Mixing humour with classic dungeon-crawling adventure and a liberal sprinkling of roguelike RPG flair, Squidly's Second Wind is snarky, silly, strange, and actually kind of awesome. Choose a class and descend into a dungeon packed with weirdness, from angry newts that can only be appeased by a magical flute to lazy mimics and political orcs. The game randomly chooses events to present you with as you play, and they can be anything from enemies that will play out turn-based style and reward you with experience and gold, or deities who will bless you for some gold, opportunistic potion sellers, blacksmiths, challenges, and more. Though initially you only have five classes available, successfully completing certain events can unlock even more until you have twenty different classes to choose from. If you die, it's game over... but as you might guess from the title, you'll have one more shot at glory. Before you die. Again. Look, it's a roguelike. You knew what you were getting into. You can't save manually, but if you leave the game and come back to it later, it will give you the option of resuming your character from wherever you were when you last played.

If you're not a fan of roguelikes, then permadeath, even with the second chance, will be a nail in the coffin. Similarly, being unable to see your inventory so you can keep track of potions and items is annoying. As is the fact that the amount of health randomly restored when drinking said potions can vary drastically. I get the feeling that this might be because some of the Infirmaries you can buy potions from are better than others, but it's hard to tell since the game treats all potions the same, and, again, you can't look at an inventory to see you just bought a "Potion of Stanky Lameness" or something. Which in my case apparently happened a lot. For that matter, so did going missing attacks and clicking through endless repeated encounters before I finally found the single one I needed to progress. It's the sort of thing you expect with any game that uses a random generator, but it still rankles, and makes you feel like the game often comes down to blind luck.

Fortunately, Second Wind has a very Kingdom of Loathing-esque vibe to its tongue-in-cheek style and writing, which is never a bad thing, though it does clash somewhat with the serious tone the end encounters take. This is where the game's breezy "aw, c'mon, just one more try" addictiveness really shines through, and since the different classes have a surprising amount of variety and strategy in their strengths and abilities, it takes some of the sting out of starting all over. There's just so much to see and encounter, and with four possible endings, some better than others, you'll have to experiment a lot, and probably die a lot, if you want to see all of it. Though heavily reliant on luck and patience, Second Wind is a witty and addictive retro dungeon crawler you can spend five minutes or an hour on without really realising it.

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