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Dread Purgatory: a hardcore 2D Soulslike with no ending. How far can you get?

A topic by BloodOfPhantoms created 12 hours ago Views: 26 Replies: 2

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Waves that never end, enemies that adapt to you, and a cap at wave 9,999. Your best wave is your score. $1.00.

Dread Purgatory is a hardcore, horror-infused 2D action platformer with Soulslike combat. You play as Azim, a strange dog knight in golden armour, trapped in Purgatory. With no escape in sight, you must fend off waves of glitched enemies—and confront ATTRITUS, the dark entity at the heart of it all.

Every run is different: enemy behaviour, attacks and encounters change between runs, so you can't memorize your way through. It's hard on purpose, but built for newcomers and veterans alike, with room to learn, adapt and master the combat.

What's in it

Lifetime updates. Buy once, and every future update is free from the page you bought it on.
Soulslike combat: attacks, guarding, parrying and charged strikes.
The Hand system: five abilities: Pyro, Blessed, Lifesteal, Blink and Shadow.
Bosses waiting beyond the waves.
Phis (pronounced "fee"): bank them or lose them when you die. Spend them on 10+ skins and other cosmetics. Nothing you buy makes you stronger.
21 original soundtrack tracks and 142 sound effects.
60 FPS, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch controller support, custom controls and gameplay statistics.
...plus secrets you'll have to find yourself.

Photosensitivity warning: contains flashing lights, rapidly changing colours and screen distortion. If you feel unwell while playing, stop.

$1.00 for the game, or $1.99 for the game plus the full soundtrack bundle: 21 tracks (OGG), 10 Extended Cuts (WAV) and 14 musical scores as MusicXML files (.musicxml). Windows.

I made it solo and composed the soundtrack myself. If you play, tell me what wave you reach.

Play it here: https://bloodofphantoms.itch.io/dreadpurgatory

ming1019 hours ago

Enemies that keep adapting definitely stop endless waves from turning into pure pattern memorization. How do you help new players tell the difference between "the pattern I just learned changed" and "I just missed a cue"? Is there a readable tell before their attacks shift?

BloodOfPhantoms3 hours ago

Great question, thanks!

There's two main things that keep it readable:

First, adapted enemies look and sound different from the moment they spawn, like a different colour, size or voice, and some move a little faster. So if you see a recoloured one, you can almost always expect it to act differently. Second, adaptation changes what an enemy chooses and how fast it moves, not how its attacks are telegraphed. Every attack that comes out still gets its full windup, and bosses can’t spam the same move (period).

When you get hit, you can almost always point to a windup you missed. The frames are just forgiving like that. A pattern change just means a different cue shows up, or the same cue comes at a different speed or order. A missed cue means the cue was there and the player didn’t react to it.