Devious Dungeon

Continuing to work through the backlog of games and this is one I got as a reward for giving blood. A fellow gamer who runs loads of promotions offered it to me in advance of my second giving appointment with a promise of another one if I make it to five donations. At the time of writing, I’m days away from donation number 4 and therefore, 3 months away from another free game.

Devious Dungeon is a roguelite game and it’s probably the best one I’ve played (in terms of reference, the only other one I’ve played is Crypt of the Serpent King which was shitty awful.) You take control of an armour-less knight with a sword and descend through 65 levels of dungeon, collecting coins and experience to buy new equipment and level up respectively.

In terms of combat, at first, I thought the enemies were cheap a lot of the time, especially the floating eyes with their blast attacks, but after the first boss fight (of which there are five throughout the dungeon) it clicked that everything is a case of working out the enemiy’s attack patterns and timing.

The dungeons themselves are procedurally generated so the environments and enemies are random in all levels. In order to progress from one level to the next, you need to find a key and the exit door. Sometimes, this will have you going from one end of a long dungeon to the other and back again, but enemies do not respawn so the going back isn’t really a problem. Sometimes however, the exit door, start location and key will all be within 20 seconds of each other. Surprisingly this happened to me towards the end of the game quite a lot, it was almost forgiving.

The coins you collect can be used to buy different bits of equipment to improve your three key stats; attack power, hit points and critical hit frequency, all of which serves to make your character better and therefore, the game a lot easier.

Looks wise, it’s a 2D SNES graphics style which caused my wife to question why I was playing such an old looking game when I had more modern stuff in the collection. The reason I gave was that I was given it as a gift and, of course, the…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

You can get the majority of the achievements in this game quite quickly as they are tied to buying stuff from the shop, levelling up and checking the map screen. This leads to earning 12 achievements before the first boss fight, assuming you get another two ones for picking up a tome during a level and hitting an arrow in mid-air.

There are then five achievements tied to the individual bosses. By the time I had killed the final boss, I only had two more achievements to get. One of these is a bit of a grind as it involves collecting 100 keys. Completing the game, assuming a few deaths, will still leave you around 30 short of this but it is a simple case of starting the game again with loads of equipment and playing levels until you get the remaining amount you need.

The last achievement I earned was for dying 25 times and this is a testament to how easy the game is. For me, this essentially boiled down to taking my armour off and standing in front of the dragon boss around 15 times. Easy, but when this is required 15 times in a row, it’s still boring.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Devious Dungeon was a quick completion coming in at around 5 hours. It was pretty fun but towards the end, the dungeons and gameplay became quite repetitive despite the procedural nature of the game. It retails for £8.99 so you are looking at over £1 per hour of game play which just isn’t worth it.