As much as I tend to love roguelike games of all stripes, I’ll admit that getting the formula for them right can be tricky. I’d imagine the first thing everyone thinks of when they’re mentioned is their general degree of difficulty. There’s no doubt that an essential part of their design is that they tend to be on the challenging side, but there’s actually quite a bit of nuance to that fact if you look beyond the surface. While not all titles that are roguelikes tend to possess all of their elements, you do tend to expect some sort of procedural level generation, elements of risk and reward to tempt you, variable power-ups that can help spice things up, and then some meta progression between runs to help soothe some of the sting of frustration early runs bring.

I think my issue with Astral Flux is it only feels like a relatively small portion of those elements made it to the party, and unfortunately the ones that feel either absent or only minimally included tend to be the ones I enjoy and somewhat expect to help incentivize me to keep coming back. There’s no question that the stage design for each run will be different, and when paired with the fact that you are always resource-constrained by dwindling oxygen you’ll need to keep replenishing as you go, that tends to be the sore spot with play more often than not. So yeah, the game absolutely has the challenging part covered, and then some. 

The problem is that I see a lot of stick in the game, but not enough carrot to compensate. Challenge stages you can opt for involve some risk, but while its rewards with stat modifiers are helpful they’re also not remotely exciting. You will have the benefit of wisdom in future runs, getting a better understanding for the challenges you’ll face and become more adept at facing them, but without meta progression there’s a chance less determined people will simply just tire of the challenge without feeling enough rewards for their efforts and move on. In general, this just feels like a game where the deck is stacked against you inherently, and that the expectation is that somehow that’s enough to keep you coming back for more. The problem is that the platforming action simply isn’t that spectacular, its design is simply not that awe-inspiring, and the fun factor just doesn’t feel like it kicks in much of note. I can appreciate what the developer was trying to accomplish here, and it feels like they’ve met their goals reasonably well, I just can’t say that it amounts to feeling very interesting or fun in the end when measured against its peers.