re very easy to get into — if you can point your mouse cursor and left-click, you’re good to go — and aren’t especially taxing. Two hours of intense PvP action on a competitive FPS server will leave the average gamer frazzled; two hours into a Diablo-like, the player would be perfectly happy to spend more time to finish a few more quests for the next tantalising level-up ding. The mechanics are so simple, the decision-making so limited, the action so repetitive, most players can plough through these games almost on auto.

It helps a lot players aren’t normally penalised heavily for failure. Death is usually a trivial inconvenience less painful than a stubbed toe. There may be some minor loss of XP (which can be quickly recouped) and some retracing of steps to be done but these penalties are so insignificant there’s little incentive to stay sharp and focused while hacking and slashing through hordes of foes.

This is not to say Diablo-likes are completely devoid of challenge. There is challenge enough within them to satisfy even the most hardcore of the hardcore but players must actively seek them out. By increasing the difficulty levels and enabling the permadeath option, action RPGs can go from near-mindless comfort gaming to genuine tests of skill as encounters which are otherwise straightforward turn into epic heart-in-mouth struggles.

Unfortunately, few action RPGs encourage this. These games constantly reward with XP, level-up skill improvements and loot but provide very little incentive to ramp up the difficulty, leaving the player with only the daunting penalties that go hand-in-hand with greater challenges.

Permadeath, in particular, seems an unduly harsh punishment and all the more so given the hours a player might put into each character, carefully tweaking the build and kitting out the character with the best possible gear. For those who’ve never tried playing with permadeath enabled, it may seem a completely mystifying way to play, a choice for masochists and the foolhardy. There can be no avoiding death in action RPGs, only a delaying of the inevitable, so why deal with the frustration of permadeath?

Yet the greater the risk, the greater the intensity of experience and ultimately, the more rewarding success becomes. A level-up ding is satisfying in normal mode; with permadeath enabled, each level-up is a fist-pumping moment, hard-won and well-earned, a testament to skill and endurance. Still, that thrill will never be experienced unless there is proper inducement to give this high-risk style of play a try.
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