App Profile: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead 0.F

Greg Langmead

Rating: 5/5

This is a good-faith effort to port a keyboard-focused game to iOS with or without a keyboard. It inspired me to learn the game, knowing there is a supported app. There are few deep roguelikes on the platform so it’s very welcome. One issue on iPhone is that vertical scrollbars (e.g. when examining an object with ‘e’ or in ‘V’ mode) are apparently scrolled on PC with page up and page down. Could there be buttons for those? It may be tough to get right because in ‘e’ mode the text is under the d-pad and so the user may want to hide the overlay — but then how will we tap new page up/down buttons that live in the overlay??

awful house

Rating: 3/5

When you play the game for a while on PC, you want to get it on mobile, right? That was my thought. This developer ported the game and made it cost money for the same product. Okay then. I paid the money and got what I paid for! The game is mostly untouched and decently optimized for mobile (not as much as the official version though.) and surprisingly even moddable through the files despite Apple’s restrictions. Then things went downhill. One day I opened the app and it had started on some odd menu, and then things went south. J started the game and lo’ and behold, my menu was frozen! I couldn’t access my save files through the game so I had to pick through the files to get my saves backed up. When I re-opened the app, brushing it off as a small bug (not a fresh install), it didn’t display anything at all! I honestly believe that this is just a poorly emulated version (NOT EVEN A PROPER PORT) of a game that already HAS a mobile port to go off of…

An actual Freerunner

Rating: 5/5

Lots of accessibility features and a decent amount of mods and tilesets. It runs without fine even with lots of entities in the world, and even has additional content built over the core CDDA. For some reason the game sound doesn't work though, the soundpacks help a lot when it comes to immersion and it's not there. Also for the devs, when you update the version can you please try to keep it on the same app or find a way to completely transfer settings and keybindings? It's a drag to redo all of that because the game is unplayable without adjusting those. Don't get me twisted though, great work! (Also if you're reading this and have never played this game, prepare for a stupidly deep roguelike. Where even how you put your clothes on matters)