Midboss : Positively Possessing

Midboss is a procedurally generated, turn based dungeon crawler with a heavy focus on enemy possession made by Emma 'Eniko' Maassen. You begin the game as a weak imp and will want to posses the first rat you see. In order to posses a creature you must first mark the enemy with a possession spell then defeat them. This requirement means you can't simply go and posses the strongest monster you see and keep the game tough. Possessing a creature is also fully heals you and is one of the few ways to heal your character in the game which makes constant use of possession essential.

Currently I've gotten about 3 levels deep after a couple hours of gameplay. The game has permadeath so when you die you start over again with nothing from the previous game and no ability to save. The strongest monster I've possessed so far is a zombie.

I found that constantly possessing different creatures helped my progression a lot. My initial instinct was to try to focus on leveling up the strongest creature I could posses but it seems that trying to fight the same creature you currently posses is disadvantageous. For instance in the beginning sections of the game I found attacking a vampire bat with a vampire bat was a risky move while attacking a vampire bat with a rat was a lot more likely to result in me winning the battle.

I had previously played the game a few versions ago and found the game a little hard to learn. Since then a massive amount of tool tips, context sensitive help and a tutorial have been added. It was sometimes a little verbose but I didn't once get stuck trying to figure out how to do something. Little touches such as ui elements highlighting when you have points to spend or new upgrade options are much appreciated.

One of those "uhoh I'm dead" moments

Right now I'd like to see more content in the early levels, maybe another enemy type or two. The game is right now in a early stage of development but the release is quite solid. I didn't run into any issues and the tool tips/tutorial helped a lot.

You can get the latest version of Midboss at midboss.net and follow its development by following it's author on twitter 

Article by Alex McGilvray