Dungeon Of The Endless was a Humble Monthly title from June this year. The little I had seen early on had had me dismiss it as yet-another-pixleart-wannabe game or a flash-port of some title from Kongregate.

Instead, we have a mix of a dungeon crawler and a tower defence game.

I basically spent the next few days playing this as my primary gaming session.

You are in a ship that has been attacked and damaged and escape in an... escape pod. This craft has a small amount of power such that only part of it can be lit up at once, and available resources to your heroes are sparse. The aim is to survive 12 floors using what you can find along the way.

Of course, alien demonic scum is also there to prevent that from happening. They're after your tasty organic body, and a bloody big glowing crystal. This crystal will power the elevator to the next floor but you need to find the elevator first. As as soon as you pick that crystal up you can expect to be attacked constantly and the person carrying it will act like a beacon for everything on the floor. Die carrying it and it is game over.

The game works in a pseudo-real-time mode. Most actions only happen when you move into a new room, and you can't place your heroes at specific points, only point them to a room to move into.

As enemy waves are activated they will head towards the player or resource point in the map, but you can pause the game at any point with a quick tap of the good ol' spacebar.

It is an interesting mechanic that is set back by its own limitations. If you're use to the RPG genres with RTWP then a lot will not apply here. Most of the spacebar use comes from preventing things from happening outside of your viewscreen as you plan out your route or actions, rather than anything combat specific outside of healing.

While some heroes will have a special power than can be activated, there's enough time in real time to activate them.

Enemy mobs are rather easy to kill overall. As long as you are in the same room the heroes will shoot them until they are dead, or die trying. It is possible to run and try to escape them as their movement rate is just slower than yours. However the wrong combination of heroes will make it harder, and it is better to have a decent mix of raw attack power and speed/specialisation.

To help you survive you can use Industry, Food, Science, and Light Dust. These have a set rate that you can increase by building major modules. \\
Each room you open will increase these by their growth value. Occasionally you may also find a room with treasure in the form of bonus points to these sections.

• Industry is required to build minor modules such as turrets and buffs. It is tied with food on how valuable it is. These minor modules can be placed at selectable hardpoints in most rooms, they're useful for placing down to create a line of defence when you are ready to make the elevator, or to protect the path to the crystal.
• Science is required to unlock researchable new major and minor modules. It is a slow growth as I rarely found places I could use it to unlock these new options to make it worth building production. Overall you want to increase attack modules and level up the major modules over other options.
• Food is highly valuable. There's no actual hunger levels, so it acts as a med-pack. Clicking on a Green + symbol near on your hero list will heal a percentage of their total HP. This can be done in real time or while paused.
  
  But is is also used to Level-Up the player for higher base stats to assist in staying alive.

All these three require Industry itself to build, so you may want to claim the first major hard point for Industry production.

• Dust can be used to light up rooms and power the hard points within. You can toggle a room's light on or off from anywhere in the ship as long as you have been in that room at least once and a light path can be traced to the room.
  
  There's no direct way to gain Dust. It will either drop on opening a room, or can be taken from a few monsters in the deeper levels.

As for loot? There's not a lot of it. At least at first

Most of what you find is empty rooms and special equipment for boosts to the resources, though there is occasionally a treasure chest to find. These do become more common later on, though this may just be a side effect of having extra rooms to explore.

As each hero has a different build and preferred weapon, selecting two different ones is recommended, unless you try the RNG to generate a recruit on one of the levels. In the inventory mode you can apply them to a hero, but only if it is their preferred type. Come of people. You are doomed. About to be shredded by some kind of monstrosity, and you will not use a different gun or melee weapon?

This is not an aRPG, so don't expect stuff to drop like crazy. It does assist in making it a real event when you find something you can use, even if it is a slightly better version of what you have.

However they also rarely feel like any real gain until much later on in the game. It might be an extra stat boost, or healing rate increase, possibly a new combat option, tiny increases that start adding up when you can kit your heroes out.

It is a rather slick and well produced game that is an odd mix of Tower Defence and a Dungeon Crawler but hard to recommend to either crowd. Despite my gripes, I kept returning to it. Fun in small doses but hard to play for long periods as a full run in the standard ship can take around an hour to complete.

I did enjoy it though and have been playing a lot of it the last few days. (edit: managed to clear a floor shortly before tidying this post up: link).

My recommendation would be to check out a few gameplay videos or Let's Plays of it before hitting the purchase button. If you like the genres it plays off of you're more likely to enjoy it, but I expect many players would be frustrated by the difficulty level. You have 'Easy' and 'Too Easy'. And both are delightfully hard.

Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly (June 2016).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 25 December 2016 2 - 28 December 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.1
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT or equivalent
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 700 MB available space
Sound Card: DirectX 9 Compatible Audio
Additional Notes: Minimum Resolution: 1280 x 720