While originally planned for a March release, minimalist roguelike dungeon delver Necropolis has a new Steam release date, that of July 12.
I got some playtime with Necropolis back in May, turned loose to explore its procedurally-generated dungeons and battle a number of its nasty residents. The combat is enjoyably Dark Souls-y: timing your attacks, blocks, and dodges based on your enemies' animations. Learning which enemies do what obviously takes a bit of trial and error, and while button-mashing and mindless hack-and-slashing might work at first, if you want to get more than a few levels deep you'll really need to learn how your different attacks work, how long they take, and how to time them against your enemies.
The minimalist dungeon crawler features permadeath, though there is an element of persistence. Completing tasks for an entity known as The Brazen Head will earn you Tokens of Favor, and those tokens are collected and remain available to you even if the character who earned them died. You can spend these tokens on magical books found in the dungeon's libraries, and the abilities gained from those books remain with you from character to characters, meaning you won't really be starting over from scratch each time you play.
Necropolis will also feature up drop-in drop-out co-op for up to four players. It wasn't available to try during my session, unfortunately, but I'm eager to try it out. When playing with friends, death isn't permanent unless you all die: you can revive fallen friends and continue on your journey. Friendly fire is on, however, so you can also kill your friends, accidentally or otherwise.
