I enjoyed this game a lot. Engaging story, interesting characters, some dark humor, some good atmosphere, good voice acting and sound design. I guess I forgot the whole description because I came here to review it and was like "oh it won an award for the story ok" There was not very much combat or actual "gameplay" in the style of like, timing of movements and jumping or whatever. It's mostly a series of objectives that require a bit of creative problem solving in order to achieve them. The controls were kind of clunky. That's why 4 stars. It didn't affect the enjoyability all that much. The game is forgiving enough that you're not dependent on making a complex series of movements or attack/defense patterns, it's all about figuring out what you need to do next, and the eventual solutions fit well within the logic of the game. I used a walkthrough for two of the objectives, I think. Both were cases of missing an object interaction icon and then running around a bit until I looked in the walkthrough. I played this over two or three evening sessions.
It started out rough. It's an older game, so the pixelation was tough to the point of not even being able to make sense of it at first. I trusted some reviews I'd read so I pushed on. Eventually I started to see the meaning in the graphics, started to see the patterns of the game, and got into it. A cool strategy building game about building a dungeon just right so your auto played minions do their thing the way you hope they will. Place your rooms correctly, attract the powerful monsters, drop them near enemies and hope they fight and then hope they win. Just as I'm getting going, level 10 comes along and the enemy is just brutal. I'll still be mining enough gold to build my basic rooms and the enemy will march across the map with an army twice the size and 3 times the experience of mine. The difficulty curve from the last level to this one is like, absurd. I had started playing the previous levels maybe two or three times to get them right, but this level I've played maybe 20 times and I am no closer to winning it. Either poor game design or from some help pages I've seen, some kind of update to the game AI made this level just stupid. Either way, it's kind of sad that I'm about to give up on this game after a couple of days because it's NOT FUN ANYMORE.
though I'm not sure it works on windows 11 since I have not been able to get it to work anymore
Played a while but then it keeps crashing at the Den. Can't figure how to make it work.
Wouldn't run on my windows 11.
