REVIEW: Dungeon of the Endless

The idea of hurtling into space, crash landing on an alien planet and having to fend for yourself is one that has gained a lot of popularity in recent years with the formula remaining somewhat constant in various mediums. It’s a concept that leaves my brain a bit more pickled than your average pub pickled onion.

The main gist of most of these stories, humans searching for a new world, crash landing or being left behind out of sheer bad luck, having to fight never-before-seen creatures, and warding off starvation by any means possible has become pretty standard.

Dungeon of the Endless follows such a theme, recycling the idea into something a little different.

My squad of three is over-run. I’ve planned everything wrong, focussed more on gathering resources to use on the following floors than actually defending anything. Enemies are pouring through the doors, I’m trying to get my crystal to the escape hatch and the team are falling like flies. Game Over.

This rogue-like, tower defence game isn’t like many I’ve played.
Procedurally generated floors mean no level is ever laid out the same, and perma-death looming on every horizon means no play through should ever play out the same way.

After you’ve hurtled through space time and wiped your starship out on the surface of new terrain, you will pick two survivors to get to the escape pod with the power crystal. Each character has different statistics, and abilities.
There are a certain number of rooms per floor, and once you have discovered the escape route, you’ll descend to the next floor.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong.

Apart from the room you start off in, you have a small number of resources and you need to power the crystal. Why? Monsters, obviously.
Of course you’re not going to be lucky enough to crash land on a planet of lusty wenches and muscled barbarians who want to do everything in their power to help you. This isn’t Disney!
If you don’t power the crystal, you can’t light the rooms through the floor as you go. This is a problem, as monsters will spawn in rooms that aren’t lit, and then they’ll come and destroy your crystal, leaving you trapped on the planet forever to become monster guano.

All is not lost though, I admit, I’m making the game sound pretty bleak.

As you control characters to open new rooms, you can collect Dust which powers your light source (so less monsters randomly spawn) and your crystal so you can utilise rooms. Dust isn’t guaranteed every time, and it’s a finite substance and can be lost, making resource management quite important.
You can have multiple rooms lit at a time, but you might not always be able to have them all on, so strategic planning is a must.
Sometimes you’ll come across self-powered rooms which sadly aren’t rooms with a large hamster wheel in the middle being turned by a reptilian chocobo. You can build and use the Nodes in these rooms essentially without needing Dust to power it. The Nodes will only activate while the room has power, so think wisely about how you build up your defence and attack.

My go-to game plan was to open the doors with my team altogether, until I found the exit. Keeping the team together made it easier for me to deal with any enemies that might spawn in the new room. Then once I’d explored the whole floor, I’d make a lit path to the escape hatch and line my way with gun turrets. Getting my fastest character to pick up the crystal (as picking it up will affect your move speed for that character for the time they’re holding it), I’d then send everyone to the escape room, directing my other squad members (if any) back to help kill any monsters who might be coming for the crystal bearer. Rinse and repeat. This plan was teased and perfected over many runs with different characters, The Dungeon of the Endless is a cruel mistress. I like that in a game. I enjoy games that let the player find their own style, and don’t tell you the easiest or best ways to do things. They let you fall down and learn, and you get better.

Then you have the resource aspect, collecting Science, Industry and Food from each room. The amount gained can be increased by building the respective nodes in lit rooms.
Science determines the things you can research. Industry is your building material resource. Food is pretty self explanatory.
Each one of these resources can be used as currency by a trader, should you be lucky enough to find one, but there’s no set pattern which resource he could ask for.
You can also recruit new members to your crew as you go through the dungeons, each with their own stats and special abilities. Who would you want to die on an alien planet with? Each character can be controlled independently, or all at once, which is so helpful when you’ve got waves of monsters and your characters are spread out all over the map and you need them all to be in the same place.

Once you’ve discovered the exit, you can retrieve the crystal and the team will then have to fight through waves of enemies to get to the next floor. If your characters die, they die. They don’t respawn on the next floor. So if Terry the Terra-former (names have been changed to protect their identity) dies carrying the crystal to the exit, Emma the Engineer is going to have to go back, pick it up and carry on. Emma will be alone on the next floor, unless she finds a new companion.

There is a certain degree of autonomy in Dungeon of the Endless. Turrets and characters will automatically attack any enemies in the same room as them, leaving you to just strategically place them along the monster’s war path. For this reason, for me, I don’t feel that compulsion to keep playing for hours and hours.

It’s nice to dip in and out of, but I don’t get the same level of satisfaction I’ve experienced in other rogue-like games.
I really enjoyed the pixel-art style, but felt that perhaps some characters designs were a little too simple. Often I found myself wondering what this humanoid shape of pixels was supposed to be.
The perspective angle in some rooms also changes and I’m unsure whether this is purposeful or a design-flaw, which in turn leaves me feeling a little bit jaded about the whole thing. It’s difficult to tell if you’re looking into a room from the top down, or at the opposite wall which breaks immersion.

Game-modes can be unlocked to give the game more of a ‘survival’ feel, where characters can be stronger but no longer able to heal after monster attacks, making you more reliant on food and healing turrets.

Summary

The game is HARD. For a team of five people though, I am really impressed. They’ve pulled together a pretty good game, with a unique style which is challenging and fun. It does have small flaws but I also feel that these are personal gripes to me, and other people will have a more enjoyable experience. What can I say, I’m just your average run-of-the-mill player, and strategic games and I don’t often bond well.

How does the game end? You could pull the old “all characters are dead” chestnut, that will certainly get you a game over. Monsters could destroy your crystal, but you don’t want that. Or you could actually escape. Where’s Ellen Ripley when you need her?