Foremost, this is a good, fun game that has already taken up hours of my life as I go from run to run. It's also got got a couple issues too. Conceptually, it's one of those games where you don't control your character exactly, but control the circumstances around them and watch them go - a la Gratuitous Space Battles, something I've always enjoyed. In this game, what the player does is use cards to create the hero's environment, which changes what lies in their way as they go around a loop, getting persistent buffs from buildings. This hits two poles: roguelike/rpg, and god/builder, and is tightly made at its core. Each card you can add to the world ups challenge, adding perks but also making things harder - some even combining into new ideas. As a fan of both, it works well. There is a downside, though, as after a couple hours and one or two camp upgrades in, the player may notice that the ability to alter the world in a progressive way abruptly slows to a crawl. The game very quickly stoppers progress and gets grind: few of the new buildings for a while (or the cards that come with them) significantly affect the game world. Card combinations dry up quickly. Base resources trickle in, and some require the player to keep cards that don't mesh with newer ones to get. Enemies don't typically drop resources (upping other problems), and - most problematic of all - making stronger enemies tends to just give you more rolls on the RNG rather than affecting what you get, so there often isn't a reward for making things more challenging. Thus, you can make the game harder, but can't much affect how you progress or positively affect future runs. There are other classes, but after putting hours in each they feel more like hardmode trials than different ways to play. All in all it's still great, don't get me wrong, but it'll be a while before it builds on what it promises - in a game where building new things is the point - and this makes it less great than it could be.
The first thing to note about Desktop Dungeons is that it is not a dungeon crawler. It's a puzzle game with a dungeon flavor, but it's a very strict game of choices and move order. If you've ever played one of those "mate in X moves" chess puzzles, it's actually similar to to something like that. The basic playthrough of the game is like : you have a hero of limited health, a limited amount of health/mana restoration and a limited amount of enemies. Defeating enemies gains exp and levels, which will strengthen the hero and restore health/mana, but causes the hero to take damage. Finding ways to defeating enemies more powerful than oneself nets more exp, while defeating less powerful enemies isn't as worthwhile. There are spells with specific - some allow greater exp gain, some let the player harm enemies without taking damage. The point of the game is to defeat all enemies in an approximately correct order, without taking enough damage to die, such that the hero gains enough levels and power to defeat the dungeon's boss. The different classes and races largely add more avenues to the game's puzzles, presenting new strengths and weaknesses and styles of play, and the kingdom map is mostly just a hub for unlocking them. Regular games often boil down the same way regardless of class, but the puzzles unique to each are well done enough. It's one of those games where one can lose long before they realize they can't possibly win, so you'll die a lot. In the main quests, even so much as exploring too much or going in the wrong direction (and thus eating up valuable regeneration) can cause a failure down the line - the straightforward puzzle segments are definitely where the game shines. It's a game for someone interested in keen, merciless puzzle challenges - but at the same time it is a very casual experience, and thus it does its replay value very well. All in all, not bad. I'd recommend it, but mostly to those who already have an idea what they're getting into.
