Way back in the long, long ago, in the year Twenty Sixteen I played an enjoyable little minesweeper with monsters title called Runestone Keeper. Dungeon Journey takes that core concept of clicking on tiles and giving you monsters and loot without much else. The result is... Surprisingly something that I put nearly 6 hours into.

Choose your class! Of a limited selection that slowly (ever so slowly) unlocks as you play. Honestly, it does not matter that much but if you want to power through the early levels quickly, go with the knight.

A little fat dragon thing friend will give you a tutorial than blissfully shut up and not talk to you again. I don't use a points system here, but if I did I'd give it a point just for making a potential chatty companion silent once the basics are out.

What do you do here? You click on a tile! Perhaps there will be some gold! Perhaps there will be a barrel with some gold! Perhaps there will be a coffin with some gold! Perhaps there will be a monster! Most likely it will be empty.

Anyway, monsters need to be brutally killed just for existing and chilling in a cave. How dare they have a different culture and lifetyle from humans. The bastards! Slay them! Upgrade your character to slay them harder!

The one trick this game has, and one that shows a likely mobile app background (more than the narrow playfield) is the tapping of your character or spacebar to defend. Yeah, monsters are not going to just sit there while you wail on them. They will strike back. And then wait until you attack again. If you can time the tap right, the monster icon will show a orange rotting effect and you can strike again for massive damage, despite the fact they are not a giant enemy crab.

Eventually you become powerful enough that this riposte attack kills them in a single hit.

Each monster does have different timing though. Sometimes their attack lines hit you, and a delayed melee attack hits. If I counted in gold the amount of times I mistimed attacks from those hunky minotaurs I could easily buy myself a weeks worth of chicken schnitzels.

The loot system overall feels rather week. Single point upgrades until late in the game when double or triple point upgrades start to drop. Sure, you can use the store if you want and pay massive amounts of gold, though I felt it best just to slash the way through everything.

Thankfully you can slow in gems. And upgrade gems to be better gems. And use a rare drop to make those rare gems even rarer gems... Or....

Or wait until very late in the game and upgrade them at a blacksmith. Honestly, I felt that the smithy should of unlocked earlier.

Special loot also drops on each dungeon run. Small bonuses to gold and magic finds. Occasionally something neat will drop, like the magnifying glass that really calls in the minesweerper feeling by telling you the number of active monsters surrounding each tile you open. Kinda neat, I wish that mechanic was built upon more.

Alas special loot vanishes on death or when you escape the dungeon. I guess it is all mimic vampires or something that die in sunlight. Allowing the player to buy mechanic types before each run in addition to stumbling upon them was something I really wanted but was not present.

Dungeon Journey is a very basic Rougelite-Minesweeper type game. Good enough to pass the time for a bit if you have an itch for this genre of games and find Runestone Keeper is too overwhealming.

Game Acquisition: Bundle Stars (Wrath 1)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 7 August 2021
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10
Processor: 1 ghz
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Graphics: Integrated or higher
Storage: 240 MB available space
Sound Card: Integrated or higher