Dungeon Of The Endless Preview

With the influx of current ‘early access’ games on Steam it’s very difficult to know how far along some of these games are. There are some extremely good examples of fun games in early stages of development, such as success stories like DayZ and Starbound. Unfortunately, Dungeon of the Endless is in a stage of development where it’s definitely only half done.

The premise is that you’re flying along in your spaceship, transporting prisoners, when you happen upon a planet with hidden security measures and it shoots you down, leading you to crash land. There then appears to be an endless dungeon conveniently parked outside your crashed ship’s door. Despite a thin story, a game can make up for these things on gameplay. Unfortunately, right now DotE is actually very short on gameplay as well.

A tower defence game mixed with a roguelike, at first, doesn’t sound like a good idea but it does lead to some interesting game design. At this moment DotE feels like a door opening simulator. You open doors to find a way to get your crystal, which powers your ship and conveniently all the rooms plus modules you can place, to the exit.

The more doors you open, the more resources and… stuff you get. There are resources that help you build mini towers or ‘modules’ that have various different effects on the inhabitants of the room at the time. Modules come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes from health regen to a plain old offensive turret and plenty more. These modules are core to the gameplay, helping you build a strategy and a path for getting the crystal from the beginning to the exit. The tower defence aspect happens whenever you open a new door. Upon doing so, all unpowered areas have a chance to spawn enemies whose only aim is to go straight to destroy your crystal.  

Right now the rougelike elements aren’t very heavy, I would even go as far as to say it has more roguelite systems. The two characters that spawn randomly at the beginning have gear and you can purchase new items from shopkeepers, who spawn in the same fashion when you open a new door. At the moment though, that’s really all the characters bring to the table beyond upgrading their gear. There are a few resources that may change this later down the road, but they aren’t yet implemented.

My first experience with the game had me very interested to open all the doors, and soon I realised that maybe this wasn’t the best way to go about it. At first the game seems simple enough: move your guys, turn-based style, until you want to open a door. But you can very easily get overwhelmed and this wasn’t apparent until I had died horribly a few times. The speed at which things go from fine to “Oh, I really shouldn’t have opened that door” is pretty brutal for a newcomer.

After a few tries I started to understand that the game expects you to spend your resources wisely and spread them across the possible avenues of attack, placing modules in specific rooms to make sure it was secured. The issue is, with further playthroughs I realised that just defending the room adjacent to your crystal, or the crystal room itself, was a much easier way of protecting everything. Send your fastest character off to open a door, then run back and defend with your other character you left standing in the heavily guarded room, the room with the only entrance to the crystal. 

There have been an influx of 8/16-bit inspired art styles recently, but personally I never get tired of this more modern take on it. I really enjoyed looking at DotE if nothing else. All the animations look fluid and characters stylised, monsters look cartoony yet weighty and everything is clearly defined. This is all without mentioning the already fantastic musical score the game offers. The calm, serene, almost shoegaze soundtrack helps set the tone just right; at times feeling lonely-yet-awe-inspiring.

  

 

 

 

Finally the writing and humour in this game are already prevalent in a way most games fail to achieve. This is no Borderlands, you won’t be talking about unicorns made out of diamonds, instead the game gives humorous descriptions of items, poking fun at RPG and game logic. This made me chuckle a few times and is something I hope stays with the game until full release.

So looking at DotE right now; it needs some work. With a lot still to add in terms of mechanics to help the game move towards a more complete state, there will be a lot more updates I’m sure, but right now you’re looking at a half-finished tower defence game with the wish to be something genre-defining. Who knows, it might just be?