Dungeon Girl (PC) review "Dungeon Mistress"

Match-block puzzle/dungeon crawl hybrid games are a weird niche genre that’s really snuck up on me. Did everyone else know this had steadily become a thing? It’s weird; there’s nothing more appealing to the filthy casuals out there than block matching puzzles yet, rather than try to petition dead-eyed Facebook users and your mum, Inu to Neko have instead taken this once simple creature and grafted all the extra limbs they can find on to it.

So, like a million games before it, there’s this grid, right? It’s full of different icons and should you select an interlocking pattern of the same icon numbering three or more, then all those blocks are eliminated with a satisfying pop. Then, all the other icons that were above it fall into the gaps now made vacant, allowing for new combinations, and you do it all over again and again and again. We’ve all had a Columns or a Bust-a-Move or (if you’re Marc Golding) a Hunie Pop in our lives, and we all know the formula. Except, you’re not fighting for points or glory or to lever off the occasional bra in this instance; you’re using it to delve through a monster-infested labyrinth.

Even here, there’s a lot more complexity than you would initially expect. Sure, just dungeon delving is a breeze on the surface. You collect search tiles to try and find access the next floor down; you can collect work tiles to mine for minerals as you explore, offering a stream of capital. There’s attack tiles you’ll need to abuse should you stumble across an innocent monster minding its own business in what’s probably been his family home for generations, and there’s heart tiles you can collect to perk up flagging HP should the inconsiderable swine dare to fight back. The more tiles you banish at a time, the more potent your selected action. Pretty straight forward so far, right?



Sometimes, special tiles arrive that affect you in different ways. For example, there are the mind tiles which add to your mind count. What’s a mind count? I’m not quite sure; the game never really explains it, but it’s constantly decreasing the further you delve and, should it reach zero, then it’s the premature end of your crawl. I guess it’s kind of like a sanity meter? So, there’s that to keep an eye on. Oh, and you can often find treasure chests. But you can’t actually open them unless you have a spare key. You obtain keys by completing little quest lines that can refresh without warning, so you need to keep an eye on that, too. They’re usually pretty straight forward; asking you to do stuff like eliminate 30 search tiles, or knock off a number of six or above combos. They’re important because chests contain items.

Okay. So, items. You can carry up to six of them into each crawl. They’re infinite, so they never expire if you abuse them, but their use is regulated by item points that slowly refill turn by turn. As well as acting exactly like equipment and offering all the stat boosts you can expect, they have an active use skill, such as replenish health/mind, or deal direct damage, or swap tile properties, or hard-refresh quest lines. There are a lot of different uses, and it’s on you to come up with a combination that suits your game style best. But you don’t have to just rely on scavenging to bolster your stocks; there’s a ridiculously deep crafting system to muddle through and figure out. Because the game doesn’t do things like explain their functions. What it does do is set a weight limit so you can’t over-buff yourself on herculean items and stroll through the dungeon unchallenged. This weight limit can be increased in many different ways; you can buy permanent stat buffs from in-dungeon shops, for example. Or you can unlock special item limit perks from your party’s tech grid.

Did I mention you have a backup party? Well, you do. You start out with three well-wishers in your entourage, your adorable little sister, a cave obsessed weirdo and some guy. Each delve allows you to bring along up to three followers who are all assigned friendship points dependent on the strength of your dungeon crawling. You can spend these points on, goodness, so many things. HP boosts, item limit buffs and ore price appreciations. You can unlock special skills for your friends, such as doubling friendship points by killing enemies without taking damage, or unlock new classes for your main character that shake up your stats, like making you a mining god who takes all the ore, but has a paper-thin defence. Or you can spend your points haul on unlocking your party’s friends and thus add to your backup options. Or you can unlock their story sections, where Dungeon Girl finally has a shot at advancing a plot.



Such as it is, anyway. I think the thrust of it is that adorable girls go into a mine, and the food they take is awful and they hate it, so other people try to bake them better things but it’s often more awful and everyone laughs. Ha ha ha! Then, because delves only take a few minutes – because you can often find an exit every five levels or so -- you ignore all that nonsense and decide to kill a little bit of time on a quick run. You’re only a few friendship points away from being able to have a second quest line option, after all, and more keys sounds like a good idea. Then you see you’re only a few floors away from a boss fight, and you wonder if you’re at stage in your development where you can take it out. Perhaps you’re not; what’s the harm in grinding up a bit so you have more of a chance next time? Perhaps you are; there are suddenly new dungeon floors to have a little peek at, and what’s another five levels? Then it’s 2am, and bloody Dungeon Girl has somehow devoured your entire sodding evening again.

But maybe you can combine some of those shiny new items into a fancy new hat you can use to break down enemy armour levels. Hmmm...

Staff review by Gary Hartley (August 22, 2018) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.