To the Dungeon!
releases on TBD
Explore the depths of this massive dungeon with your adorable companion Una in this exciting deck-building adventure!
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Disclaimer: at the time of writing this review (which I can't believe I'm writing), this safe-for-work version of the game I have played hasn't been released yet. However, looking at its Steam page, I don't anticipate any major changes to what I'm about to praise the game for, so I might as well write the review now while my thoughts on the game are still fresh.
Somehow, we live in the timeline where an h-game is now my third favourite roguelite deckbuilder, right after Slay the Spire and Monster Train. It's also the first game that made me realise I actually quite enjoy premeditated deckbuilding where I sit and think about card costs, synergies between cards, the balance between defence and offence and all that good stuff, I just hate most deckbuilding games.
Usually, in a deckbuilding game, you aren't really building the deck as you want to use it, you build for the sort of statistical average and hope that the RNG gods will bless you with the hand you need to have to pull off your wombo-combos. In To the Dungeon, the deck is your hand. The way it works is that when you run out of cards to use, you semi-permanently discard one of them to get the rest of your cards back in your hand. This is so insanely clever and it solves so many of the usual design problems of deckbuilder games with one single mechanic, that I'm flabbergasted that the first time I see it is in a god damn h-game.
Deckbuilder games often devolve into finding an infinite combo. Can't do that here, as you use the cards you have to discard them one by one.
Deckbuilder games often suffer from allowing turtle builds where you go full defence and win by turn 80. Can't do that here, you simply don't have enough cards to discard to last this long.
Roguelite deckbuilder games often have extremely long runs as every encounter goes for significantly longer than one turn. Here, your first turn is usually your strongest one, and since you can only get discarded cards back very occasionally, you have a heavy incentive to end things in 1-2 turns.
If RNG gods don't smile upon you, in most deckbuilding games you tend to get fucked through no fault of your own. Here, most of the destructive randomness is eliminated by the fact that the deck is your hand, and you build it specifically for how you're going to be using it. There are still some random aspects to some effects of the cards, and to the relics you can get during the run, but it's either strictly beneficial, or something you choose to inflict upon yourself if you want to.
None of that is to say that other good deckbuilding games just leave most of those problems unsolved. Slay the Spire deals with infinite combo decks and turtle decks by both making them pretty hard to get to work over the course of the run and making most enemies scale their stats as the fight goes on. It has a lot of tools for mitigating RNG, with a lot of card's effects dedicated to cycling through your deck faster, or picking out a specific card from your deck. Similar things can be said about other deckbuilding games, but I have never seen the solution as singular, general and elegant as it is in To the Dungeon.
Aside from the main mechanic, it's fairly standard with some small twists (the shield you gain doesn't reset after battle, most buffs only last one turn, cards can have special effects that give you buffs on discard that last for the entire run). There are buffs, debuffs, DoT effects and some light cost manipulation. You build your deck before the start of the run, and you can upgrade and give extra effects to the cards with runes you find in your runs and craft in the shop. It has enough variety to fill the 5 deck slots the game has with ease.
All that said, I feel the balance could've been better. The difficulty feels just right for the first 3 dungeons, but after that any decent deck you build will severely outscale the enemies, and it could've probably been solved just by tweaking their stats a bit.
It would also be nice to have more optional dungeons that facilitate specific kinds of decks. I never have any problems with finding intrinsic motivation to try out different builds for fun, but I know for certain that a lot of people would build one deck that works and just stick to it, which would get you through this game but also would leave you pretty bored, I imagine.
I don't have much to say about anything other than gameplay here. The visuals are alright, though I wish at least the heroine who is on the screen 95% of the VN section time had more than one pose with changing facial expressions. The music is good. The story is probably accidentally horrifying, as is often the case with the h-games.
If you're looking for a good roguelite deckbuilder and don't particularly mind that it's an h-game, I recommend trying it out right now. It's cheap, it's on Steam. If you really don't want to play an h-game, get the SFW version this page is dedicated to whenever it's out.
Somehow, we live in the timeline where an h-game is now my third favourite roguelite deckbuilder, right after Slay the Spire and Monster Train. It's also the first game that made me realise I actually quite enjoy premeditated deckbuilding where I sit and think about card costs, synergies between cards, the balance between defence and offence and all that good stuff, I just hate most deckbuilding games.
Usually, in a deckbuilding game, you aren't really building the deck as you want to use it, you build for the sort of statistical average and hope that the RNG gods will bless you with the hand you need to have to pull off your wombo-combos. In To the Dungeon, the deck is your hand. The way it works is that when you run out of cards to use, you semi-permanently discard one of them to get the rest of your cards back in your hand. This is so insanely clever and it solves so many of the usual design problems of deckbuilder games with one single mechanic, that I'm flabbergasted that the first time I see it is in a god damn h-game.
Deckbuilder games often devolve into finding an infinite combo. Can't do that here, as you use the cards you have to discard them one by one.
Deckbuilder games often suffer from allowing turtle builds where you go full defence and win by turn 80. Can't do that here, you simply don't have enough cards to discard to last this long.
Roguelite deckbuilder games often have extremely long runs as every encounter goes for significantly longer than one turn. Here, your first turn is usually your strongest one, and since you can only get discarded cards back very occasionally, you have a heavy incentive to end things in 1-2 turns.
If RNG gods don't smile upon you, in most deckbuilding games you tend to get fucked through no fault of your own. Here, most of the destructive randomness is eliminated by the fact that the deck is your hand, and you build it specifically for how you're going to be using it. There are still some random aspects to some effects of the cards, and to the relics you can get during the run, but it's either strictly beneficial, or something you choose to inflict upon yourself if you want to.
None of that is to say that other good deckbuilding games just leave most of those problems unsolved. Slay the Spire deals with infinite combo decks and turtle decks by both making them pretty hard to get to work over the course of the run and making most enemies scale their stats as the fight goes on. It has a lot of tools for mitigating RNG, with a lot of card's effects dedicated to cycling through your deck faster, or picking out a specific card from your deck. Similar things can be said about other deckbuilding games, but I have never seen the solution as singular, general and elegant as it is in To the Dungeon.
Aside from the main mechanic, it's fairly standard with some small twists (the shield you gain doesn't reset after battle, most buffs only last one turn, cards can have special effects that give you buffs on discard that last for the entire run). There are buffs, debuffs, DoT effects and some light cost manipulation. You build your deck before the start of the run, and you can upgrade and give extra effects to the cards with runes you find in your runs and craft in the shop. It has enough variety to fill the 5 deck slots the game has with ease.
All that said, I feel the balance could've been better. The difficulty feels just right for the first 3 dungeons, but after that any decent deck you build will severely outscale the enemies, and it could've probably been solved just by tweaking their stats a bit.
It would also be nice to have more optional dungeons that facilitate specific kinds of decks. I never have any problems with finding intrinsic motivation to try out different builds for fun, but I know for certain that a lot of people would build one deck that works and just stick to it, which would get you through this game but also would leave you pretty bored, I imagine.
I don't have much to say about anything other than gameplay here. The visuals are alright, though I wish at least the heroine who is on the screen 95% of the VN section time had more than one pose with changing facial expressions. The music is good. The story is probably accidentally horrifying, as is often the case with the h-games.
If you're looking for a good roguelite deckbuilder and don't particularly mind that it's an h-game, I recommend trying it out right now. It's cheap, it's on Steam. If you really don't want to play an h-game, get the SFW version this page is dedicated to whenever it's out.