Hydra Slayer

Hydra Slayer is a Roguelike game focused on one thing: slaying Hydras. It is inspired by Greek mythology, Dungeon Crawl, MathRL seven day roguelike, and some mathematical puzzles about brave heroes slaying many headed beasts.
Hydra slaying has a long history.

First explorers who have met hydras were completely unable to do any harm. As they cut hydras' heads, two new heads always grew in place of each one cut.

Some of them started using clubs instead of swords. However, this was only a temporary solution. A club may stun a hydra, and make it temporarily less dangerous, but not kill it. When time comes, it will wake up and attack further. Hydras remained indestructible monsters.

Some mages have been employed to research methods of slaying Hydras. The first thing they have invented were Runes of Decapitation, which could kill a completely stunned hydra, or permanently destroy some heads of a non-completely stunned one. Another thing were Runes of Cancellation, which could remove hydra's regenerative abilities. However, both of these Runes were one-use items and very expensive to create, and thus not practical.

Then, a report came, claiming that heads won't regrow if the sword was put on fire. Apparently all Hydras in some region were killed using that method. Their meat was found extremely tasty, their blood good for healing wounds (due to hydras' natural regenerative abilities), and their scales good for improving armors.

Mages tried this method. Unfortunately, it did not work for them, though. However, they have experimented with other kinds of magically imbued weapons. It turned out that some enchantments will reduce the number of heads regrown. Possibly even no heads will regrow. Some hydras could be slayed after these findings, but not all. It is rumored that some mage long ago created a weapon which could slay any Hydra without regrowing heads, but he got overconfident and killed, and the secret was lost.

Mages experimented with their magical weapons even further. And they had a new result: weapons which could cut (or stun) several heads at once. If they cut all heads, the hydra was killed. If not, the Hydra would usually regrow the same number of heads as if only one head was cut. The mages were happy with that major result.

Of course, some new hydra slaying weapons and magics were created later, but they were nothing compared to the previous major achievement. The numbers of Hydras kept decreasing, and finally, they disappeared, and were almost forgotten... And less and less people became acquainted with the hydra slaying techniques, as other people laughed at them, because their profession was completely useless in these times.


Now you, a young student, have heard about a manifestation of hydras in so called Hydras Nest. Apparently some brave knights came to kill the Hydras... Brave, but stupid. Even if they equipped themselves with mighty hydra slaying weapons, they had no knowledge about how to use them correctly. What use is a mighty sword which can cut ten heads in one swipe, against a Hydra which has only 9 heads? All these knights have been killed.

You are more clever. Since your earliest years you have had an unnatural ability to count people in an instant, and your great grandfather has suggested you to pursue the Hydra Slayer career, and learn the forgotten art of Hydra Slaying. Now, you will show people that it is not just an useless funny thing. You take two small magical weapons and some magical items, hoping to rob better ones off dead bodies of these stupid knights, and head to Hydras Nest. Of course, not that you are one of these clever guys who are too scared and weak to be useful in a battle... you could also wield a two handed weapon with one hand.

The game counts various statistics about your character. I think the game is quite challenging, but not enough to require you to use up all your resources, so after winning once, you can try to win again with using less items, or taking less wounds, or using different strategies.

The game has two victory conditions (called "winning a battle" and "winning a war"). After obtaining the first one, you can try the second one (which should be winnable even without using one of the Potions of Life). You can try optimizing your play in both games. After winning the war, you can still go down, although the enemies get tougher and you gain less and less health, and items are not sufficient, so you will eventually have to stop.
Hydra Slayer currently features:
Download Hydra Slayer version 13.0 - released under GNU General Public License, version 2. As such, it comes with without any warranty. The package contains a Windows executable, and source, which compiles on Linux and MacOS X (and should compile on anything similar). For the Android version see its homepage. You can play Hydra Slayer for free, but if you like it, you can consider donating.

(Note: savefiles and scoreboards from Version 7.0 and up are not compatible with previous versions.)

Hydra slayer took:
Beginner's guide
If you are stuck on early levels, or just prefer to know what the game is about before starting, and you are not willing to try experimenting or understanding hints hidden in the story above, here is some basic information which might help you:

I recommend playing as a Human first to learn what the game is about. Although Elven archery and fencing, Naga ambidexterity, Trollish brute strength, and the double nature of the Halfling Twins are all very powerful powers, an experience with Humans will help you learn how to best use them to your advantage, and handle their disadvantages.

On each level your goal is to kill all Hydras.

The usual way to kill a Hydra is to cut all its heads with your blade.
Each blade cuts a fixed number of heads. You start with a dagger (-1, which means cuts one head) and a machette (-2). For each attack you select one of them by pressing '1' and '2', respectively. Thus, you can kill all 1-headed and 2-headed hydras in a single attack.
If some heads still remain after your attack, the hydra will usually regrow some heads. The number shown next to the hydra's name on the right side of the screen says how many heads will be regrown; it depends on the weapon you are attacking with. Sometimes it is impossible to kill some of the 3-headed hydras on level 1 with your initial weapons, because they regrow heads too fast. In this case, you can try using magical items ('i') or looking for a better blade.
You can only carry a very limited number of weapons. Carrying the biggest ones you can find is not likely to be a good strategy, because it is normally impossible to attack a hydra with a blade which cuts more heads than the hydra currently has.
In the later game you will find more types of weapons and some special types of enemies. For example, you will probably soon find bludgeons (aka stunners), which temporarily stun heads (making the hydra weaker) without actually removing them (but also without growing new ones). I think most of the weapons work in a logical way, although you probably need a bit of experimentation e.g. to understand how good exactly is the protection granted by the shields.
Have fun!

You can also see the Let's Play videos. I think they explain the basics quite well.

Thanks to the following people on RogueTemple:
As a traditional Roguelike, Hydra Slayer uses ASCII characters to draw its screens, and is controlled with a keyboard. However, you can get graphics, simple sound effects, mouse support, and several other options by playing through my frontend, NotEye. (Move the mouse to the bottom right corner to perform gameplay actions; tooltips appear which explain what will happen if you click, you can hide them by moving the mouse to the bottom left corner.) NotEye can also help you if you have problems to run Hydra Slayer in the proper ASCII mode in your new operating system (using the traditional DOS font, correct colors, and full screen). Just download NotEye, Hydra Slayer 13.0 is included with it.
hydra-fpp.png
Hydra Slayer FPP
 hydra-hex.png
Hydra Slayer hex tiles
 hydra-tiles.png
Hydra Slayer tiles
 hydra-ascii.png
Hydra Slayer in ASCII
hydra-hires.png
Hydra with hi-res font
 hydra-iso.png
Hydra isometric
 hydra-isohex.png
Hydra isometric hex
 hydra-minitile.png
Hydra mini-tiles

a video

Note when using the first person perspective (FPP): when playing in the eight-directional mode, some passages won't be visible. Also it is not available in the hex mode. It is rather for looking at from time to time, than for playing the whole game in it.
Updates about Hydra Slayer are published on my blog. You can discuss Hydra Slayer in the RogueTemple forum thread, or by e-mailing me (zeno@attnam.com).

If you like Hydra Slayer, you can consider donating.


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Thanks to Slashie for hosting this at RogueTemple!