DUNGEON ENCOUNTERS

I didn't think this would be for me like, at all. I was into JRPGs as a teen but grew bored of them, it's a real struggle to make myself engage with turn based battles anymore and had I just looked at the screenshots for this I would have shrugged and continued scrolling. And then I read that one negative review about a guy getting into thousands of in game currency's worth of debt and I was ♥♥♥♥♥♥ SOLD. This is like the pure distillation of a dungeon crawl, honestly it feels a little like they're taking the piss by having the graphics be this simple, this is like protype level game design, this is placeholder assets and some pretty monster drawings, but it WORKS, with a surprising amount of depth and genuine stakes. This is not for everyone, and you can lose everything if you're not careful, but if you're curious, into pure game design - and you see it half off in a sale - I absolutely encourage you to give it a go. Also - plays great on steam deck, tiny game, legit barely drains the battery, RIP me ever getting sleep again now that I have access to this. EDIT - Just to re-iterate like, 200 hours later, that this game is an isntant classic, absolutely masterful pacing and playful design, and If you ever meet me IRL I will talk your ear off about it hi future friends did you enjoy the game DID YOU

Imagine you distill down the essence of a JRPG... and then use the dregs? Virtually no interesting story, character progression, tactical or strategic choices, or even exploration. Way too many design decisions that simply punish you with annoying wastes of time for exploring the game - fight the wrong new enemy for the first time? Characters get stoned with no possible way to prevent it, nor fix it, until you randomly find (or look online) the location of a shrine to fix it. Which is basically trivial, except requires you to remember the X/Y/Z location of the stone party member, and then journey back to pick them up when you're done - none of which has any risk if done right, it just wastes time. I generally like a grindy game, but this game is extremely grindy, even for me. Lots and lots of repeated combats with no interesting choices. I found that, by far, the most effective strategy for not wasting real-world time was just to equip everyone with the same boring "hit everyone with magic" spell and spam it as quickly as possible. In theory other strategies could finish combat in fewer [i]turns[/i], but not in less [i]time[/i] than just holding down the [b]A[/b] button and spamming the same thing for everyone. Exploration is done on a featureless abstract grid, and occasionally was engaging, and did have some Pac-Man like fun in covering the whole grid, but the later levels basically alternated between annoying (like bumping into every wall to check for a secret passageway?) to trivialized by upgrades you find. I did have [i]some[/i] fun with this game, and I did 100% it (in about 30 hours, probably), but only because I was playing it while mostly focused on listening to a pod-cast, and also had the game running at 3x-5x speed (via external program).

A very fun dungeon explorer that nails the vibe of classic titles in the genre while curtailing a lot of the arbitrary unfairness that makes some of those games difficult to return to. It rewards thoughtful exploration and decision making in combat. Great art style. It is functionally storyless, which may be a turn off for players looking for a narrative.

The little pop up when you fully map a floor makes my brain feel tingly Ok i'm updating this review after more playtime: this one is absolutely, strictly and sincerely for the freaks and sickos only. There is literally nothing between you and the dungeon. Legendary designer and inventor of the ATB system Hiroyuki Ito took a budget of what I assume was whatever change was down the back of the couch in the Square Enix canteen and stripped the blobber down to the bare screaming metal and called it good. You need to want the dungeon, man. This game doesn't care about you. Dude got petrified? Rough, buddy. You can't haul his petrified ass around so you need to take him out of the party and leave him where he is until you can find a shrine to cleanse it. Whole party got wiped out 18 levels deep on a bad beat from a tough mob pack? Sorry bro, gotta train up and entire new party to haul ass down there and drag their corpses back out again. Art and music are minimal (the soundtrack seems to entirely be one guy playing classical music pieces on an electric guitar), the story is non-existent, combat is simple but breezy and feels good. Classic ATB fare. It's just you and the dungeon. This makes Wizardry on the Apple II look feature rich. It's not for everyone and it's fine with that, and if you're fine with that, you should buy it. I just party wiped on level 19 after eight hours and now I have four level two characters and no gear, and I can't wait to get back down there. You already know I'd this is for you. If it is, you should buy it

What a peculiar game. Essentially it's an extremely stripped down party-based dungeon crawler. And by stripped down I mean there are no classes, no spells, no abilities, nothing of the sort - not even consumable items of any kind, really. There is some unique equipment, but it's rather limited and a lot of the time situational. All your characters get is HP (self-explanatory), PP (determines what and how much equipment you can put on) and equipment: 2 weapon slots (weapons are physical/magical, melee/ranged, single-/multi-target and with fixed/random damage), headgear (magical defense and optionally speed), armor (physical defense and optionally speed) and 1 accessory (speed, crit chance, counterattack chance, extra damage). One thing I actually like is that physical and magical defense act like separate health bars that take damage of the respective type without rollover, so the damage only goes through to HP when the defense is at 0. Unfortunately, in practice it usually only saves the character from 1 attack since a lot of the time the enemies will do damage many times over what defense the currently appropriate level of armor provides. Some enemies can attack your party members' life points directly instead, and the heavily randomized damage often ends up being much higher than the max HP values too, resulting in rather unfair-feeling oneshots. Some weapons apply special effects instead of dealing damage (poison, banishment, petrification, etc.) and these same special effects can also be applied by the enemies to your party members, and can be quite devastating until you find the ability to completely nullify them. Speaking of abilities, these are divided into exploration and battle ones. Exploration abilities mostly help navigating the floors and avoiding hazards, while battle abilities include things like restoring defense, resurrection, healing and various passives. The game is also rather punishing overall. If your party is wiped, the characters stay on the same tile and you have to assemble a new party from the base to go down and carry them out. Keep in mind that there are only 4 character slots, so you're gonna have to keep some of them open to pick the other members back up in several trips. Certain enemies can petrify your party members, requiring you to leave them behind until you find an altar, input the coordinates of your petrified party members, and go back to pick them up. Some enemies and floor hazards can scatter your party members to random locations on random floors, the process of finding them again being quite arduous even with the ability that is supposed to help locating wandering adventurers. There are also enemies and floor hazards that can not only steal certain amounts of gold from what you have on hand, but are also able to put you in debt, somehow. The presentation is extremely minimal, with a flat map that has all encounters and events represented as 2-digit hex numbers (black for enemy encounters and white for events like stairs, altars, shops, new abilities). As you explore you'll mostly be hearing some ambient noise and that's it. In combat, both sides are shown as static portraits and all battle music tracks are electric guitar covers of classical pieces. The arrangements aren't bad by any means, but it's still a bit of a weird choice. One of many in this game, really. Given that there is no real progression aside from "number go up," you will have seen most of what the game has to offer in a couple hours. Sure, some of the later acquired abilities do feel nice to get, but not much really changes. I could only recommend getting it on a deep sale and only if you really need a nothing-but-gameplay palate cleanser of sorts, otherwise there are dozens of more feature-rich and overall engaging JRPGs/DRPGs to choose from. That said, it does still have a certain charm to it as you zone out and grind in the background while doing something else.

I'm of the opinion that every good JRPG needs to have at least one Rodent that ruins your day. Dungeon Encounters has several, which should be evidence enough that it belongs among the greats of the genre.

i weep and gnash my teeth proclaiming that this game is art

SquareSoft decided to make an art game based on stripped down a classic dungeon crawler to as nearly an abstract experience as possible... and it's good! If you like dungeon crawlers. If you don't, you won't like it. And it doesn't care. If you like crawling dungeons, this is the neat-no-ice-no-chaser version.