The short version
A small, confident roguelike from a genuinely respected author in the genre (the creator of rot.js, the toolkit half the browser roguelike scene is built on) -- everything we tested worked cleanly, with real contextual feedback for every action, in a game explicitly designed to be finished in one short sitting.
Biggest strengths
- Confirmed working via direct keyboard testing — arrow-key movement, wall collisions, and door/room transitions all responded correctly with real narrative feedback text ("You bump into a solid wall")
- Flexible, genre-standard controls (arrow keys, numpad, or vi-keys), explicitly explained on the very first screen
- Charming, legible ASCII presentation with a genuinely funny title-screen fairy tale framing and "Fun Fact" footer text
Biggest weaknesses
- Keyboard and mouse only, with no viewport scaling for narrow screens -- correctly a desktop-tier game, not one a phone visitor should be sent to
- The roguelike tower-climb structure itself is familiar territory, executed well rather than reinvented
- A week-long jam scope means what's here is compact; anyone wanting a long-haul roguelike should look elsewhere
Who it's for: Roguelike fans who want a genuine, complete dungeon-crawl in fifteen minutes rather than a fifteen-hour commitment; keyboard and desktop required.
Our recommendation: recommended
7.2 / 10
Sleeping Beauty is a 2017 entry for the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge by Ondřej Žára -- a name worth knowing if you've played browser roguelikes before, since he's also the author of rot.js, the toolkit underpinning a large share of the genre's web-based entries. This one is his own small, complete game built in that library, and it wears its jam scope proudly: the title screen promises a "truly beautiful day for a heroic action" and delivers exactly what it says, no more, no less.
Controls (8.5). We tested this directly with real keyboard input, not just a description. Arrow-key movement moved the player character cleanly around each room, wall collisions produced honest, immediate feedback ("You bump into a solid wall"), and navigating through a door correctly transitioned to a new room layout. The game explicitly tells you on the very first turn that arrow keys, numpad, and vi-keys (hjkl-style) all work, which is exactly the kind of input flexibility genre veterans expect and newcomers appreciate having spelled out.
Presentation (7.0). The ASCII rendering is clean and colour-coded (green trees, white player, orange doors), and the title screen goes out of its way to be charming rather than purely functional -- a hand-drawn ASCII knight, a fairy-tale framing text, and a rotating "Fun Fact" footer. It's a monospace, fixed-layout interface with no responsive scaling, so it's desktop-only by design; we're reviewing it under that tier rather than penalizing it for lacking a phone layout it was never built to have.
Gameplay and scope (7.5 / 7.0 value). The pitch -- climb a tower, floor by floor, to reach a sleeping princess -- is familiar roguelike shape, but it's honestly delivered: a real health/mana resource display, floor-by-floor progression, and a design that's explicitly built to be finished in a single short sitting rather than abandoned halfway. For a coffeebreak-length game, that completeness matters more than raw originality.
This isn't a genre-redefining game, and it doesn't try to be one. It's a well-made, honestly-scoped week-long project from someone who clearly knows the roguelike toolchain inside out, and everything we asked it to do, it did correctly.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Confirmed working via direct keyboard testing — arrow-key movement, wall collisions, and door/room transitions all responded correctly with real narrative feedback text ("You bump into a solid wall")
- Flexible, genre-standard controls (arrow keys, numpad, or vi-keys), explicitly explained on the very first screen
- Charming, legible ASCII presentation with a genuinely funny title-screen fairy tale framing and "Fun Fact" footer text
- By a well-known figure in the browser roguelike community (creator of the rot.js toolkit); ISC-licensed code plus a separately Apache 2.0-licensed bundled font, both verified directly from source
- Deliberately short and complete -- a real beginning, middle and end, not an abandoned jam sketch
Cons
- Keyboard and mouse only, with no viewport scaling for narrow screens -- correctly a desktop-tier game, not one a phone visitor should be sent to
- The roguelike tower-climb structure itself is familiar territory, executed well rather than reinvented
- A week-long jam scope means what's here is compact; anyone wanting a long-haul roguelike should look elsewhere