One sentence review: Labyrinth of Zangetsu doesn’t set out to revolutionize the dungeon crawler but does provide a solid classic experience.


Exploring the map. Doesn’t this look like a beautiful world worth saving?

Like most dungeon crawlers, Labyrinth of Zangetsu has a story, but you’d be forgiven if you can’t remember what it is while playing. A plague called “The Ink of Ruin” is turning people into madmen or demons. With the land overrun, Ido stands as the last holdout and calls for warriors, mages, and priests – and perhaps even more unscrupulous types - to fight back against the plague. But all of this is just a setup for classic Wizardry-style dungeon crawling.
The first thing you’ll notice is the hand-drawn artwork. You won’t find anime here, by design. The stark black-and-white style brings the ink theme to the forefront. The character portrait style fits in nicely (apart from several anime-style DLC portraits) with the overall look and feel, but the number of different portraits is too limited.

There are two difficulty levels: normal, where your team transports back to Ido on a party wipe, and hardcore, where the fallen team’s corpses remain on the tile where they died until you bring a new party around to pick up them and their equipment. Considering that resurrection costs five hundred times the character level (and double that upon failing!), hardcore does provide a challenge. The real difficulty, of course, rests in how you build your party and how much you stock up on supplies.

Character creation
Creating a new conscript is straightforward: Choose a race, roll for bonus points, and select a class. There are six races to choose from when creating a character and their strengths and weaknesses align with what you would expect. Humans are decent all-arounders with average stats apart from higher charisma. Dwarves are physically strong and make for good fighters and clerics. Elves have high intelligence, making them excellent wizards and sages.

Three non-standard races are also available. Cavegrams are creatures who live underground and have extraordinary luck – an apparent reference to hobbits or gnomes (they are called hobbits in Japanese text). Their high dexterity makes them great for starting as thieves. Nekomata are catlike people well-suited for samurai. Finally, Half-Oni have the highest physical attributes of any race, making them excellent front-line fighters of any kind. They also receive a small bonus to regeneration each round, but the limit on maximum attributes means they cannot become Sages.

Likewise, there are nine classes to choose from, and each has minimum stat requirements to join. The base classes are Warrior, Cleric, Wizard, and Thief. Monk and Samurai are advanced classes: with enough bonus points, characters can qualify for either of those classes even at creation. Finally, Paladin, Ninja, and Sage are the special classes. You’ll need to advance your characters a bit before they have the required stats for those.


Character screen – look at what 22 bonus points can get you: Class change to Paladin at level 6!

Alignment
Character alignment is one place where Labyrinth of Zangetsu does try something new. Upon character creation, after choosing a race you choose an alignment for the character as well. Unlike most games in the genre, parties can contain a mix of good, neutral, and evil characters. Healing effects work more strongly on good parties, while evil parties receive a bonus to damage – and a chance that resurrection will not work. Mixing character alignments cancels out these bonuses.

Classes can be of any alignment as well – even paladins or assassins – but some class abilities are restricted by alignment. Your evil-aligned paladin won’t be able to use holy attacks against enemies, after all. The developer has hinted that he may add additional abilities for these “off brand” aligned classes in a future update or DLC (more on that below).

Leveling
As a “classic” dungeon crawler each character will increase hit points and gain (or lose) a few attribute points when leveling up. Every few levels each class receives a special ability as well. Some of these special abilities have alignment or minimum stat requirements. Each class has a maximum of 20 levels with the exception of Sage which has 30.

Provided your character has the minimum stats required, you can change classes at any time. The first time you change into a new class, the character will reset to 1 in the new class and lose two to three points in each stat. Moving back into a previous class also costs one or two points, so think carefully about what you want the character to focus on.

Exploring and Fighting
When your party leaves Ido, you can travel to any dungeon that’s been opened up to you. Dungeons are all standard square grids with enemies to fight, traps to avoid, secrets to discover, and NPCs to talk with. There are no wandering random encounters. Certain squares are covered in a smoky ink containing a random group of enemies to fight. These encounters have a chance to be avoided if your team sneaks through them, though, and they reset each time you leave the map. You may occasionally run into “neutral” enemies as well and actions can move your character alignments toward good or evil.


A typical battle screen. Get used to hitting that “repeat” button.

The grid is auto mapped, and while you technically aren’t shown which direction your party is facing unless you cast Orientation, a single move in any direction makes it obvious where your party is moving. Darkness effects also prevent the auto map from appearing.

The battles themselves are nothing new: Each fight is round based, and you can set each of your characters to attack, defend, use magic, use a skill, or flee. Some enemy attacks will “corrupt” your character, reducing their maximum hit points until you can return to town and cleanse them in the temple.
After each fight a locked and possibly trapped chest will appear which your group can attempt to unlock, disarm, or bash open. And you’ll be opening a lot of chests since the market in Ido has only the most basic of supplies to offer.

Negatives
At launch the game had a bug with not auto-saving for some non-English versions, especially severe since there is no manual saving. The easiest way to avoid this bug is to use the English version of the game, but a patch is being released to fix it.

Like many JRPG dungeon crawlers, the UI is console focused, most clearly seen in the default controls. Thankfully, all inputs can be remapped. The inventory screen also suffers because of this.

Each character has indicators for whether you have a weapon or armor that can be equipped in equipment slots. It is supposed to tell you whether the available equipment is better than what is currently being used. Unfortunately, the indicator wasn’t especially useful as it didn’t distinguish whether another character already had that item equipped. It also doesn’t take into account any special effects the item might have.

Auto mapping is controversial. My preferred method is that used by the Bard's Tale Trilogy remasters, where the auto map can be toggled on and off, and more map features appear depending on spells cast. This game needed a boost in this area.

A bestiary of enemies encountered would have been nice. A bestiary that progressively gives you more information about enemies as you defeat more of them would have been nicer. The unusual enemy types made it difficult to know whether a spell or attack was especially effective or ineffective against them.


The first map. Sorry if spoiling this ruins the game for you. Who knows, maybe I left a secret for you to find.

Dev secrets
For now, information like class guides is extremely limited. In fact, the only known game guide is on a single Japanese language site – but thanks to a little known program called Internet Explorer and Bing Translate, all of the site’s secrets were mine! The developer has been active on Steam providing more detailed information about the game and his plans for the game’s future. That includes a DLC with an additional dungeon and tweaks to the current balance.

He has also provided insights into the game’s development: he felt that many players are turned off by the “complexity” and anime style of many modern dungeon crawlers, so he wanted to bring create a game with a straightforward gameplay. Also, the game contains several homages to D&D, including d20 attack rolls (all of this is behind-the-scenes).

In addition, there are many puns and wordplays in the original Japanese games that were not carried over into the English version. For instance, the game’s name for Dwarves is “Daruma,” which are a type of Buddhist monk that are often depicted in a dwarf-like appearance in good luck charms.

Conclusion
Labyrinth of Zangetsu is tailor-made for those looking for a classic dungeon-crawl experience with some modern elements. If you’ve played most games in this genre, you may feel that this doesn’t bring enough that’s new to be worthwhile. Completion times can range between 20 – 40 hours, depending on how much time you spend maximizing characters. There’s not much replay value unless you want to try out different classes.

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I know most users here like Thief, and those that don't should be cast out as the intellectual lepers that they are.

Sadly, not many developers particularly care to make games like Thief, and playing fan missions can only take you so far. Not to disparage the very talented Thief community, but a change in locale is very welcome.

GENERAL PREMISE

It's been a year since Sporey left the Blackburn Gang to make her fortune as a freelance thief. But when her former fence and mentor tracks her down, Sporey is forced back into servitude to settle an old debt. A temporary setback, she thinks. But these days, honour among thieves is wearing thin. Which of her old comrades can Sporey trust?

Filcher is Thief-lite - and by that I mean the developer clearly set out to make a game that tries to emulate the original as much as possible, but either due to inexperience, lack of time or resources was not able to fully realize such a vision.

By this I mean that the game lacks some mechanics present in Thief 1 and 2. Chief among them are mantling, varied objectives depending on difficulty, water arrows (or equivalent), rope arrows (or equivalent), pre-mission purchase screen, leaning against doors to hear better, and voice acting - to name the most notable ones. In practice, this means that the levels do not have the degree of verticality you would see in a Thief level, and that most lights cannot be put out unless you find a switch to turn them off. Levels will also not have the funny guard banter you would expect in a Thief game.

Not to say that Filcher is a bad game. It's very good in fact, just that it should be approached with the understanding that it was made entirely by a single person with access to limited resources.

NARRATIVE

The story is nothing special. Functional is the best way I'd describe it. Besides a few in-mission twists all the other story beats were fairly predictable, and the narrative played out as you'd expect it. That being said, if the player is willing to dig deeper in the penultimate mission it does cast a different light on some of the characters and their motivations.

The Paynesque comicbook cutscenes are a good example of the game's striking art direction and bring the characters to life.






The readables in the missions were always fun to discover and peruse, and combined with the environmental storytelling they help to make each locale feel more like a real place.

THE CAMPAIGN

What the game offers is a 9-mission campaign with varying objectives - from robbing the apartment of a rich couple, to a daring heist of a treasure vault inside a jewelry store, culminating with a raid on the city's police station and infiltrating the mansion of your former gang. No mission is the same, each one offering a unique challenge.

As an example, the first mission will require you to move across a room cross with laser tripwires, that you have hopefully sabotaged beforehand. The floor is marble, with a few carpets strewn about, and a guard is patrolling down the hall.


The room in question, from the game's store page

The mission where you are robbing the jewely store will require you tp deactivate and navigate past the security system - of which the most challenging part is going to be the shutoff switch for the vault camera - that gives you a scant 90 second to reach the vault door. This requires the player to have a very good grasp of the movement mechanics and map layout, especially if aiming for the "ghost" ranking. There's a degree of skill (or luck) to this sequence, as not only do you now need get to the vault door within the time limit, but also do so without being detected by the patrolling guards.

The vault door

A subsequent mission features a lighthouse that is constantly illuminating the restaurant you are infiltrating, requiring you to keep track of it lest your shadowy cover evaporates at the most inopportune moment (a mechanic very similar to the one found in Gloomwood).


Your main antagonist for the mission

ART DIRECTION

The most striking feature of Filcher is the art direction, and you will either love it or hate it. I previously described it as Dark Deco. If you have ever watched Batman: The Animated Series, you will instantly recognize it as a direct inspiration. While the graphics are very rudimentary, and all NPCs are 2D sprites, I found the game pleasing on the eyes since it emulates the look of the cartoon so well.

Example of inspiration from B:TAS


...and a screenshot from the game with a similar composition from the game's itch.io page

SOUND DESIGN
Another area where Filcher truly shines is the sound design. All sounds in the game have that clear, crisp feel of Thief 1 and 2, allowing you to tell just how far away a guard is from sound alone, what surface you are walking on from the sound of your footsteps, the alertness of the guards based on their grunts etc.

The music, on the other hand, is very understated, mostly used to build tension or set the mood, and never getting in the way of the gameplay itself.

ENEMIES

Standard guard
These will be your primary antagonists in most missions and come in a few variants (guard, cop, mobster). They communicate their alertness via silly grunts and are not terribly bright, but will investigate noises, alarms and if they see you while out of shadows or with your flashlight out (though only if you are shining it when they are looking directly at you, you can keep it aimed at the back of their heads and they will not notice it). Sometimes they will be equipped with flashlights, making them all the more dangerous.

Enemy guard with flashlight

They are all armed with guns and, unlike Thief, there are very few ways for you to fight back. The blackjack is much less effective if they are alerted to your presence, the dart gun takes time to knock them out and the flashbang gives you only a temporary reprieve, while their hitscan bullets pack a punch.

Dogs
Despite what you might assume, dogs are no better at detecting you in the dark, nor smelling you. The biggest challenge is that you can't knock them out with your blackjack, and that they are usually accompanied by a patrolling guard, so even using a dart gun to knock them out is a risky proposition.

Guards with helmets
The rarest and most challenging enemy of the game. No different from the standard guards, but the helmet makes them impervious to your blackjack, leaving only the dart gun as a way to take them out.

EQUIPMENT

Blackjack - works pretty much exactly as it does in Thief games - if you sneak up to an oblivious enemy and hit them on the head, they will be knocked out for the duration of the mission, unless an ally finds them and wakes them up.

Sleep-dart gun - your only ranged weapon in the game, but unlike in most other stealth games, hitting an enemy with the dart will not immediately put them to sleep, but will instead make them alert and aggressive, trying to find you and also alerting every other enemy they encounter on the way. It's usually very difficult to stay undetected when using this weapon: the ammunition is very limited, you need to arc the shots to hit enemies even at moderate distances, and headshots do not lead to an instant knockout. There are very few instances where you will wish to make use of this weapon, and will altogether avoid using it if you're going for the higher scores.

Lockpicks - work nearly identically as they do in Thief, but without the need to switch to a different lockpick. Much like in that game, the challenge and tension comes from the fact that picking a lock takes time, which you may not have.

Flashlight - fairly obvious tool, helps see in the dark, but will also make it easier for enemies to detect you.

Flashbangs - if you are using these, then you have already fucked up and will probably need to restart the mission. Their only real use-case is to blind the enemies for a few seconds so you can either hide (optimal approach) or shoot them with the dart gun (not a good idea).

Noisemaking windup toys - again, a fairly obvious piece of equipment that can be thrown to distract and draw enemies away from an area. Has far more uses than many of other items in your arsenal.

Clump of moss - works exactly as in Thief, creating a clump of moss on the ground you can run on silently, though limited to how far you can throw it, unlike the moss arrows.

DRAWBACKS

In terms of negatives, the biggest stumbling block for many people is going to be the fact that there are no in-mission saves. This can be frustrating in certain missions, especially if you are trying to earn the "ghost" rank, but since the levels are much smaller than those in Thief and can be finished in around 15 minutes or less, it doesn't lead to too much time being wasted. You are expected to go through the missions multiple times to find out all the secrets and the most optimal routes to complete your objectives. I can understand why people criticize the lack of saving, or even in-mission checkpoints. Later levels can be brutal, with a single mistake requiring a restart. That being said, there's nothing quite as heart-pounding as sneaking past a bunch of guards in a crammed security room to reach a switch and unlock a door to progress further.

There's also some additional quirks to the game. While the sliding mechanic is a good way to quickly navigate the environment, especially where you need to duck into cover quickly, tying it to the crouch command can lead to unfortunate accidents like sliding off ledges to your death or into guards, thus alerting them. Another puzzling quirk is that the doors close automatically after some time, which can be mildly irritating as you are forced to open and close them multiple times while waiting for a guard to pass.

All lights in the game are electrical, and while you can turn off many of them, many more are permanently on without any switch to shut them off, despite there logically needing to be one. I understand that this was done for game-balancing purposes, but I feel it could have been handled more elegantly and would have helped alleviate some of the more frustrating parts of the game.

The lack of mantling is also a puzzling design choice, since there are a few instances where having the ability to jump over low walls or fences to more easily sneak past enemies would have been a welcome option.

CONCLUSION

It took me about 14 hours to 100% the game, including finding all the secrets and ghosting all the missions, which for the asking price - either full or discount - was money well spent.

if you're on the lookout for more Thief, this is as good as it's going to get outside of fan missions.

PROS:
- gameplay that clearly tries to be as close to Thief 1 and 2 as possible and largely manages to do so
- varied missions, each with their own set of challenges and quirks
- unique art direction
- slide mechanic is a welcome addition, though no substitute for mantling

NEUTRAL:
- the protagonist is no Garrett and the writing is functional, if not particularly engaging
- enemies and certain objects are 2D sprites
- most of the equipment at your disposal is not very useful

CONS:
- lack of in-mission saving will be off-putting to many
- doors automatically closing after a certain time can be irritating
- sliding move can lead to unfortunate accidents on occasion
- guards mostly communicate in grunts, which sometimes makes it challenging to tell in what state they are in
- guards being sprites can make it hard to gauge what direction they are looking in
- lack of mechanics that were present in Thief 1 and 2 limits player options