TLDR: Charming, easy to play, and great for short breaks. Play again? Likely.

Each week we roll a random game that the Epic game store had for free at some point, and play it for 2 hours on stream to see how it fares. This week:

Guild of Dungeoneering

Perhaps the key feature of this game is its charm. Everything we do is chronicled in song. Even the main menu is an ode to the dungeoneer! And the visual style very heavily leans into the pencil-and-paper adventure to the extent that all of the assets look hand-drawn on graph paper. Combined, the effect is of a game that takes itself not very seriously at all, hammered home by the self-aware mickey-taking of the genre.

A simple roguelite game with a simple gameplay loop: send an adventurer into a dungeon and try to survive in there. Return with coins to buy new areas for your guild and new trinkets for your expeditions. Thus do you unlock new characters to send in, and new boosts to starting out.

Had I not seen Aavak play the new release version of this game, however, I would not have understood certain mechanics. The tutorial is very simple and leaves you to fathom for yourself the rules of gameplay, which appear to be thus:

• The dungeoneer will head towards unexplored rooms
• Interesting things are more interesting than empty rooms
• Closer rooms are also more interesting
• You level up for beating an enemy of your level or higher
• You heal completely (rather; your health resets) after every fight

Thus do you guide your dungeoneer through rooms—rooms that you place—to collect treasure—that you place—and fight enemies—that you place.

The drive to return to dungeons is simple: there’s stuff to do there! Each one has a few quests to achieve, the last of which is a boss fight. By clearing them, you open up dungeons further afield.

Not cleared up in the two hours of gameplay is the related question: what drives us to pick a particular class for our adventurer? It seemed to me that the tanky classes were vastly better equipped to beat the dungeons than the squishy classes. We lost our Apprentice and Cat Burglar every time we went out, but I don’t think we ever let our Chump die at all. (The Chump is the well-named starting class, a peasant whose loss would be unremarkable to anyone and whose naïvety is wholly exploitable.)

Honestly, this became frustrating. I started to feel like I was cheesing the game by sending out a new class, failing miserably, and then sending out the easymode class instead. You can’t send out the same class again if they die; you have to wait one round for the recruitment posters to bring another one back in. So we could either throw Cat Burglar, Apprentice, Cat Burglar, Apprentice at the problem ad infinitum—or we could just pick the Chump or the Bruiser to deal with the quest and see more content.

We died often enough that the game ran out of failure songs!

I must assume, then, that further down the line we will find dungeons with a different balance of enemy, and that most early dungeons favour the early classes, but later dungeons may favour the classes that so far have been doomed to abject failure.

But perhaps it is due to the other minor frustration with the game: RNG. Your job as a player is to place rooms, enemies, and treasures onto the graph paper, and your adventurer will just follow the above rules to decide where to go. Trouble is, I found myself commonly wondering how to do that with the cards in my hand, because I would be dealt rooms that did not attach to the map at all, or that sent my adventurer on a wild goose chase, just so that I could hope that the next deal would actually contain something of practical use. Treasure notwithstanding; it would be quite pleasant to put valuable items in a room, but where playable rooms were thin on the ground, collectibles were almost unrepresented entirely.

All this said, what difference does it make? Each adventure into a dungeon is, what, five minutes? Perhaps you die to enemies your character is not suited to fighting; perhaps you spend all your time following corridors just so you can get to the room you were supposed to. In five minutes you’ll have another go anyway!

It’s because of the simplicity of the loop and the fact you’ll be serenaded whether you succeed or fail that the game is so replayable. The exact same mechanics with a more sober, stricter, or grittier style would simply fall flat. Instead it’s easy to dip into and out of, and of course if you’re not streaming it you might not feel so obliged to come out of your comfort zone with weaker characters, and just plough through the content however you see fit.