Desktop Dungeons Review

Ever since I played Puzzle Quest on XBLA, I’ve thought that it would be cool to make a real puzzle RPG. Fun though Puzzle Quest was, it was basically just Bejewelled with a fantasy setting, character customization, and special moves. In my mind, I pictured a puzzle game where you’d have an RPG character or party and you’d have to get through carefully designed puzzle dungeons, doing all the things you’d normally do in an RPG, but in bite-sized portions with a limited number of solutions.

Well, it’s not quite what I had in mind, but Desktop Dungeons is the closest thing I’ve seen yet and it’s even more fun than I expected. You pick a race, a class, and a gameplay mode, and off you go to solve a single map dungeon, fighting monsters, learning spells, gaining XP, items, and other bonuses in an attempt to become powerful enough to defeat the boss or bosses. In about 10-20 minutes, you can get the full RPG experience, going from a LV1 nobody to an unstoppable force of nature…assuming you don’t die.

One of the most clever design choices in Desktop Dungeons is how it gives the player a sense of progression even though a single game can be finished in under half an hour. As the player wins games and succeed at specific challenges, they unlock a host of new features like more races & classes (in total, 7 races, 15 regular classes, and 3 special race/class monster hybrids), new theme dungeons, better items and more. There’s even a super-hard three part campaign.

The game has a surprising amount of depth to it – in just a few hours, I’ve already learned a number of neat strategies that I wouldn’t have thought of early on. Most of the different classes are well designed and several of them require the player to completely rethink their common strategies to be effective. Shops and different gods to worship (each with their own pros & cons) keeps the game from becoming boring and the constant desire to win a new mode with a new class and unlock something new or just to boost your gold maximum or improve the quality of shop items keeps the player coming back for more.

If there is one thing that will make or break this game for some people, it’s the randomness. Unlike the game idea I’ve been considering for years with its predesigned dungeons, Desktop Dungeons is highly random. Sure, when you enter the Crpyt dungeon, you know you’re going to run into zombies, skeletons, and vampires, but from game to game, the dungeon layout and items change. On the plus side, this gives the game a great deal of replayability. On the negative side, sometimes you get very unlucky. It’s quite possible to possible to play the same mode with the same character class and have an easy time the first time and then get a layout that’s literally impossible to beat the second time because you’re stuck in a small room and every exit is blocked by a high level monster. It’s not so common that it’s a dealbreaker and it only takes a moment to start a new game when that happens, but it’s still an annoyance.

Annoying randomness aside, Desktop Dungeons is a highly engrossing, entertaining, and unique game that has provided some of the most enjoyable hours of gaming I’ve had this year. Best of all, it’s completely free! The developers are currently working on a paid version with new features and higher production values, but in the meantime if you like RPGs and puzzle games, I highly recommend playing the current free version ASAP. You can get it here.