Fidel: Dungeon Rescue showed up as one of the Humble Monthly Originals, a reskin/fork of the devs other game Ernesto. But Fidel has a dog. A cute dog. And some different mechanics.

It's a turn based dungeon crawler and it has a dog. Do I really need to post anything other than that???

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Fidel is a dungeon crawler where the hero can't cross over any previously moved square, though you can backtrack. The gimmick to force this is Fidel's leash, which blocks the dogs path as it attempts the various dungeon runs.

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There are 10 levels in total, each with slightly higher difficulty, randomisation, and new monsters and traps to bypass. Most runs will result in your death. Even if you are careful. But each run is short and each map takes around a minute to pass through.

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Killing monsters nets you XP, but you get hurt on most attacks and the result is losing a heart. If you get enough XP, you gain an extra free heart and extend your heart limit. There's some timing/planning that can be done so that you end up one heart away from death and kill something for the bonus. The aim in this is for the next square will be a medkit, refilling your health bar entirely to the new max level.

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Some monsters can be backstabbed or frozen such that attacking them does not deal damage to you, but in most cases if they are not in their vulnerable state they can 1-hit kill you.

There's some dancing around a few of them or hitting things in the right order to get them ready to remove with a satisfying smash or splat. And sometimes you don't pay attention and they change because you just jumped on to them without looking.

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And some monsters are stronger than others, up to the boss monsters which you need to wear down before you jump on them. Others still can poison you, reducing your max health by one until you get to the next level. There's not a huge amount of variety, and you can quickly learn how they behave. Even after returning to the game after a month I could remember what all of them did.

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But each level introduces new challenges to the player. Such as traps.

Early on you see a leaver and different coloured floor tiles. Some of these files will launch spikes and kill you, but the leaver will remove the trap from all of them. But sometimes the leaver is not easy to get to, or doing so will block you off from medkits or coins on the map. It's a risk/reward chance that can make you complacent if you decide to rush it and jump on a possible trap square.

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Coins can be used for powerups, these act as quick health or bombs to clear parts of the level. If you make a mistake, you can backtrack and get them back, otherwise you need to forge ahead and collect more coins to unlock them again.

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And as I've suggested, you can bark at enemies. They'll jump/react. The most useful case for this is with mimics, the bane of many an adventurer. Bark at a chest, stun the beast, steal the loot. Other enemies will jump at the noise, and I'm expecting further development to cause them to react in other ways, such as waking up sleeping enemies to reset their wake/sleep loop.

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It is short turn based but fast game and I've lost several hours to this thing. The RNG is not that brutal, but there's been a few cases where I've suicided on level 1 due to not seeing an optimal path without wasting coins on the first floor.

It should be on steam soon, and I'll update this page when I see it (and remember to do so!). Worth grabbing if you like this type of puzzle games. (edit from 2018: It is on Steam! though it plays a little different from here.)

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Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly Originals (October).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 8 October 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

Unlisted, but it uses Adobe Air and should not take too much to run. I'll update this as soon as it has a commercial release and I remember to log on here ;)