While the start of Into the Pit is unquestionably rocky, the follow-through is a blast, with fast action and serious pyrokinetics as monsters turn into blood splats decorating the walls. While the overall theme could have been dark and gloomy, everything lights up and the darkness becomes the backdrop for the neon-magical lightshow to illuminate. The variety of enemies and level types helps each run stay engaging, and while fifteen sets of levels plus the final area can feel like a bit much, there’s no need to try to blow through it all in a couple of days. Into the Pit is about action, after all, with only just enough story to get things moving. There’s a village in trouble and a ton of monsters to destroy by way of magical annihilation, and if it takes a bit to rescue everyone they’ll be fine waiting for a combat mage to do a run or two a day until the evil is finally dispelled.
I like Into the Pit a fair bit. The graphical style is nice, the combat is incredibly fluid, and the mechanics there are easy to understand, but also have a noticeable effect when spawning new dungeons. However, I also found it to be a little bit too easy for the most part. The game requires a lot of runs in order to rescue more villagers and max out your character, and it doesn’t do quite enough to keep you drawn in versus other similar games.
It’s a fast paced shooter, that feels really tight as a first person shooter. It’s meant to be played in fast bursts, so maybe it’s the perfect exciting thing to get you pumped while commuting on the bus. Or the kind of game where you breeze through the dialogue, turn off the sound and play while listening to a 25 hour audiobook. Into the Pit is a well-constructed roguelike shooting game and if you’re the kind of person who hears those words and yells, “I’m sold!” then you will probably have a lot of fun. But it’s not going to make believers out of genre-skeptics.
I have a great fondness for roguelikes, but this one puts me in a weird place. Mechanically, Into The Pit is a welcome throwback to classic FPS games with the added twist of randomized elements to keep things interesting. However, the pool of random elements is too shallow and there are not enough interesting combinations to keep all but the most dedicated players interested.
It’s no doubt that Into the Pit draws heavy influence from the Doom franchise, with its old-school graphics, fast-paced shooting, and rock and roll heavy background music, but the core gameplay loop makes it hard to recommend as a rogue-like. It’s fully functional and fluid with snippets of fun thanks to its brief runs, but its lack of variation for dungeons, weapons, and bosses makes it difficult to stand out from others in the genre.
Into the Pit is a retro FPS/roguelike that's far less than the sum of its parts. It's got great action, but everything that surrounds it is questionable.
Into The Pit rolls out new content far too slowly. With player upgrades that are mostly changing numbers around and rooms that aren't hard to puzzle out, playing becomes an exercise in enduring repeated content before finally stumbling onto something that makes things feel fresh. Even then, what does unlock often isn't enough to truly fuel more runs. At the end of the day, Into The Pit is too repetitive to truly succeed as a roguelike and too skim on content to survive as an FPS without those trappings.
SummaryA fast-paced retro-FPS roguelite. As a member of a family of lore-hunting mystics you are summoned to a cursed village, drawn by rumors of a demonic portal. Dark magics have overwhelmed the village, It's up to you to rescue the survivors, grow your powers, and journey forth INTO THE PIT.