Path of Achra

Greetings from the Eighth Cycle of Passion

Despite claiming to be a fan of the genre, and having played a good deal of NetHack as a child, Path of Achra is the only Berlin Interpretation-approaching roguelike that I have ever actually finished, which I attribute to a number of factors:

1. It’s fun

Once, in High School, a friend of mine invited us over for D&D - after character creation, he presented us with the dungeon - a nightmare maze of *one hundred randomly generated rooms* that he had spawned five minutes prior.

The campaign did not last.

The act of painstakingly exploring every square in some giant dungeon, particularly one created by stochastic process, is deeply unfun and quickly tedious (I’m sorry Moonring).

Instead Path of Achra exists as a near-autobattler that still has the full ninekey roguelike commands available to you (though still mercifully fewer keys than Nethack with its ninety-five separate key commands). One can simply hold down Tab, which causes one’s character to zip around the room, autoattacking the nearest enemy in turn - indeed, the game has only four verbs:

• Step

• Attack

• Stand Still

• Pray

Path of Achra’s monastic paucity of actions available in the moment to moment gameplay is instead supported by the game’s build system, constructed of

• 24 Cultures

• 24 Classes

• 24 Gods

• 90 Powers

• 168 Weapons and Armor

• 78 Prestige Classes

Which would be flatly overwhelming when set next a piddling ninety-five key commands and lock one into decision paralysis, if not for the fact that the game makes its synergies easily readable and obvious (color coded for your convenience). So it’s enough to guess at what works and try to muddle through.

The Path of Achra in Path of Achra is, however, unforgiving of muddlers and will quickly kill you, leading in to the next stage of gameplay: refinement.

If we’re building around Amplify Pain, let’s Drop Oozemancy, swap the Mind Diamond for the Toushi, make sure you pick up the Kairos Skirt and the Itabah - but you still die to Okokorpus so you switch from Arba to Koszmar and suddenly:

Note that the build just requires you to enter the room and Stand Still. Investing in Dexterity is important so you can Stand Still faster.

It all just works - you can’t be stopped - enemies take tens no, hundreds of thousands of points of damage and can’t lay a finger on you, and all you need do is just stand there.

Then, after a breathless half hour of standing still you win, but doing so only means you advance to the next cycle - the enemies grow more powerful - you could do it again with the same build, but what’s the fun in that? It’s time to choose another power, another prestige class, another god, and iteratively unpick what’s needed to attain the end of the Path.

The Lore, while just there for flavor, is neat too. Conflicts of mythic proportions in space, sickass swords, the good stuff y’know