Digging through the trenches and diving through dungeons has never been easier or more accessible! A new and upcoming tactics-based, rogue-lite dungeon crawler, jam-packed with quick-to-complete randomly generated dungeons will be sure to fill any gap between the big releases this year.

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a remaster of the critically acclaimed title released way back in 2013. For those who already owned the original, you can claim the remaster for FREE. Developed by QCF and published by Prismatika in collaboration with Indienova, it is set to be released to PC on April 18, 2023.

In Desktop Dungeons: Rewind, you are trying to build a new kingdom. How does one build a kingdom from scratch? WITH GOLD! How does an adventurer obtain gold in a medieval fantasy world? Commit heinous hate crimes against thriving dungeon species, steal their gold and treasures, and ultimately, destroy their leader and take them as a trophy to sell.

The more you play, the more you unlock. By defeating dungeon bosses and taking them as trophies, you, in turn, sell them to upgrade your settlement. By upgrading your humble abode, like a domino effect, new adventurers become available to send to their demise.

With 7 different ‘kin’, which are essentially races, and 16 total classes, the options you can take into a dungeon feel somewhat endless. Each kin has different passive abilities, like doing extra damage for every 100 conversion points, or extra health per level. On top of that, obviously, each class is different and has different attributes and passive abilities. Being able to mix and match to tailor-make your own overpowered concoction of an adventurer is freeing in a world of games that have limits. Being able to run around as an angry little dwarven berserker or elvish blood mage really gave a sense of the options in the game.

The gameplay is super simple. Perhaps a little too simple. You enter a single-leveled dungeon, search around one tile at a time and attack enemies that are hesitant to attack you first. All enemies in a dungeon have different levels and types. Some enemies are mages, some are goblins, others are zombies, and the rest range from abhorrent meat men to vicious vampires. The main threat within the dungeon is the boss, the only reason you ventured in. While moving around the dungeon you can pick up gold, health and mana potions, special items to use in battle, and magical runes to cast special abilities on your passively unaware enemies.

If you have multiple magic runes, you can convert them for conversion points to gain additional adventurer perks within the dungeon. The main issue I had was that the UI for all this seemed very out of place, and with no real prompt when standing on items, I regularly forgot to pick them up or convert them, forcing me to backtrack constantly. It’s not that a pop-up didn’t appear, more that it was out of place and blended into the game itself.

The lack of controls in the game makes it easy to pick up and learn. Literally, the only input you need is the LMB. Everything is controlled by the mouse. I found it a bit of an issue at times and would have preferred to have the default map movement set to WASD. The graphics and audio have had a full overhaul. Going from the flat and dreary 2D graphics to these bright 3D textures was a great move.

Dungeons felt dark and dismal with dangers lurking around every corner. As for the audio, the background music comprises a looping medieval-themed adventure tune when messing around in your kingdom, but it snaps straight to a high-action battle track filled with violins and war drums as soon as you set foot into a dungeon. The audio definitely made you feel as if you were venturing into the unknown.

Overall, Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is an in-between game. While testing, I never had an overwhelming urge to rush home and play. The super basic mechanics made the game lack any feeling of a challenge and if I died in a dungeon it didn’t matter – there was no sense of loss.

In saying that, with the number of classes and items to use, it does give a sense of replayability, and if you really get in the groove, you can spend a good couple of hours at a time playing without feeling bored. The lack of complication or challenge made the game very easy to forget.

Written by: Bigfoot