In the world of Roguelikes, there’s a bunch of different flavours of games, from more strategic ones (see Drill Core and Dungeon of the Endless) where your every move could decide the fate of your run… to more tactical ones where you make in-the-moment decisions based on what Lady Luck has in store for you (like in Little Noah or Hades).
There’s a lot of variety in terms of gameplay, and what’s truly interesting to me is how each developer changes up the formula and present you with interesting mechanics. Similarly, I just love to see how limitations result in innovation… and in that way, I do believe that Talented shows off these core aspects of what makes the genre great incredibly well.
Developer: TurtleFox Games
Publisher: TurtleFox Games
Genre: Indie, Action, Roguelike
Release Date: December 20th, 2024
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was purchased.
Welcome to the “Demonic Conveyer Belt”, where spooky enemies come to get you in twenty nights that are yours to survive! Strapped into the middle of this evil contraption, you utilise your abilities and basic attacks to strike enemies coming from the four cardinal directions.
Each night, enemies get stronger. New types will appear, some as stronger variants even, and with each night, you’ll need to grow stronger by collecting the experience gathered from enemies, levelling up in the process, and then spending your skill points on the procedurally generated talent tree after each night is conquered!
And that’s the key selling point essentially: Every run there is a different procedurally generated skill tree for you to spend your points on!
The talent trees feature a variety of talents that benefit you in some way, from basic stats in the common tier to modifiers that let you play differently in the rare and epic tier, to legendary skills that can really glue together your build even further… and now more recently, the devs also added a new mythic tier that stands above them all with a full-colour icon, some animation, and some rather wonky effects!
Depending on what class you pick, you’ll see many different types of builds available to you. As the archer, for instance, you might go for a high-attack speed build that makes use of lots of poison effects and exploding arrows… or you might specialize in traps, bounty effects, various gadgets or even homing arrows.
As the mage, you can cast powerful spells or let the spirits aid you, the warrior might specialize in throwing weapons, and the summoner has a whole slew of effects that their snails can exude. What I’m getting at is that each class plays very differently from the others but you also have a ton of variety from run to run through various synergies between perks or the diverse talent packages that let you hone in on specific elements of a build.
It’s a cheap game that was in Early Access for a while but released fully at the end of 2024. I’ve already sunk in nearly 100 hours into this release, so I obviously like it a lot. The music is great, the art style is neat, and the increasingly difficult mastery levels as well as the various challenges and the new “waves” mode offer a ton of content for you to play through.
What I dislike a bit about the game is that there are times when certain stats just won’t do anything anymore. Once you’ve reached the maximum amount of life, you don’t gain anything from the max-life perks. Similarly, you can’t go over 100% crit chance and each crit chance pick-up doesn’t do anything for you. There are talents that allow you to modify your crit damage when you pick up crit chance but I’d rather see something like that baked into the game, as is, since it feels wasteful going above 100% crit chance or max health.
If you’ve played Risk of Rain or Risk of Rain 2, you might know that some items essentially just give you bonus stat that then scales additively the more of that you pick up. Particularly in late game after many loops, you’ll end up with one run or another practically looking the same even though they started out very differently.
In Talented, Endless Mode runs can also very much end up looking the same at some point, meaning high-attack speeds, lots of summons, big explosions and practically no reason to keep going anymore. It’s a shame but the game is just not meant to be played for a lot longer past night 20 and I’d rather recommend the Endless Night or just going for the next difficulty level.
Besides that, though, the game offers a ton of variety and very different experiences per run, on top of a plethora of challenges and an incredibly unique waves mode. Furthermore, the community is passionate about the game and the developers keep delivering on further updates even way past the initial release. Again, they just released a whole new tier of talents which is absolutely phenomenal.
I do highly recommend Talented to anyone looking for their next big time sink. It’s a truly fun title, especially if you love seeing numbers go up or if you love ending up with a super overpowered build eventually.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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