Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Authors: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Dated: 2021-03-30

The other day when I wrote about Tangledeep I was reminded of the classic Android game Pixel Dungeon. Out of curiosity I checked out its website, and to my surprise they listed the Amazon app store as one of the ways to download the game.

I actually have a cheap Fire tablet that's several years old now. I think it was given to me as a gift by my father, and it is actually a pretty nice tablet if you don't mind being locked into Amazon stuff. Ironically, it's the vendor lock-in that caused me to almost never use it. Well, to be fair, it's probably the absence of the Google Play Store, which in itself is a vendor lock-in. It probably would let me install F-Droid no problem, because I've already installed other apps from outside Amazon's store.

But anyway, the tablet just sits there doing nothing most of the time, and all we ever really used it was for games and the odd video. Its storange is much too limited to do much, but I figured hey why not play a game on it? It was a good game.

When I looked in Amazon's store, I saw several versions of the game. There always were many versions because it was open source and people kept forking it, but I noticed Shattered Pixel Dungeon was there, which is the version you can also play on Linux. Astonishingly, it had even been updated on Amazon's app store *days* ago. What! I mean, who even bothers with Amazon's store?

I was quite impressed by the fact that the game is still in development, with the latest release being very recent. After playing it again, I realized it's much improved from the original version I remember. It seems they did such a good job with it, that I just couldn't stop playing. After each death in the game, I felt like I had to try again because I *knew* I could do it better the next time around, and now I'm apparently stuck with this game.

Since it's FOSS, I thought I would write about it on here so more people can enjoy it if they haven't already. Installing it from Flathub is easy on systems that have flatpak:

`flatpak install flathub com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon`

You can also visit their website, which is in the app ID I just provided. The author would like support in the way of donations to continue developing it, and I say why not give something? Doesn't matter how much, but I'd say they earned it.

The game itself is fantastic, but since it's a mobile game at heart the UI is such that you would only most enjoy it by playing it with a touchscreen. That means it's not quite as good on "Linux" as it is on Android devices, but maybe you're lucky and have a Linux device with a touchscreen as well. I'm sure you can get used to playing it with the keyboard only or a combination of mouse and keyboard, but it was hard for me to find the ideal technique right away. Well, if at first you don't succeed...

I find it to be a worthy and innovative Rogue-type game, difficult enough to challenge you and fun and rewarding to master. The graphics are very pleasant and part of what makes the game enjoyable, but the music... It's good at first, but it gets so damn repetitive that I just had to shut it off after several hours of hearing the short theme on loop.

If you have an Android device, you should probably keep this game installed. It only takes up around eight megabytes, which is hardly anything at all. Just watch out that it doesn't destroy your battery since you play it too much...