The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but it’s not like there’s a bench every few paces. As a rule once you start something it takes a bit to get to a stopping point, but Desktop Dungeons was built around the idea that you could hop in for a nice ten to fifteen minute break and complete a run, even if the overall game itself was a massive beast with near-endless adventures in its depths. Great as it is, however, the game was looking retro when its alpha released back in 2011, and while that puts it in good company today there’s always room to freshen things up a bit. Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a full remastering of the classic dungeon-crawler into 3D, retaining all the elements of the original while adding a single major new feature in form of the rewind ability, which lets you go back several moves after death to try and do better.
The basic setup of Desktop Dungeons is that you’re a traveler lost in a new land, slowly building up a tiny outpost into a bustling town by sending adventurers into the world to explore and bring back gold. Newly-conquered dungeons open up new buildings, adding new character classes, races, and other features, and they all want more gold for upgrades. The dungeons are small enough to beat fairly quickly, but require a decent amount of tactics and understanding of the gameplay systems to survive. The movements are turn-based and enemies stay where they are, and only counterattack rather than take initiative, but they hit hard and you’ll need the experience to defeat the dungeon’s boss monster. This frequently means maximizing experience gains by attacking creatures a level or two higher than you, using magic to avoid triggering a counterattack and figuring out whether it’s worth soaking up damage to defeat a tough opponent. Each dark area of the dungeon exposed by exploration restores health and mana, and the monsters are marked in the dark so you can make a beeline towards them while saving unexplored sections for post-fight recovery, but even with all this weighted in the player’s favor it’s still very easy to miscalculate. There are a huge number of different types of dungeons, from story-based, randomized, daily runs, and even puzzle dungeons, so getting stuck in one section just means there’s something else to look at elsewhere.
All these modes and features have built up over the years in the original game, which is currently free on Steam right now sogo get itif you’ve never had a chance to play before, and now with Desktop Dungeons: Rewind it looks great as well. The new trailer shows off the paper-thin story and a lot of dungeon adventuring, so give it a watch to see how the new art adds a shine to the old dugeon-crawling warhorse.
