DemonCrawl

While the core game is fun, repeat crashes and consistent errors eventually soured my love for the game. You will find a tame sounding synergy that will brick the run. Lost my first save to a corrupted save cloud years ago but I started again anyway. Then the game failed to launch for a while and was only fixed recently after a long time of silence on Steam (Enough to warrant a removal from the storefront). We finally get an update fixing the launch issues and the launch of 2.0, only for my save to brick again. I consider this the final straw. Save yourself the trouble and look elsewhere.

The idea is fantastic but the execution isn't fully there, the game will run you into "unavoidable" guesses. a term used by the game. where you are forced to make a 50/50 decision and sometimes will instantly cause you to lose a run because the enemies you are attempting to flag will hit you for more than the HP you currently have. there's nothing you can do about this because the RNG didn't roll in your favor to give you items that would prevent you from taking as much damage so you just lose. i've tried multiple times to get through the game and have unlocked a few achievements. rather than unavoidable guesses the game should of done something different. it doesn't feel like a satisfying loss if i'm forced to take a 50/50 on it. it just sucks. its infuriating and even with less than 10+ hours it doesn't feel like the gameplay loop changes much. my entire save was reset and i had just had to restart from level 1, and i was hit with 3 "unavoidable" guesses on level 2-6 and i guess wrong on two of them and lost. if the unavoidable guesses were changed into something else i could probably find more enjoyment from the game but for it to literally boil down to guessing defeats the purpose of roguelike style games in general and leaves just a sour note behind because you didn't do anything wrong you just lost a coin toss. which again kinda defeats the idea behind roguelikes.

At least it runs now, but It's still an unstable mess of bugs and crashes. Every single daily quest and beyond quest I've played has crashed since the latest update. There are still multiple missing assets, some which cause crashes and some which just cause annoying errors and missing textures in-game. The Item Tree minigame is one of the easiest places to see this, as it still isn't working correctly. As much as I love this game, I can't in good conscience endorse buying this, even on sale. Avoid unless and until the dev has actually made the game stable. EDIT: Well, the dev is back to the same pattern as before: ignore the current bugs and introduce """fun""" new features which are horribly unbalanced and make the game perform worse. It looks worse, still doesn't have a colorblind mode, now noticeably lags when opening any menu (even with all of the animation effects disabled) and when attempting to generate the first level of a quest [i]and[/i] crashes when opening cells, but hey we have three mostly-usable classes (sarcasm)! I keep opening this game after updates, hoping that maybe this run will be fun and I won't run into any crashes, and I am disappointed every time.

It's back! :D Now to wait for it to come back to mobile. Definitely one of my most played games on mobile until it started crashing upon launch.

I've seen some interesting twists on minesweeper, and hoped this would be a fresh one. sadly, what I found was a grab bag of disjoint mechanics which almost entirely serve to undermine the core fun of minesweeper (deduction), with the "roguelite" and "RPG" aspects (i.e. the "bursting with content") being low-effort skinner box fluff. which could almost have worked if I were especially bored, except instead of the cheese I came for my bait was styrofoam. the interface design is aggressively mediocre. this extends to a lot of things, but to avoid typing too much I'll focus on the landing screen which frankly feels like it was designed by brand managers who have never played a video game. I had to guess which among the horizontal row of indistinct icons was intended to be "new game" because even though they gained labels on hover, none of them actually said that. meanwhile I could not possibly miss the Discord link or the "buy DLC" messaging: clearly tuned for engagement metrics uber alles, the game merely a vehicle for Acquisition. the half-assery runs so deep they couldn't even be bothered to make sure that when you hit the first shop there's at least one item you can afford with your available gold. nor did the "warp zone" a couple of boards later take me to the SAME shop, so it's not like you're gaining info you can use later; it's just blind RNG. that's when I quit and refunded. I don't see an AI disclosure, so maybe this is genuine human slop, but it's slop nonetheless. ideas that other people did cool things with, haphazardly smooshed together as if the parts are what matters and not the assembly.

I want to like this game more than I do. The appeal of roguelites hinges in variance and the items you acquire help you overcome the odds the game makes you face by either bridging a skill gap, i.e. making the core gameplay easier on their own or offering synergies, or by reducing the randomness of underlying game mechanics. Minesweeper in itself is a game of deduction in which you can correctly assign spaces on the game board with enough time to think and offers very little in regards of randomness aside from having to wager occasional guesses. Demon Crawl sadly sticks too close to the core game's formula. The only useful items are the ones which reduce the frequency at which you have to guess since everything else can be overcome with enough time and thought. However, those items are few and far between and making a mistake in this game can be brutal on account of how little life you tend to start out with and the rapid increase of monster strength, especially once you've passed the early stages. One can, of course, increase their maximum life if the item drops are in their favor but that's effectively just getting lucky to be allowed to continue playing the game. Keep in mind that the randomness in the core gameplay loop stems from being forced to guess time and time again so what happens to your HP is out of your control in the best of cases. Not to mention the game likes to modify stages with omens: debuffs which punish you even harder for making a mistake or increase the frequency at which you have to guess. The game does offer a mode in which the game board is always solvable by deduction, which is a common setting in Minesweeper games, but at that point all items become superfluous and you're left simply playing Minesweeper with a new skin which otherwise is freely available in your browser. The issue here is that this mode cuts out the randomness entirely which, in turn, removes the foundation for a roguelite. One can argue that players aren't perfect and not every solution is immediately obvious, leading to mistakes which aren't rooted in RNG. However, once you've learned to solve a game state which is guaranteed to be solvable, what's left? A mode in which the additional challenge lies in occasionally losing because you flunked a coin flip? There has to be a way to meaningfully expand on the core idea. Demon Crawl looks great and has a decent sense of humor but as a roguelite it sadly falls short. The inherent solvability of a logic game clashes with its vision of a roguelite. What fun I had with it I had because of Minesweeper, not Demon Crawl. It's by no means a terrible game and I'd give it a neutral review if I could but as it currently stands it misses the mark. Perhaps give it a try if it happens to be on sale but don't expect too much.

If you love minesweeper and roguelike elements with just a dash of pure utter chaos, this is the game for you. However fair warning, this game can get SO much chaos that it will crash at times. But one could argue the crashing from hundred effects happening at once is a good thing so I leave that up to you.

It's rough around the edges, but when it's fun, it's *insanely* fun. If you like Minesweeper and you like roguelikes, this is a must-play. It still has its fair share of Minesweeper BS in it, but that's also what you're signing up for with a Minesweeper roguelike. Every run feels truly unique and there are a ton of systems that interact in super cool ways. When you get a god-run, you'll know it, and you won't ever want to stop playing. If you're looking for a roguelike that's entirely skill-dependent and one where you feel like you could've won every run, look elsewhere: if you're in for the long haul and don't mind an occasional run getting ripped from your hands from a bad stage modifier or missed 50/50, join the rest of us gamblers and pick this up.