I’ve written about roguelikes before, of course, but I’m revisiting the topic now because I’m punting a game. A roguelike game, obviously, and – like most of them – an indie project. It’s also a game developed by a friend of mine (and regional Guybrush Threepwood lookalike contest winner, Rodain Joubert), but I totally wasn’t bribed with loads of hard cash and a decade’s supply of expensive imported pilsner to promote it over here (maybe).
Anyway, this one’s a roguelike with a bit of a difference. Where the genre is usually characterised by games of sprawling scope and stories challenging the Prose Edda in baffling, improbable complexity, Desktop Dungeons is entirely designed around quick, 10-minute crawls – that’s quick, 10-minute crawls that are over when they’re over, and click “Start” to start again.
There’s absolutely no story involved here beyond THY QUEST – YE VERILY FORSOOTH! – IS TO SLAY ANYTHING – YE VERILY FORSOOTH! – WITH EYEBALLS, and I just made that up to maintain this charade that video games are meaningful or something. Dungeons are also comparatively diminutive little things at just 20 x 20 squares. The big idea here is to have a roguelike game, but without all that tedious time investment and howling tragedy when your 63rd level darkborn half-elf magethief dies of starvation at the bottom of a hole they didn’t have the mana to get back out of (oops). Perhaps more significantly, the big idea here is to have a roguelike game you can play in a window behind your TPS spreadsheets while your boss isn’t looking. This is ingenuity hard at work in a very real, very Discovery Channel “Ingenuity Hard at Work” special sort of way.
Starting out, the game has five races and four classes to choose from. Once you’ve completed a dungeon (that is, defeated the dungeon boss in combat) with any class, you’ll unlock a sort of upgraded version of that class, as well as new dungeon denizens. And once you’ve unlocked every class and completed dungeons with each one, you can move on over to ranked play with proper leaderboards and everything.
I’m saying that like it’s easy. It’s not. Just getting through a single dungeon is much, much harder than it sounds, and there’s a lot of working it all out for yourself. It’s not really a case of rushing about and cracking skulls, but rather of balancing finite and very limited resources, risk management, and some careful calculation. Perhaps a little unlike traditional roguelikes, Desktop Dungeons is actually a clever, complicated puzzle game pretending to be a hack ‘n’ slasher.
The best part, oh just by the way, is that Desktop Dungeons is totally, 100% free. For the time being, anyway, since the developer is currently being stalked by a PopCap director on Twitter. Get it while you still can then.
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