Desktop Dungeons Enhanced Edition

This is exactly what I needed for my breaks. I was getting eye-balled by the boss too often when playing Giants during lunch. Somehow the 2D graphics and smallish game window must be less threatening. The game seems well refined; both the dungeon mode and city management mode are straightforward and entertaining (after the tutorial). My pre-tutorial venture into a dungeon was met with almost instant death, but the quick tutorials prepared me for adventuring and less instant death. On top of everything, it runs well on my ancient XP machine from my own dungeon. Thank you very much GOG Team for bringing us another gem!

This game forces you to think of everything you have: items in your inventory, unexplored parts of the dungeon, monsters as resources. Trying to kill everything thats your or below level won't gain you much. Instead you try to take down more powerful creatures than you, to gain more experience, which is again, a resource you have to keep track of, since when you level up, you get healed, and can now continue beating down that stronger monster. The developers thought through every combination of glyphs (spell), monsters races, classes and items. The game starts off easy to let you learn it, then it progressively gets harder as you progress in it, and gets more and more addicting, fun, as you unlock more things in it. Even the game taunts you to use some weird combination for a quest. You think "wow that must be hard", but after a couple of retries, you actually say to yourself "ha, that was pretty easy. Give me something more challenging!". The game "answers" to what you said, and wants you to do something even harder. Definately recommended for everyone that likes puzzles, resource management, "rogue-likes and dungeon-crawlers" +progressive difficulty +the game teaches you the concepts of it +everything is a resource +neat UI allows for easier tracking +playable with either mouse, keyboard or both +can be played under 10 minutes +everything is on one screen (you always see the full picture) -price is a bit too high for my region

The game opens with a simple and fun tutorial to teach you the absolute basics of what you need to do to win. But once that is over, the difficulty and challenge is ramped up exponentially and the fun factor is ripped out and replaced with tedious micromanagement. Running through a level "with both guns blazing" is hands-down the absolute worst strategy you could use--every move, every attack, and every cast of magic must be carefully and painstakingly pre-planned lest the entire remainder of the level becomes hopelessly lost. You are seriously outmatched in every level and manipulating the timing of your level-ups to replenish HP/MP is the ONLY way to survive through to the final boss of each level; there is no other strategy. I've periodically re-installed this game every now and again and every time I remember why I stopped playing it. It's a one-trick-pony game and just doesn't have enough entertainment value to keep me interested.

Desktop Dungeons is a fun and addictive RPG-puzzler with an unpredictable but surprisingly fair (for the most part) random component. It also has a nice and active wiki with a substantial page full of beginner articles followed by links to articles for races and classes, written by the game's veterans, any of whom have been playing since the early alpha builds. This same community was actively involved in bringing this game to its impressive state of balance, and continues to be active on the QCF Design forum. There are also some good YouTube play videos, such as those from JayPlaysGames. Inspired by the rogue-like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but having evolved into a sort of an RPG puzzler, Desktop Dungeons is the opposite of RPGs like Final Fantasy which are about endless grind and discourage using precious consumables. Instead, Desktop Dungeons frees the player to make bold and carefully planned decisions regarding inventory management, level-up heals, and even the worship of gods. Inventory space is precious and limited, but most items can be destroyed in exchange for its conversion points. Converting an item may please a god who hates that type of item, while the conversion points themselves count toward the gain of a buff or potion depending on the player's race for that run. Even unexplored tiles are a scarce resource, healing the player (but also the enemies) as they are uncovered. The game starts out easy and ramps up the difficulty and complexity nicely over time with an unfolding supply of unlockable content. While earlier dungeons are forgiving, in later dungeons it becomes important to pay close attention to the strengths and weaknesses of enemies and leverage every resource, casting very valuable spell glyphs one last time before sending them off for the conversion points at the end of a fight. The last-second considerations needed to stretch your resources for one more attack often lead to the sort of close calls that make gaming exciting.

It has been over 5 years since I took on this bad boy, so my review will lack the depth of subtleties. As an indie game connoisseur, I have finished 100s of indie games, and this game stands at the pinnacle; this is the best indie game I have ever played. But, as mentioned here, this game gets insanely hard from a strategy perspective (and from a roguelike item acquisition perspective). Completing the third mission in the Goatperson DLC is my greatest accomplishment as a gamer...it took me ~30h to complete that one mission. It's so difficult, that I couldn't find a single video (and because the game didn't garner the attention it should have) of somebody else accomplishing said feat, at that time. This is must play for all roguelikers. I do plan to replay, some day, avec the Extreme Edition mod.