This game is a clear case of 'exactly what the title says'. The word "Dungeon" refers to the one single cave you venture into dozens of times in the course of a playthrough; its mysterious and ever-changing interior laying the narrative foundation for 28 floors of procgen-roguelite goodness. The word "Dreams" refers to the town-building side of the game; whether drawn by adventure, money, or plain excitement, individuals have congregated around the mysterious dungeon and the aggregation of their dreams has formed the town of Ecallia - a community which you eventually become an inextricable part of.

And the fact that the first letter of both words stands out by being bright yellow shows that this is a harem game where nearly every character... has Double Ds. (groan!)

Me trying to be funny aside, I think that's a pretty accurate way of summing up the premise of Dungeon Dreams. This roguelite-townbuilding-dating sim is clearly inspired by Azure Dreams but is a lot more complex: four-member parties, ATB combat, job systems and skill trees, cooking/crafting, and a metric ton of optional sidequests mean a good amount of content! It also means that - since this whole thing is largely the work of one guy spending thousands of hours on RPGMaker - the whole game's back groans and creaks under the weight of its buxom ambition. Not every facet of the game works well with the others, and nearly every one of them can be summed up as "nice, but..."

Take Exhibit A: the town-building and romance sections. I feel this is the stronger half of the game: having the entire story take place in one town means that there is ample time to get to know Ecallia's residents on a deeper level than your average NPCs. As you - an outsider at the start - immerse yourself in the community and start forging friendships and gaining respect, you learn that everyone has a story and hidden depths... yes, even the pompous womanizing bully the game seems to be going out of its way to make you hate! The game introduces new friends to you at a steady clip, which in turn unlocks new areas of the town, new quests, and new services (like an alchemist who synthesizes monster drops into more useful items), so you always feel like you have something new to discover when you walk around the town. Romance is not bad as well; while the dating conversation topics are not varied enough and tend to repeat, I like that it's not a 'harem' game in the literal sense of the word. Girls will get pissed off at you if you start dating someone else and you can't end up together with everyone like in Azure Dreams, so there is a more meaningful choice here in who you choose to end up dating (and possibly marrying).

All of the above, however, comes with the pretty big caveat that the writing is kinda clumsy. English might not be the developer's first language - and if so then he did an admirable job anyway! - but some of the dialogue does come across as cringe, and some of the puzzle solutions feel unintuitive thanks to the language barrier. The main plot and backstory - which consists of threads from different subquests and needs to be pieced together by the player - is needlessly muddled thanks to the writing.

I've avoided talking about it for long enough, because the bread-and-butter of the game (the procgen dungeon) is actually the weaker half! The combat is more than passable and the job/skill system is nice, but the actual dungeon crawling itself suffers from a structural flaw. One thing I see in the best roguelikes/roguelites is a sense of randomness that transcends whatever meta-progression you're making - some runs you might find a really overpowered piece of loot that carries you until you get complacent and lose, other runs your equipment and feats don't synergize in any way and you just keep treading water hoping that the next room yields a tool that brings it all together, and other runs you get a perfect storm of all the right tools that helps you go much further than you have any right to at your level.

Dungeon Dreams' flaw is that the balance is skewed too far in favor of meta-progression that it no longer feels like a roguelite. When you exit the dungeon, you keep all your skills, all your job points, and all your levels, and if you use a wind crystal (which is so plentiful that I ended the game with 60 of them in my inventory) you get to keep all your loot too! This means that there is very little variance between runs, treasures are greeted not with a "yes!!" but with a "ah, I already have twenty of this sword", and the gameplay loop is less "roguelite" and more "long tedious grindy JRPG with one long-ass dungeon". There's generally enough new content spread across the dungeon and the town that the game is still fun to play - but in the lategame the sidequests slow to a trickle and you really start to feel it become a chore. In my case, roughly a third of my total playtime was spent trying to romance and marry Fiona to unlock a unique DPS-heavy class - the trigger to get her father's blessing was entirely random, and by that point of the game there were very few new quests and I spent the longest 20 hours of my life doing largely uneventful runs into the dungeon waiting for the random event to trigger.

My thoughts on this game definitely seem to skew slightly negative, but this is obviously a passion project that I can't bring myself to be too hard on. There's a sequel in early access, and I'll be watching it eagerly - a more focused vision (and perhaps outsourcing some of the writing) would be very much welcome!