Pixel Boy and the Ever Expanding Dungeon Review

Pixel Boy and the Ever Expanding Dungeon fits into many genres including Action, Adventure, RPG, Dungeon Crawling and Top-down Shooter. That is a lot of genres to fit into and a lot of games to compare to, so instead of giving comparisons to every genre I’m going to focus on which elements fit into each genre and how well they mesh together. Let’s begin.

The main menu of the game features your typical, start a new game, continue, options, etc. but it also has a currently locked feature called “The Daily Dungeon” with no information other than coming soon. I’ll probably be revisiting the game to see what’s been added. Once you start a new game you get thrown straight into the fun where you are greeted by a rather quirky and almost stereotypical nerd-like voice who opens the game by making a joke, setting the tone of this game and its self-aware humour. You begin with the really simple tutorial that explains the concepts in the game including the crafting system and leveling system. Once you’ve beat said tutorial you should hit level two allowing you to upgrade your stats. These stats are Health, Damage, Range, Speed and Rate of Fire. You get four points per level and, of course, since it is an RPG, you can pick how your gameplay is affected by these stats. Once you’ve allocated your skill points you’ll find yourself in a town that merely serves as a hub to stock up on your power-ups and armor before you go on ahead to the dungeons.

The way this game deals with power-ups is pretty interesting. You can carry up to three power-ups at a single time and instead of being time based, they’re ammo based, so you can use that power-up until you run out of ammo for it. There are several power-ups in the game, they’re all pretty standard stuff like your larger shots and triple shots, but the thing that makes the power-ups interesting is the game’s crafting system. This allows you to combine power-ups together, giving you more bang for your buck, and is really cool to mix several different power-ups together giving you really interesting combos for you to experiment with. There are also one time use power-ups which are really strong, things such as time stop, invulnerability and a complete room clear. Unfortunately these cannot be used in crafting at all, which was upsetting, but I guess they had to balance out the strength of these things. I mean otherwise the game wouldn’t be fun.

I also previously mentioned there is armor, which works off your stats. In order to craft armor you’ll need five armor orbs which can be found throughout the dungeons. The armor crafting is done in a strange way, but I like it. Each orb type buffs a stat to their corresponding colour. Blue buffs damage so if you use five blue orbs you’ll have bonus damage stats, but it doesn’t end there. Say you wanted to buff every stat by one, you can do that, just use an orb of every colour. Lastly the armor goes up in five tiers, each one giving more stats but being more expensive to craft, which forces you to grind out a dungeon for all it’s worth. It’s a really cool way to work the RPG element along with the stats themselves.

The dungeons in Pixel Boy and the Ever Expanding Dungeon are procedurally generated, meaning every single dungeon you enter will be different, even the same one. This gives the game great replayability and it really makes each player’s adventure unique. As well as having procedurally generated dungeons the enemies in each dungeon are randomly decided before the level. In the loading screen before the dungeon the ‘Mob Maker 9000’ will appear which randomly selects the four types of enemies that will appear in that dungeon you are entering.

The enemy types aren’t very vast though. You have three small insect-like enemies who are easy to kill with low damage potential and high fire rate. Then there are a few melee-types; There’s a worm with claws, a frog and penguin whose charge moves deal a fair bit of damage. There’s a scorpion who is the bloody tank as well as dealing strong damage if he hits you with his windup attack. Then there’s two enemies that basically crawl on the floor being useless - one fires in random directions and the other makes smaller versions of himself once killed. Finally, there’s one more enemy who is basically the River Zora from The Legend of Zelda in every way - except for the fact you can actually hit this guy. 

A River Zora from The Legend of Zelda

There’s at least enough for you to have a different experience for each dungeon on your first playthrough.

In order to complete a dungeon you must find an RGB key, a key made up of Red, Green and Blue pieces (hence the name). Each dungeon has a red, green and blue piece scattered somewhere in it and you have to find all three to progress to the next floor. They also contain four floors and a fifth and final floor containing a boss fight. The boss fights are okay, it’s nothing that hasn’t been seen before, not to say they’re bad, they’re just cliché. Boss fights with simple mechanics such as hit these three switches at the right time to weaken the boss then hit it when it’s down sort of stuff.

The game ranges in difficulty as the mobs are a key factor in how difficult each floor will be. I found the game had difficult points but not impossible. The more you die later on the harder the game becomes though as you’re stripped of all your gear and left with just the coins and armor orbs you’ve found. My experience went rather well as I found myself a really strong power-up combo so I managed to keep my deaths to a minimum and beat the game in three and half hours.

Overall Pixel Boy and the Ever Expanding Dungeon is short but it has great replayability and it’s really fun, a nice game to just pick-up and play for a short time, but I would hardly call it an RPG , so don’t pick this up expecting a vast open world to explore. It does, however, attain to the dungeon crawler genre, which is by far the best fit for a game with the name dungeon in it. I personally found the game’s humor pretty funny and it got a chuckle out of me with the narrator’s dry style of humour. On a final note I think Pixel Boy and the Ever Expanding Dungeon is an enjoyable game and though I could sit here and say things like “It’d be better if it was co-op”, It’s honestly still fun. It seems like the game is still being updated with new features so overall I really cannot complain, especially since I rather enjoyed this title.