Effulgence RPG is a game made entirely of ASCII art where you convert your enemies' raw parts into new weapons, and if that doesn't convince you to give its demo a look I don't know what will

A radar dish is struck by a beam from space. The entire image is rendered in ASCII art.

(Image credit: Andrei Fomin)

You know what I worry about? I worry about the lost artforms of the early internet. Time was, every game guide out there would come prefaced with some lustrous bit of ASCII art—an unfathomably complex picture made up solely of characters on your keyboard. Now it's gone the way of ancient basket-weaving and the spinning jenny.

I keep telling our guide writers we should spend upwards of three hours appending absurdly complicated ASCII pictures of game characters to all of our guides, but they just whine about 'wastes of time' and 'another terrible idea from Josh' and 'get out of my office.'

Anyway, I was glad to see—amid the latest glut of Steam Next Fest demos—one game keeping the old ways alive. Effulgence RPG is a rather striking turn-based, um, RPG that pits you and your party against gauntlet after gauntlet of monsters. Also, you and the monsters and the world and everything are composed entirely of ASCII characters.

The key gimmick, at least in terms of gameplay, is that the enemies you defeat get converted into resources that feed into a 3D printer. Once you hit enough enemy-bits in the middle of a fight, the printer will spit out a weapon—a fresh gun full of ammo, some grenades, whatever you've loaded up the schematics for.

ASCII representation of two figures in boats fighting a monster shaped like a globe. — (Image credit: Andrei Fomin)

The larger structure of the whole thing consists of a world map I'm going to, perhaps lazily, call 'Slay The Spire-like'. There's a big ASCII globe and you move across it, between areas that present you with decisions (choose an upgrade, choose a weapon, that kind of thing) and bigger areas where you can shop or upgrade your gear. The meat is in the combat areas, which is where you'll clear out waves of enemies with your squad, harvest up their various meats, and turn them into weapons. You're good guys. Don't worry about it.

My only qualm, so far, is that the sheer profusion of text on the screen can make the actual text a little hard to parse at times. When your whole vision swims with alphabetical symbols, it can be a tad difficult to zero in on the stuff that's meant to be actual sentences. The good news is that the game lets you set its trademark glow a little lower, which helps increase readability, but be prepared for an adjustment period if you do fire up the demo.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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