When you rage quit from a game and you immediately want to give it another try, you know you've got something special.
Verlies II is a first person dungeon crawler, with real-time combat and grid based deplacement.
And it wants you dead.
Yep, according to the Master, death is the only thing you rightly deserve.
Let's prove him wrong, shall we?
In order to do that, you'll have to master combat precision, actively aiming at the monsters, and timing, to block with your shield and manage breath/endurance. It's a fun and solid system and you may soon try to block "frame perfect" in the vain hope it will mitigate more damage :p or you will die miserably for it was obvious this 5th strike in a row was dumb.
You'll have to master the odds in a game of dice for you'll need tons of money to buy keys, health potions, repair your so fragile stuff, cure poison, sharpen a blade, ID artefacts way too high level for you but rejoice! The smith can "standardize" it (remove the level restriction) for a mere 30 gold coins, less than a night at the inn! That's one of the only "gift" in an otherwise harsh and tight economy.
You'll have to take lots of risks. The boss is down, should you delve deeper straight away for an XP boost or should you take the chance to go back to town as it's the only moment it's free of charge? On the brink of death, do you tail back in the middle of a floor with XP loss or do you pick up that probably trapped healing basket? Yeah, you should have trekked back...
You'll have to die, over an over, for there's no tutorial and the game is mean and nasty. But like in the best rogue-likes where exploration and experimentation are key, it wraps up in the long run and I dare say Verlies really shines, carrying the torch of classics with strength.
You'll probably have to specialize. There's not so many level ups and there's a lot of skills, actives and passives. Classics like shield bashing or alchemy for instance, and not so classic ones, like a heal paid by XP or an instant kill spell that eats up your total mana pool.
Floors layout, monster population, loot and traps are all randomly (procedurally?) generated. Level tone and design change every 3 floors and while there's no lush vistas nor DX12 features, the comic-style graphics are lovely (though I miss the naked blacksmith from the first opus^^)! Sound is good, atmospheric and creepy, or dumb and funny like that cash register trading sound.

So, this review's a mess... I hope it stills shows of much I enjoy this love letter to the genre!
I cannot recommend it enough. Two blue thumbs up out of a puddle of blood.
N'cha!