When a gamer picks up a video game today, they usually can expect the game to offer lengthy tutorials and the occasional helpful hint when they find themselves struggling. Back in the early days of home video games, retro games were fairly brutal to the inexperienced player. The games themselves offered little to no help as to what to do, and even the instruction manuals proved to be vague, at best. Korigame Entertainment attempts to bring back the frustration of retro gaming, for better or worse, with their dungeon-crawler puzzler:
Dungeony.
At face value,
Dungeony doesn't seem like much of a game. First, the player picks what character they would like to play as, and each character is ranked based on difficulty. Then, from that point on, the player is simply told to make it from one level to the next while picking up the occasional bombs, potions, keys, and coins. As far as the player knows, this is pretty much the entirety of the game.
In reality,
Dungeony is a bit more than that. The player is given three single stats to manage: attack, health, and stamina. Attack and health are based around the players experience -- the higher their level, the harder they hit and the more health they have. Stamina, however, is constantly drained by moving and attacking; to make matters worse, certain enemies can poison the player, draining them of stamina even faster.
The lower the stamina, the less likely a player is to successfully attack an enemy. Stamina is replenished between levels and replenishing stamina with potions is an option, but they tend to be rare - and often, levels are designed to drain the players' stamina as fast as possible. Without stamina, players are rendered vulnerable to being killed, and forced to start the game over.
This leads to an interesting resource management system; the player will essentially have to decide which enemies to kill and which items to collect. If the player skips killing the enemies, he or she can't level up, and will surely be killed in later levels. If the player ignores items, they won't be able to purchase things from shops. This requires a player to constantly try to figure out the best way to maximize reward while minimizing the risk of immediate or near-future death.
Dungeony has a few flaws -- primarily, we would like to see a better stat management system. The player has a defense stat that they are never able to view, which apparently is supposed to allow them to absorb damage. A stat page would be beneficial, specifically to allow a player to see the average damage they can deal and how much damage they have a chance of absorbing. A brief character write-up on the character select screen would also be helpful, allowing players to understand the difference between Knight and Green Knight, or Pirate and Viking.
Overall, the game is still a decent mobile dungeon crawler, and fans of the genre are likely to enjoy the puzzle-like elements within the game.
Dungeony is available for both the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and
costs $2.
Who would like Dungeony:
Those who like retro-style dungeon crawlers with interesting puzzler elements and little hand-holding.
Who wouldn't like Dungeony:
Those who dislike perma-death mechanics and/or dungeon crawlers
-- Amber Neely (
@SurferAmber)
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