Daily Review: Dungeons of Dredmor

Daily Review

Dungeons of Dredmor

System: PC (Steam)

Status: Unfinished

Currently: Getting various achieves through the runs. 

Honestly, I am a big fan of rogue-likes in almost every incarnation. Western styled ones patterned after Nethack or Diablo pedigrees, Eastern styled ones ("Mysterious Dungeon" games), any of them tend to bring out a lot of love in me. The imposed difficulty of every death being permanent, and reaching the end being a true challenge instead of trial and error brings out a lot in me. Of course, the flip side of that is with permanent death, you can play for five hours...and make zero progress due to a stupid mistake. Which is very bad for my attempts to reduce my backlog.

Dungeons of Dredmor has some issues that at first put me off. The main of which is that when I started up the game, the first screen was difficulty (not a big deal), smaller dungeons (OK, that's fine), and permadeath (Wait, what?). That's right, Dungeons of Dredmor (for the rest of this labelled DoD), is a rogue-like that lets you save, and load if you die. Hence....not a true roguelike. That almost made me put it down right then and there.

When I got to playing it, the game itself was very solid. Select class trees at the start (wide variety and you get to pick several), and off you go. There is significant crafting if you select one of the trees, which does quite a bit to nix some of the randomness that also goes with roguelikes, but its within acceptable bounds. The limited inventory keeps you from keeping everything in hopes of crafting it later. The game does have a severe lack of healing items. Most of it is garnered from food, which only heals 1 HP per round, for as many rounds as the food gives you. Healing potions are very rare, which means you have to be ready for each encounter or they will kill you because you can't just chug potions. Some of the classes do more to help with the randomness, for example, archeologist lets you sacrifice useless artifacts for free xp, and so I select it nearly every time.

The game play is solid, I do highly recommend picking smaller dungeons....otherwise they are just mind numbingly huge and painful to crawl around on each floor. The small dungeons feel more 'right', and you don't have to stare at the same enemies and tiles for a good hour (and yes, one large dungeon floor did take me nearly an hour to explore by itself). I personally have been playing with permadeath on....it is a rogue-like after all. That and winning with that will feel more solid, and net me two separate achievements. Some of the achievements are silly, like dying to the weakest enemies, or random silly enemies. Mini-quests do vary things a bit, as well as random events like zoos. Overall, it was worth the purchase, and is a slower less stressful alternative to Binding of Isaac.