Dungelot: Shattered Lands is a quirky roguelite by Red Winter Software and published by tinyBuild (who also published Punch Club). Fundamentally speaking, it’s what you get when you play Minesweeper by way of a roguelike RPG. And it’s better than it sounds.
The story is mostly the standard fantasy deal, but with a twist. Their version of Alexander Graham Bell decided that mana was a far more viable power source for his invention, and the people blew most of the world’s magic on long distance calls. Now that it’s almost all gone, the only real magical objects left are portals that allow travel between the fractured bits of the continent.
You start off with only one character unlocked: the (what’s a) Paladin, who has spells capable of smiting his enemies and healing himself. You can unlock three more characters by playing further in the game; the first happens to be a friendly vampire, helping to complete the rot of awesome monsters that Twilight ruined.
Speaking of spells, there are two things to keep in mind about them: 1) they work on a charge system (the higher the charge, the more effect you get out of your spells) which requires you burn items to gain charge, and 2) they require you to pick up scrolls to use, one use per scroll. Thankfully, they’re stored separately to your inventory. Sadly, however, they really don’t have a large effect even when you’re at full charge. And that’s a shame, because you need every edge you can get.
The game is not forgiving. You need to manage a number of resources in an inventory that’s really too small to begin with (even though you can expand it later), you need to make sure you have enough food (once again, having a blessedly liquid storage like spells) so that you don’t suffer penalties from starving, and you need to make sure not to activate traps, easily done by accident while clicking the tiles. Also, enemies hit like a truck, and accuracy is a stat that just feels super borked. I once watched myself miss a bat on the first floor so many times from just a 20% reduction to accuracy (all bats have this) that I lost all of my armor points and the majority of my HP. Needless to say, it wasn’t a winning run for that dungeon.
The gameplay is literally akin to Minesweeper. You want to clear as much of a floor as possible to make sure you have enough resources to continue, but sometimes that means fighting the aforementioned truck-like enemies, since they block off surrounding tiles when you activate them. for a game with such a generally kid friendly aesthetic, it’s not forgiving in the least. And once you’ve failed a dungeon for the umpteenth time because of something stupid like an enemy’s skill (like, I don’t know, the bat’s ability to dodge your best efforts to hit it), you will feel the rage. The random elements are part of what makes it a roguelike, but they also make it tedious like any other game in the genre can get.
There are so many items in the game, and some of them are valuable simply because they can navigate around problem enemies. Managing them in a four slot inventory isn’t made better by the fact that multiples of the exact same item can stack (with a few exceptions). The game clearly wants you to use them freely, but juggling them all while trying to figure out if you can forgo having them later is the real challenge.
The second you unlock the vampire, you have access to the mansion. The mansion has a bunch of items that offer a permanent boost for all characters. Most of them alter loot drops and coins found. The problem is that they’re all fairly expensive, and most of the time, your cash flow is minimal because you’re spending money in dungeon shops just to survive. You need to engineer runs to fail just to reap the largest benefit in coins sometimes just to afford new mansion items and equipment.
Overall, Dungelot: Shattered Lands is a decent game. It does have a fair share of things that might drive players away, though. And it’s best played in short bursts, to avoid hurling your mouse through the nearest wall.
B. Simmons
Dungelot: Shattered Lands