Dungeons of Dreadrock is an adventure game that includes action, exploration and fighting but mainly focuses on puzzles.
"Every year, a young boy is chosen to defeat the King of the Mountain." - only this time, it's your brother. After accompanying him to the Dead King's Gate and letting him en...
Dungeons of Dreadrock is an adventure game that includes action, exploration and fighting but mainly focuses on puzzles.
"Every year, a young boy is chosen to defeat the King of the Mountain." - only this time, it's your brother. After accompanying him to the Dead King's Gate and letting him enter on his own as advised... Well let's just say things go different from there than the Village Elders expected.
In order to reach the Dead King's crypt to save your brother from being sacrificed you'll need to solve puzzles, evade traps and fight a bunch of enemies. There are scrolls to decipher, levers to pull, floor plates to step on, fireballs to evade, doors to smash or to unlock, and a whole lot of enemies to kill. But while Zombies or Dread Beetles are easy prey, a lot of other creatures from Ogres to Dark Elves, Minotaurs and Dragons will require more than just brute force to be overcome.
Dungeons of Dreadrock basically takes the idea of oldschool first-person grid-based real-time Dungeon Crawlers (like Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder or Legend of Grimrock) and shifts the perspective to top-down. But what seems like a little twist results in a whole new (yet somewhat familiar) experience that was designed to be accessible for oldschool gamers and casual gamers alike.
Popular achievements
New Dawn
Survive till Sunrise
common
·
33.73%
Spikes
Fourth time pays for all
common
·
61.96%
Round the Outside
Round the Outside
common
·
41.96%
River
You crossed it!
common
·
54.12%
Sesame
Open, Sesame!
common
·
45.1%
Shovel
Knight
common
·
40.78%
Chamber of Death
Find three Skulls
common
·
36.86%
Trapdoor
Ogre stupid!
common
·
81.96%
Trident
Kill the King's Hound
common
·
34.9%
System requirements
Minimum system requirements:
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I haven't had this much fun in a long time. Some of the puzzles are very challenging—they require you to think outside the box—but overall, it's highly recommended for anyone who enjoys puzzles.
The puzzzles are well balanced. For some you need to think out of the box but the longest time I got stuck was for about 10 minutes. The story is good but predictable after the first quarter. Might be a bit short but I bougth it on sale.
I expected Dungeons of Dreadrock to be a nice little puzzle game that I’ll be able to finish quickly, but after reading some reviews I had some concerns about the action elements, the required timing and reflexes, since even the hint system wasn’t going to help with that, and I also wondered whether I could “manage” to mess up the connected puzzles in a manner that’d lead to getting locked out of continuing. So it was a relief when my concerns proved unfounded and I finished the game without ever using the hint system, the video driver’s software claiming that it only took me six hours, though they were split over six days and the number surprised me when I saw it, since it definitely felt like it took longer.
If that sounded bad, let me assure you that I merely meant that I really didn’t think that my playing sessions were so short and that, seeing as there are 100 levels, each of them took me only a few minutes, on average. And that would remain the case even if that timer’s off by as much as a few hours. But what’s more important is that I wanted more when I was done, and not just because I generally want to spend a significant amount of time with a game I choose to play and count requiring anything less than quite a few tens of hours to finish as a negative, but because I actually found it enjoyable and satisfying. Plus that the story, such as it is, couldn’t just end there. And, indeed, it doesn’t, the series apparently being planned as a trilogy and the sequel having already been released… Though it’s unfortunately not here yet.
But that’s another issue, so let me get back to this game and say that the bite-sized puzzles are generally just right, with only a few threatening to be potentially frustrating by requiring more than a matter of seconds to reach a trickier final part, while in the large majority of cases you don’t really “feel” it even if you have to retry several times. And you also don’t really feel the increase in complexity or difficulty, the features being introduced gradually, most of them being intuitive, and adequate explanations usually being provided in the remaining cases. So there shouldn’t be more than a few moments when you’ll find yourself at a loss, and the hint function is available if you do find yourself in such a situation. But, as I already mentioned, I never used it at all, not even to test it, so I can’t say how helpful it actually is. What I can say, however, is that some features are pretty clever, those that involve connected levels probably being the most notable. And, perhaps more importantly, almost all of the solutions make sense and there are moments when the game will make you feel pretty clever for figuring things out on your own. Admittedly, there may also be moments when you’ll feel pretty foolish for failing to do so sooner, and a few solutions that may be rather strange. Since they could be seen as spoilers, I won’t give any examples, not even naming the one puzzle that I ended up solving by accident, just trying everything and then going to check a guide after it finally worked to find out just what I had actually done, but I will add that, at least in my case, the former far outweighed the latter. And I’ll also add here that those dream sequences do their job well enough, both in terms of the story, such as it is, and providing hints.
As for those initial concerns, the fact that I never had good reaction times or coordination and they’re definitely not getting any better as I get older did mean that the action and timing elements were an issue, and there were a couple of moments when I thought that there must be another solution because it didn’t seem possible to actually do what seemed necessary, but I eventually managed to scrape by. So you can make it if your reactions and finger movements are a “normal” kind of poor, but if they’re at a level that may or does indicate health problems, not to mention a disability, the only solution is probably activating the cheat mode and skipping levels. And that mode would also cover the worst case scenario of becoming unable to continue by messing something up in a level that’s connected to another in a manner that couldn’t be fixed normally. But I for one didn’t happen to find myself in any such situation and those levels are typically designed to assume that you’ll initially go for the easy or obvious solution of the first one, end up making the next one impossible as a result, and then go back and fix things. Sometimes that’s possible right away, in a few cases it requires restarting that first level of the pair after returning to it, but you can always restart a level at will and it seems to always be possible to find the solution normally, without even resorting to using the load function that allows you to go back to any previously completed level. And yes, you’ll clearly know when you may need to go back up because those are the only times when you can do so, a message stopping you otherwise.
Still, I’d have felt much more at ease if manual saving would have been allowed, and I’ll always see it as a major negative aspect of a game, any game, when it’s not. Yes, Dungeons of Dreadrock lets you reload previously completed levels if you wish, the cheat mode means that even if the save is lost or corrupted you can get back to where you were, and the short levels mean that you lose very little in case of a crash, power failure or immediate need to quit, but not allowing manual saving, in different slots, still shows a lack of respect for the player’s time and doesn’t allow multiple people to play the game on the same account, and needing to use the cheat mode because the one automatic save somehow got lost, corrupted or overwritten may be disappointing. And there’s also the option to clear that save, and while it requires confirmation, it’s not impossible that someone would accidentally activate it.
On the other hand, I can find few other faults. I mean, yes, the game is too short, it doesn’t have much of a story, and the action and timing elements can prove difficult to manage even if you correctly figure out the solutions to the puzzles, but all of that is pretty much expected and should be known by those who look up a little information about the game before getting it, and the price is right for what it offers, especially considering the typical discount. There is the fact that you can’t customize the controls, but there are very few of them. And I wonder if being unable to skip those logo videos is some sort of Unity thing. And another potential tiny nіggle that has to do with starting the game is that it attempts to connect to, or through, the Galaxy client even if it’s not installed, leading to a pretty significant delay unless you add “, “auth_timeout”: 1” in the GalaxyConfig.json file from the game’s folder.
In short, if you know what you’re signing up for and can deal with the action and timing elements at least to some passable extent, it’s hard to go wrong with Dungeons of Dreadrock, especially when you can pick it up even for well under $1. It won’t be memorable, even less so in terms of the story, but it provides 100 bite-sized levels of generally enjoyable and at times clever puzzles that will make you keep thinking “just one more level” while you play and leave you wanting more at the end. Just keep in mind that there’s a single slot, used for automatic saving after each completed level…
It has 99 levels plus the surface, some of the levels are double-floors,. but that's ok.
The whole thing is on the easy-side, so I recommend it for children, or to very casual players.
For its price it has decent content, and the game does look as on the poster, so this is not one of those C64-looking pixel-garbage.
The system is semi-turnbased realtime, so kinda a rythm-game if you want. Works most of the time, except the "semi-boss" is very annoying as you have no time to think.
On the other hand uses a devent variety of mechanics. The story is ok, but a bit un-epic, so it gets 4 star out of 5.
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