Portugues
Tower of Pain
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About the game
Tower of Pain is a roguelike boiled down to its bones. You are a small figure in a tower of randomly built floors, drawn in crisp white outlines, and you have no experience points and no levels: you will not get stronger than you were at the start. What changes from room to room is what you meet, and what you decide to do about it.
Every encounter gives you a handful of options. You can attack, spare the creature, run, use one of the items you picked up in the dungeon, or even talk to your enemy, and each choice can lead to a different outcome, from the simple to the unexpectedly complicated. Some options are locked depending on what you did before. The status bar at the side keeps track of your hearts, your shields and your keys, and the floor you are on is named under the map.
Fran J. Alvarez made it in 2021, taking inspiration from the classic roguelikes such as Hack, but trimming everything down to fit a pocket console. It is a game of chance, as the author says: reaching a high floor may take a lot of tries, but it is not impossible.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now, press X on the title screen and read the introduction.
Sound is off by default; the pause menu (Z while in the tower) has an S. switch to turn it on. The game keeps no records, but F2 saves the complete state of the emulated console at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | move; choose in menus |
| X or Right | B | confirm |
| Z or Left | A | back; open the pause menu in the tower |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
No levelling up. Fights cost hearts, and hearts are all you have, so an encounter you can talk, spare or walk away from is often better than one you win.
Use what you find. Items from the dungeon are your only way of getting stronger, so do not hoard them.
Try again. Every run builds a different tower, so a bad run says little about the next one.
Credits and licence
Tower of Pain was designed, programmed and drawn by Fran J. Alvarez and is free software under the BSD 3-Clause licence. It is built with the Arduboy2 library by Scott Allen and others (BSD licence), ArduboyTones (MIT licence) and the Tinyfont library by Botond Kis (BSD licence). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is in the author's TowerOfPain repository.