Video game spotlight thread
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
@pie_flavor Yeah it turns out you can write a Super Nintendo-quality game in JS and make it smooth if you put enough effort into it. That's hardly praise of JS. You could probably do the same in Excel and VBA.
You should play the game.
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@pie_flavor I played the demo. 'Tis nice.
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@pie_flavor Ok well the developers themselves describe it as a SNES game so if they're liars, then I guess I'm wrong, whatever.
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
@pie_flavor Ok well the developers themselves describe it as a SNES game so if they're liars, then I guess I'm wrong, whatever.
No, they describe it as SNES-style graphics. Cardinal isomorphic pixel art.
Enter the Gungeon is pixelated. That doesn't mean you could run it on a beige box.
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@Magus said in Video game spotlight thread:
CrossCode
A truly great game, halfway between Diablo and Zelda, with a great story and buttery-smooth gameplay,
I gave the demo a try. Just looking at it I'd think it was a Secret of Mana clone, but gameplay wise it's more like a twin-stick shooter. I found the controls extremely awkward on my controller: you're constantly pressing both sticks and using multiple rear controls, which have different functions based on whether you're moving and whether you hold or tap. Also the controller controls are not customizable, at least not in the demo.
You can change the mouse and keyboard controls, but as I didn't feel like playing through the entire demo again I don't know if they're better or worse. YMMV.
somehow written in js
HTML5
<canvas>packed with a browser engine is the new Flash.
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@blakeyrat I take issue with you conflating graphical fidelity with game quality.
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@Parody said in Video game spotlight thread:
@Magus said in Video game spotlight thread:
CrossCode
A truly great game, halfway between Diablo and Zelda, with a great story and buttery-smooth gameplay,
I gave the demo a try. Just looking at it I'd think it was a Secret of Mana clone, but gameplay wise it's more like a twin-stick shooter. I found the controls extremely awkward on my controller: you're constantly pressing both sticks and using multiple rear controls, which have different functions based on whether you're moving and whether you hold or tap. Also the controller controls are not customizable, at least not in the demo.
I always wondered how games designed for keyboard and mouse with controller support slapped on top only as an afterthought feel like. Because I see the opposite all the time in pretty much every single AAA game - but this here is quite rare. Usually such games don't support controllers at all because there's simply too many buttons to bind.
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@Parody Yeah, I've never had any interest in trying it on a controller... there's too much precise aiming involved. Not sure why the buttons would function differently when moving, though: the only thing that does that is block/dodge, and that makes sense to me.
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@Magus said in Video game spotlight thread:
@Parody Yeah, I've never had any interest in trying it on a controller... there's too much precise aiming involved.
Exactly: precise aiming wasn't something I was expecting (or really wanting, honestly.)
Not sure why the buttons would function differently when moving, though: the only thing that does that is block/dodge, and that makes sense to me.
It's the multiple ways to attack (bouncing/charged shot vs. normal/rapid fire vs. melee) while also moving around; combat in general involves the right stick and both rear right controls. I'd rather not twin-stick, instead using combined move/aim on the left stick and the six buttons for your various actions (melee, ranged, dodge, etc.) That would change a bunch of design decisions, though (making shooting less important).
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@Parody Yeah, it would be a very different game if it worked like that... there are many enemies vulnerable to only ranged or only melee, and most of the dungeon puzzles require some accuracy and speed to do well...
In the wave dungeon, you have to have a ball bounce slowly along a path while you shoot teleport sparkles so you can hold down buttons that disable doors... You have to be moderately accurate and quick to get through it.
And that temple's boss can only really be damaged by firing wave-charged orbs into walls at the right position. I don't honestly know if I could do that on a gamepad.
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Well, I'm having loads of fun on my gamepad.
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@pie_flavor It's not impossible; i think a steam controller would actually be pretty ideal for this game, honestly - but just be warned that some stuff might get hard when you have to do precise bouncing puzzles.
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@Magus said in Video game spotlight thread:
@Parody Yeah, it would be a very different game if it worked like that... there are many enemies vulnerable to only ranged or only melee, and most of the dungeon puzzles require some accuracy and speed to do well...
None of that stuff sounds much different from, say, the 2D Zeldas, Manas (Final Fantasy Adventure, anyone?) and other overhead isometric games. It probably helped them to be limited to digital controls vs. starting on mouse and keyboard; simplicity is a useful thing.
Anywho, I put it on the watch list. Maybe I'll pick it up when it's on super sale. Meanwhile, I should start poking through all the Metroidvanias people have been making lately; there's got to be one or two of them that are close to the GBA/DS Castlevanias and their Playstation progenitor.
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@pie_flavor You do realize javascript gets compiled into almost-native code before running nowadays? It's not much slower than any other language.
Html rendering used to be the bottleneck, but they've optimized it a lot for low level stuff too.
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I don't C why it wouldn't be possible to write highly-optimized JavaScript. It's like any other language - you do it by understanding its share of problems and carefully avoiding them. It's that most choose not to because they can (or rather, can't), and so make every single mistake in the process, and invent entirely new ones, too.
Now, with JavaScript it's putting the cart before the horse, and attempting to invent carbon nano-tube carts, replacing usual sort of wheels with hamster wheels, putting the horse on steroids, having a herd of rabbits as marching drummers, and encouraging all that zoo by swinging a large two-by-four, to transport a relatively small amount of goods for all that effort. But as long as the hard part is being done by someone else, the transporting itself is very easy to do.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Video game spotlight thread:
I don't C why it wouldn't be possible to write highly-optimized JavaScript.
You can, but the looks ugly as hell then. You can work around it by using an actual high performance language for development and compile it down to JS via Emscripten or whatever people use nowadays to compile to JS.
The biggest problem is that objects don't have fixed type (you can dynamically add and remove fields and methods). This alone prevents most of the optimizations that you can normally done, like storing objects in a single contiguous memory block and access objects via fixed offsets without chasing pointers. It's possible the JS JITs solved this problem for most cases somehow, but never heard of it and have no idea how it could be done for anything resembling general case. That said, I'm not up to date on JIT technology, and it has already surprised me more than once.
It's like any other language - you do it by understanding its share of problems and carefully avoiding them.
The problem with Python is that there's a global interpreter lock that prevents Python code from executing on more than one thread at once. The only known workaround is to write performance-critical parts in not Python.
The problem with Java is (used to be?) that all objects are heap-allocated, so traversing millions of them 60 times per second is very expensive. The only workaround is (was?) to forget about objects and pass data between function using only primitive types.
Some languages simply aren't meant for games.
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@Gąska This might interest you: https://github.com/v8/v8/wiki/Design-Elements (it's a relatively short read)
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Cycle 28
Cycle 28 on Steam
Cycle 28 is a classic arcade space combat game where you have six minutes to beat your high-score. Simple controls, powerful upgrades, and intense dogfights. Perfect for when you just need to switch off and shoot something. See you on the scoreboard!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hI6p6E_B9o
A top-down space shooter. You have 15-ish minutes to shoot enemies in an arena. If you beat your previous high score, you unlock a new upgrade.
Pretty simple concept, but terrifically well executed. The best part is the music. It amps up during each run, to a fantastic crescendo near the end. I usually play without music, but this game is an exception. Enemy design and shooting action are great too.
There is also some kind of a story regarding who you are, who are your enemies and how do you escape (the conceit is you are trapped in a time loop). I haven't figured out the mystery yet.
A few gameplay tips. The trick to raking up points is the multiplier in the upper right corner. It goes up as you kill enemies and goes back to zero when you get hit. You want to get it up over 5, and then kill down some of the bigger ships. The best way to do that is to provoke one of the drone ships and mow down its drones from a distance.
At the edges of the arena are walls that are keeping you in. As you get closer, the camera will zoom out and you'll be able to see a wider area around you. On the downside, your own drones will be get destroyed by the wall.
Enemies generally enter from the west and go out on the east. West wall is the best place to rake up points, but east wall has some strange door which is probably the key to the mystery behind the story. Best weapon is tripple shot, best accessory drone gun (the upgrade before the last one).
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@cartman82 said in Video game spotlight thread:
If you beat your previous high score, you unlock a new upgrade.
I hate games that do that because beginner's luck hits around the third run or so, and then you'll go two months and never come close to that score.
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@pie_flavor said in Video game spotlight thread:
If you beat your previous high score, you unlock a new upgrade.
I hate games that do that because beginner's luck hits around the third run or so, and then you'll go two months and never come close to that score.
It didn't happen with me. I unlocked everything by around 9000 points, and I wasn't really managing stop-points at all. Maybe I was lucky.
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RiME
A land of discovery stretches out before you. Explore the beautiful, rugged world of RiME. Armed with your wits and a will to overcome—and the guidance of a helpful fox—you must explore the enigmatic island, reach the tower's peak, and unlock its closely guarded secrets.
RiME is a beautiful 3D adventure platformer, set on a big Mediterranean-looking island with ancient buildings. The developers certainly knew my weakness for art styles of marble+brass mixed with nature - I can't stress enough how gorgeous this game is. Not photorealistic gorgeous like Talos Principle, but cartoony gorgeous like Breath of the Wild. You are a small boy who quickly befriends a small fox, and the two of you attempt to reach the massive tower off in the distance. The game's not that long - about four hours - but it is an absolute work of art and is very much worth it. Also, I elected to stop playing and free up disk space when I completed it, but it can last a lot longer if you try to find all the secrets, of which there are many. The gameplay itself is mostly adventure platforming with frequent but simple puzzling, similar to the manner of Hob. Most puzzle elements involve you shouting at various things, which I thought was a refreshing break from general button-pushing and lever-pulling games (although they do have box-pushing, unfortunately). My only gripe with the game is the godawful camera - the problem with a freely controlled orbit around you at a fixed distance is that the camera can and does clip through the walls - even when you let the game control it - and a lot of rendering tricks they're using break down when that happens, breaking immersion. However, that's only a mild gripe because there's only a couple of areas that's an issue on.
I would highly recommend this game to anyone who loves puzzle-platforming in the style of Assassin's Creed II's catacombs, or anyone who loves atmospheric or artistic games. If you buy this game, I would also highly recommend you read absolutely nothing about it from any website, forum, anything like that, even if you're stuck on a puzzle and need a walkthrough, as every review of it will praise it for a quality that is an enormous spoiler which will make you, when you reach the ending, feel cheated out of it, and even reading the name of one of the chapters will spoil it just as much. Seriously, even if you're the type to read spoilers because the adventure's more important than the conclusion, this one's worth it.
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@pie_flavor Cool game. I put a few hours into it, then stopped and never went back.
I guess I felt a bit underwhelmed by how simple the gameplay is. No enemies to fight, and puzzles were just OK IMO, not all that memorable. Going after the secrets didn't feel all that rewarding either, because (as far as I remember) you only get inert collectables and not extra powers or story bits.
The visuals and atmosphere were great, though. I should probably go back and finish it one of these days.
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@cartman82 said in Video game spotlight thread:
I should probably go back and finish it one of these days.
You should. Also, there are no extra powers, but you do get story bits, and also costumes, in addition to the inert collectibles.
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Red Dead II kinda finished a positive note. The middle part was depressing.
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Cops are way too agressive in this game
[Neutered spam - Mod]
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@ben_lubar how did this get through the moderation queue
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I don't think it actually hit the queue.
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Kabounce™ is the multiplayer pinball sport game where you are the ball. Experience fast-paced online arena combat, rack up combos and points and score to win. Take the action offline with single player time-attack parkour modes!
Kabounce is basically a pinball game from the perspective of the ball. In 4v4 multiplayer, capture bumpers for your team and score points by bouncing off them, and slam into enemy balls to steal a third of their points. Three times a match, the goal opens up for a short time, and if you enter it your points get banked and can't be stolen anymore. At the end of the game, banked points and capture percentages are both used to determine which team has won.
The gameplay is very solid. You're encouraged to explore as much of the map as possible because hitting your own bumper only gives you two points, capturing a neutral bumper gives you 25 points, and capturing an enemy bumper gives you 50 points. There's also other stuff that isn't bumpers that you can capture too, like boost rings and jump plates. The game is very vertical, and you have a wide variety of movement options from charging up a speed boost in the air to double jumping to air dashing to drifting to a long-range jump slam. There's also a singleplayer mode where you go through a number of challenge courses and try to complete them in a certain amount of time. This focuses entirely on movement, not points. Difficulty runs the gamut (beating the staff records is really hard), and there's hidden bonuses in the levels too. The art style, by the way, is copied wholesale from Tron: Legacy, and I'm a huge fan of it. The only downside to this game is that not enough people play it. Even though teams are 4v4, I usually find myself playing with one to two real humans. Fortunately, teams backfill with bots (and very well done bots at that), so you really don't even notice.
You can pick Kabounce up from the Yogscast Jingle Jam 2018.
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I don't care what everyone says! Skyward Sword is a fantastic game, and the motion controls are by far the best part.
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The Dog Island for Wii and PS2
What you think it is: an adorable "Nintendogs" clone where you train and play with cartoonish puppies who all live happily on an island.
What it actually is: you're an adorable cartoonish puppy. Your little brother has a painful sickness and he's dying. You go on an adventure to dog island to find a cure. You are forced to jump into the sea and almost die just to get there in the first place. You meet a mystical being that helps you on your quest. Then he also gets very painfully sick all of a sudden, but you manage to cure him. Then you meet a doctor who blames himself for the death of one of his friends some time ago, with some very explicit scenes of the sick dog dying and the doctor mourning his grave. Then everyone on the island also suddenly gets sick and starts dying so you have to cure them as well.
That's all I've seen of the game. But I heard it gets darker from there.
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@anonymous234 shit, I'm sold.
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@anonymous234 Sounds like it bears a passing reference to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
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@pie_flavor considering respective release dates, it's more likely Sekiro references The Dog Island.
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Wilmot's Warehouse is a puzzle game about keeping a warehouse running in tip-top shape. Just remember where you put everything, because when the service hatch opens, you'll need to find the things people want quickly, in order to earn the coveted Performance Stars.
The trailer gives you a pretty good idea of what the game is like.
I'm not sure I'd call it a puzzle game. This is like Sokoban except you can (and more often than not, will) pull crates; and there is lots of space (until it starts getting crowded, that is) and very few walls.
The game has a rhythm to it:
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first, a truck unloads a bunch of crates at the bottom of the warehouse and there's a countdown until the next phase begins. Try to organize the crates as you see fit before the countdown runs out and the hatch at the top of the warehouse opens. It's entirely up to you where you put each crate;
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once the hatch opens, a few clients will come and request crates. This too has a countdown timer. At first it's quite easy to serve all the clients, but as the number of crates and their types you have in store increases, you'll feel the pressure. Once you clock out after having served all clients, or the timer runs out and the hatch closes, you'll be awarded stars. These allow you to buy stuff like the ability to pull more crates, the ability to dash when not carrying anything, or knocking down the large pillars in the warehouse for more space.
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with the hatch closed, once again the truck will unload more crates and you'll try to organize them to the best of your ability in the time you have;
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hatch opens. You can keep pushing crates around, but don't forget you've got clients to serve.
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After two cycles of unloading and serving clients, it's stock-taking time! Aaah!.. No timer! You can take all the time in the world to reorganize everything to your heart's content.
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Once you're happy you can clock out, and then it starts all over again.
The trailer and category tags don't tell you this, but there's a split screen co-op mode, so you can be shouting at the person sitting beside you for messing your organization, or failing to deliver their share of items on time, or for getting in your way or grabbing that crate at the same time as you did.
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Genital Jousting tells the story of "John", a penis who needs to find a date for his high school reunion. Genital Jousting is also an online and local multiplayer party game about flaccid penises and wiggly anuses for up to eight players at once.
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@Gąska said in Video game spotlight thread:
Genital Jousting tells the story of "John", a penis who needs to find a date for his high school reunion. Genital Jousting is also an online and local multiplayer party game about flaccid penises and wiggly anuses for up to eight players at once.
I've seen Let's Plays of this. It has a great sense of humor.
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Untitled Goose Game
It's a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose. Out now on Mac, PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One.
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I just got a Switch and have so far started downloading a handful of free games, but other than that don't have anything. Is there anything I should look out for? I've already got Zelda on Wii U so I probably won't be buying a second copy of that, but other than that I'm open to suggestions.
e: Also, it's one of the new ones so no homebrew, at least for now.
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@hungrier Super Mario Odyssey is a must-have - there's a reason that it's consistently gotten 10/10. Aside from that the main things I use mine for are Smash Bros and Enter the Gungeon. I'll probably buy Repentance when it comes out.
There's a million actual suggestions I could give other than Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, but I have no idea what your tastes are.
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@pie_flavor I've already ordered Mario Odyssey, and now that I've looked up Repentance and see that it's Binding of Isaac it's now on my radar.
I mostly like GTA-style games, shmups, platformers and Metroidvanias, but I'll take suggestions outside those genres as well
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@hungrier Hollow Knight is a great metroidvania, and Super Mario Maker 2 is a great platformer. Also, if you liked Isaac, you'll probably like Gungeon.
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Reminiscent of Factorio, except it's a lot less about building things and designing your base to feed research, and more about extracting the resources and feeding them to your defense buildings so you can keep the enemies from attacking your main "core" building.
Drawing conveyor belts is a lot easier, as it will build crossings automatically, but you can and should still care about providing a nice throughput to the right places, and not clogging a line with the wrong resource. The tech tree is unlocked simply by collecting enough resources into your core building so you can buy the tech of your choice.
Also the maps are fixed and can be revisited at any time. You unlock new maps by reaching a certain wave level or by collecting enough resources in a previous map.
As such, the gameplay feels much more casual than Factorio and your... emotional attachment, let's call it that... to any particular base is smaller.
It's open source: https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry
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If you're the kind of masochist that enjoys a puzzle game where
- There are absolutely no instructions, just "figure out the rules and goal, good luck", except the game doesn't even have the decency to tell you that, it just dumps you into the game world and makes you think the tutorial is broken
- You will spend at least 30 minutes figuring things out before you start to make literally any progress
- There is a time limit, in the form of a "void" constantly chasing you. And no pause button!
- Any mistake can and will undo your last 10-20 minutes of work
Then I can't recommend Starseed Pilgrim enough!
Edit: if you're not convinced, here's a more flourished description
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@anonymous234 said in Video game spotlight thread:
If you're the kind of masochist that enjoys a puzzle game where
- There are absolutely no instructions, just "figure out the rules and goal, good luck", except the game doesn't even have the decency to tell you that, it just dumps you into the game world and makes you think the tutorial is broken
- You will spend at least 30 minutes figuring things out before you start to make literally any progress
- There is a time limit, in the form of a "void" constantly chasing you. And no pause button!
- Any mistake can and will undo your last 10-20 minutes of work
Then I can't recommend Starseed Pilgrim enough!
Sounds great, but time limit disqualifies it
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@MrL I've played it a bunch, but I've never realized there was a time limit
(though I did see the "void", I don't think I've seen it move).I've pulled up a gameplay video to refresh my memory: I lied, I have seen expand)
Then again, I'm not sure how far along I've gotten (see point 1 above).It's a game I'd like to play again, being a completionist and having enjoyed exploring it, but I'm not sure where I've kept the saved games. I'd probably play it back from the start anyway.
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@Zecc said in Video game spotlight thread:
@MrL I've played it a bunch, but I've never realized there was a time limit (though I did see the "void", I don't think I've seen it move).
Then again, I'm not sure how far along I've gotten (see point 1 above).It's a game I'd like to play again, being a completionist and having enjoyed exploring it, but I'm not sure where I've kept the saved games. I'd probably play it back from the start anyway.
I like playing puzzle games while getting drunk... time limits don't go well with that.
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@MrL Just to be clear: there's game to enjoy before you realize there's a time limit.
It's also more of a puzzle platformer than a pure puzzle game once you've figured out what the hell is going on, so that might disqualify it for you.
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Dragon Ball: Kakarot
First off, this game is an RPG. I say this because everyone I tell about it says they thought it was a fighting game. Which is fair, given how the last decade or so of DragonBall games have been.
So: I don't play a lot of single player RPGs lately. I play a huge amount of path of exile, but that's mostly because it's my standard social game that all my friends play. But occasionally, I play one.
Back in the day, I used to play a lot more, and still occasionally have time to run back through chrono cross, or play through new Platinum games as they come out. My favorite video game of all time is still an RPG: Megaman Battle Network 3. And as such, I played the Legacy of Goku games on the Gameboy advance growing up: it was my first big exposure to the series, and a pretty fun action RPG. I'd still recommend it as a way to get into the franchise. Or I would have.
Kakarot is the most ambitious DragonBall game ever made. It goes all the way from the beginning to the end of the Z part of the story, with a solid introduction to the characters involved. If you don't know anything about DragonBall but want to know why people are still talking about it decades later, you 100% should play this game.
The combat is a bit simplistic, though I haven't gotten the hang of perfect dodging yet, but to some extent that's fine: the initial clunk and slow improvement, along with the more methodical combat style you start to learn are actually really fitting in an RPG. I'd say that the game is far less fluid to control than Xenoverse 2, but not enough by any means for me to dislike it, though I do wish the controls could be rebound on a gamepad.
How about content? I've lost track of how many hours I've spent on this game so far, and I'm just about to arrive at the Cell games arena for the first time. The main story is action packed and exciting, while the side quests are if perhaps slightly lackluster sometimes, still good fun and a nice change of pace. You get a lot of extra things to do, and the open world feels enormous. And hey, this game remembers that Launch exists!
Visuals: Yeah. It's Cyberconnect2, their visuals are stupid good.
Impact: So far, the big fight at the end of the first arc has been the highest point in the game. The visuals, the accelerating difficulty... It took me an hour to get that fight figured out and beaten. It'd be easy with healing items perhaps, but I didn't have any, and that victory was immensely satisfying in a way few games manage.
All in all, my 3/5 complete review of the game, were I to give it a number, would be something like an 8.5/10:
If you love this franchise or want to know what it's about, this is the game for you. If you want a different kind of open world rpg, this is for you. If you like bright colors and action, this game is for you.
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Nova Drift
*It's like asteroids!*
What if you were playing a game of asteroids, with fairly nice looking graphics, when suddenly rainbows started shooting out of the bottom of the screen telling you to press the space bar?
Perhaps you'd be greeted by a menu allowing you to try different weaponry. And the second time advanced shielding, followed by selection of a ship...
This, my friends, is where our game begins. Perhaps you've chosen homing missiles on a ship with fast regenerating shields and high ability to construct allies? Or maybe you thought focusing on killing things with your engine flames was the way to go? What about filing all of space and time with boomerangs or grenades?
So far, you'll be getting the idea that this is a game where you choose a loadout and play it, but that's where you're wrong: as the chaos builds with each wave of enemies, your options of upgrades are no less chaotic. You could end up building something entirely different than you could previously have imagined: more likely you definitely will.
Some of you know I'm a big Path of Exile fan, and the glory inherent in that game is building more and more characters that do new things in new ways endlessly. Nova Drift is that every half hour.
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This one's a few years old, but for some reason has had a resurgence lately, and is still great.
Spelunky
It's a rogue-lite platformer where you run around collecting treasure and going from floor to floor. You start with 4 each of health, bombs and ropes, and throughout the areas you'll find enemies, weapons, and gear. Since it's a rogue-lite, when you die in the game
you die in real lifeyou lose all* your progress and roll a completely new game.The basics are pretty simple: You start at the first floor of the Mines, descend down through four floors until you hit the Jungle, then the Ice Caves, and finally the Temple. Each area has a wide variety of enemies and traps which will all try to kill you, and items that may help deal with them. At the end of the Temple you fight a boss, and when you win the game counts up your score and that's that.
But of course that's not all there is to it. Each area may have some hidden items that can drastically change how the rest of the game will progress (assuming you make it that far), including a series of optional side items (which will always be there, but sometimes be very difficult to get) that culminate in a hidden final area (spoiler: it's Hell) with the true final boss of the game. Missing any** of these will lock you out of that part of the quest for the rest of the run.
Speaking of something that indicates that the game is wicked hard, it's wicked hard. Occasionally, the RNG will be kind and leave everything you need out in the open, give you easily avoidable enemies and a
helpful itemearly on, andeverything will be fineyou'll still die from being careless, but usually you'll get a lot of traps and enemies, not enough bombs, etc. And sometimes, even if you're careful, some random Rube Goldberg event will happen off-screen and enrage the shopkeeper, and the consequences will follow you the rest of the game.Oh yeah, there are shops. Most of the time they'll have items or weapons, but sometimes it'll be something different. The one thing in common is that they have a trigger happy shopkeeper. As long as you don't do anything stupid like trying to rob the store, hit the storekeeper, drop a bomb in the store, etc, he'll happily sell you items in exchange for the money you get from finding treasure. But if you do any of those things, or if you do the ultimate crime of failing to protect him or his store from environmental hazards, he'll get super pissed and chase you with his shotgun. And from that point on, for the rest of the run, every shopkeeper you see will kill you on sight, and in addition to the ones in stores, there will also be one guarding the exit on every floor. But on the other hand, if you're brave enough/good enough at the game, you can give yourself an early advantage and just deal with the shopkeepers like any other (really powerful) enemy.
All in all, if you like pulling your hair out in frustration, and learning the limits of your foul language vocabulary and volume of your voice, give it a shot. The HD remaster version that I've been talking about is available on PC and a bunch of consoles and portables, and there's also an older free version that most of the stuff is based on.
Here's a sample of the kind of thing that'll happen to you all the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1buL1j-icY
* Not quite all your progress. You can unlock new characters, which only affect the cosmetics of the game, and you keep those forever. There's also a persistent side quest where you can unlock shortcuts to the later areas, and once you have those you'll keep them.
** You can skip one of the early items, but it'll make it hard to get to the next step, which is required.
Mindustry
The Five Stages of Starseed Pilgrim
