Necromancer for a Week is best described as a Pokemon roguelite. You start out with two monsters and then battle through seven stages representing the days of the week. Each stage presents opportunities to learn new moves, recruit new monsters, and gain other powerups alongside mandatory battles. Complete all seven stages and you’ll unlock the monsters you used as starting options for future runs.
A lot of Pokemon-esque games stumble by changing the battle system in ways that make it less intuitive or engaging. Necromancer for a Week actually does pretty well on this front. It uses a system like a card battling game where you get 3 AP to spend across both monsters and their moves however you like. Stronger moves might cost 2, 3, or even more AP, while weaker moves can be free and support moves might restore AP or allow other moves to be used a second time in the same time. You can create some fun synergies between your two monsters where one uses moves that trigger passive abilities on the other to build up to a massive attack, and the opportunities for that are greatly expanded by the extra moves and upgrades you can find during your run.
As great as that core battle system is, it’s held back by the fact that the game just isn’t that hard. I won my first run without ever really coming close to losing, and most battles can be won with little thought once you have a good combo going. There are two higher difficulty modes available to shake things up, but I don’t personally find the way that either of them raises difficulty appealing. One makes one of your monsters be chosen randomly every battle and the other does that while also blocking refreshing 0 cost moves and making enemy intents invisible. I’d have preferred to see the standard roguelite ascensions that add increasingly powerful modifiers to the enemies. The existing settings increase difficulty by reducing the player’s options, which just makes the game repetitive even more quickly.
Lastly, the monsters are something of a mixed bag. They mostly have interesting abilities and moves that help each one feel unique, but their designs are bland. The low-res graphics style doesn’t really help here, since each monster is often represented by a thumbnail that’s just an indistinguishable mess of pixels. Even the battle sprites are pretty generic, though. Ultimately it’s not critical that a game like this have memorable monster designs, but it would have helped, and needing to read the tooltips every single time to remember what an enemy does gets old.
Necromancer for a Week is a decent game that you probably won’t get much time out of. I won my one run in 90 minutes and enjoyed it enough to be happy with the money I spent, but I don’t expect to do another run. The extra difficulty modes just aren’t interesting and unlocking more of these monsters isn’t enough of a motivator. There could be something great here with more interesting modifiers and perhaps some more events to find in the levels. As it is, it’s fine.
Rating: 70%
Time to beat: 90 minutes for a run
MSRP: $8
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