- Meritous
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Meritous 
Developer(s) Lancer-X/ASCEAI Publisher(s) Independent Designer(s) Lancer-X/ASCEAI Engine Custom Platform(s) Cross-platform Genre(s) Action-adventure game, Dungeon crawler Mode(s) Single player Media/distribution Free download Meritous is a freeware game made by Lancer-X/ASCEAI for the PC. It's an "action-adventure dungeon crawl"[1] about the psi user Merit who ventures into Orcus dome to correct the problems in the psi flow.[2]
Gameplay
You control Merit, a psi user. The game takes place in a dome (a dungeon with many rooms) where you quest for artifacts and fight "shadowy creatures".[3] Your character is controlled in a top-down perspective and can only see enemies and objects that are in the same room as he is. Your only attack against the many bullet-firing monsters in the game is by charging and releasing a circular wave of psi. The longer you hold the space bar to charge your attack, the greater its power and its range of effect. However, you cannot use your attack again until your energy resets. The longer you hold the spacebar, the bigger and better the attack, but the longer it takes for your psi energy to reset and the longer it is until you can attack again.
If the psi energy in your released attack is more powerful than a "monster" that is both close enough to you and within the same room, it kills that monster and transforms it and in some cases any bullets it has fired at you into 'psi crystals' which you can collect to purchase upgrades to your attack charge-up speed, your recovery time until your next attack, and your automatic psi shield. There is no effect on the monster if your psi attack is not sufficiently charged, although it may remove their fired bullets.
The game features 3000 rooms to explore and a bestiary of easy to challenging monsters and several bosses. Most rooms are rectangular and are randomly determined at the beginning of the game. Several key rooms, including the starting room, are preconfigured with statues and other elements that you can use to your own tactical advantage. Rooms may randomly contain one or more aid tiles (and the starting room contains all aid tiles), which include a compass that indicates the direction to quest items and powerful artifacts that increase various components of your powers, a savepoint, one of three upgrade tiles where you can purchase upgrades if you have sufficient psi crystals, a psi crystal collector that brings all uncollected crystals to your current room, and a checkpoint teleport system to move you around the gigantic map. Certain well-guarded rooms also contain chests with valuable treasures.
References
- ^ http://www.asceai.net/meritous/, About section
- ^ "...one PSI user, MERIT, decided to use his own reserves of PSI to ethereally warp into the Dome itself to find out what the problem was and restore the Dome to its original state", in-game manual
- ^ Ingame manual, introduction page
Categories:- Free, open source video games
- Formerly proprietary software
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