Disclaimer: I received a free copy of Devious Dungeon for the Nintendo Switch from developers Ravenous Games, Woblyware, and published by Ratalaika Games, distributed by IndieGamerChick via her Twitter account for the #IndieXmas2018, designed to get the word out on independent video games. The game was given with no promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be talked about.
Devious Dungeon is a roguelite-ish side scrolling action platformer where you enter procedurally generated dungeons of increasing size culminating in a boss battle. During the game you level up by gaining experience points by killing enemies (and sometimes collecting Tomes of Knowledge), and further equip your character by earning money killing enemies and completing semi-randomly generated quests (Kill 5 Orc Axe Throwers, Destroy 20 Statues, etc). That is basically it, although there is a bit more, but those are the basics.
My first disappointment in the game came when I found out that you could not chose the gender of your character, which is a purely innocuous and cosmetic feature that I would think would not be difficult to implement in a game with this type of pixelated art style. My reasoning behind this that coming off of Jack N' Jill DX which gives you the option to play as either Jack blob or Jill blob (whose only distinguishing feature is a bow on the top of her head) and I thought playing a fantasy action game with a Conan the Barbarian type character would be fun to play as a Red Sonja type character instead. Instead, the game only gives you the option to play as the unnamed male character.
The second disappointment was that Devious Dungeon did not support video capture on the Switch. Again, this is really a minor thing as it means that I am only able to share screenshots of the game, but like the cosmetics above, did not prevent me from playing the game or sharing frequent moments of the character killing any number of enemies. The variety of enemies though is pretty diverse and unlike what you might expect from a smaller indie game, at least in the first half of the game that I have managed to crawl my way through, monster assets are not re-purposed and re-colored to make new monsters. There have been a couple of instances where an existing monster is combined with another to create a new monster, such as when the Orc is riding a Wolf and essentially becomes a Warg Rider of sorts. This I found to be very impressive as it meant that although I had faced both Orcs and Wovles before, going up against these Warg Riders (I've since forgotten what their official name is, sorry), the approach is a bit different.
That being said, the approach to fighting enemies is fairly simplistic. You swing your weapon either hoping or knowing that you can kill them before they run into you (thereby damaging you), or you are able to jump over them or onto a nearby platform so that you can avoid their attack, then hop down and continue yours. There is no ranged attack and you have no magic spells. This is a melee combat only game. So combat can get a little monotonous, but no more so than playing a melee character in Diablo III. The Ancient Beholder here, was an oddly easy boss, even before I upgraded the armor in that I just stood there and took minor damage. The earlier boss, the Orc Chieftain though did take two attempts as I failed to recognize the chieftain's tells on when best to attack it.
The only other criticism I have of Devious Dungeon is that the music, while often appropriate for the boss battles, the King's chamber (when continuing the game after booting the game back up), and when you run across Olaf's Emporium in the depths, the main dungeon theme is fairly mundane and more than anything offers ambient background noise that happens between the slashing, clanging, and smushing death sounds of dying monsters. Maybe hearing it outside of the game might give it a bit more mental clout, but aside from a digital art representation of the soundtrack on the limited edition of the PS4 port of the game, I have not been able to find a way to just listen to the music (next to having the game open, which is not beyond 12 year old me). Although maybe something like Jeff Ball's score to Tiny Barbarian DX: The Serpent Lord would be too much?
And with all of the critiques I have of Devious Dungeon, I have found myself going back to it, sort of as a palette cleanser when more thought heavy games such as TETRA's Escape or The Adventures of Elena Temple are causing my puzzle solving brain to strain itself. With Devious Dungeon being so light on story that I can kind of turn my brain off, is not at all a bad thing as sometimes I just need solid hack-and-slash game where the rules are not complicated that is fun to play and not too frustrating when you die. And you will die, or at least I seem to frequently die after only a handful of dungeons. And for now, Devious Dungeon fits that bill pretty well.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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