Dungeon Encounters reminds me of the early days of the internet, before the DMCA, when copyright status was merely a suggestion. With no guarantee of an official, licensed product, amateur programmers created digital versions of their favorite analog games (ie. Magic the Gathering), making applications that were difficult to use, often unstable, and immeasurably magical. That’s what Dungeon Encounters is to me: a Windows 95 application to play Dungeon & Dragons.
There’s a lot that’s good to say about the game. Its mechanics are simple, but immensely solid, and it always manages to feel tense and dangerous as you dive down into the dungeon, strata by strata. Those strata, while composed of little more than grid squares, combine the background colors, sounds, and even the general grid layouts to convey an impressive sense of location, really selling each different biome you come across as unique places with stories all their own.
On a surface level, though, it’s quite sparse, and it’s left to the player to come up with the details. Even the characters follow that philosophy, with the game having you assemble a strange, disparate cast of characters that range from standard adventures, to robots, to a cat, and to a nerd that’s been transported into that world. You only get the tiniest of snippets to explain who they are and why they’re there, and even then you might not get a clear picture. Your group’s reason for being and their dynamics together are entirely up to you, as is the story of what they encounter along the way.
Dungeon Encounters is so aggressively a digitized tabletop RPG that it’s amazing the director, Itou Hiroyuki, had no familiarity with them going into the project. Despite that, though, that is my biggest takeaway, and its whole vibe has made me immensely nostalgic for the days when program assets were just poorly taken pictures of the physical object by a camera that didn’t even know what a megapixel was. Just toss a Windows 95 title bar on top of Dungeon Encounters and I’m home.
There’s a lot that’s good to say about the game. Its mechanics are simple, but immensely solid, and it always manages to feel tense and dangerous as you dive down into the dungeon, strata by strata. Those strata, while composed of little more than grid squares, combine the background colors, sounds, and even the general grid layouts to convey an impressive sense of location, really selling each different biome you come across as unique places with stories all their own.
On a surface level, though, it’s quite sparse, and it’s left to the player to come up with the details. Even the characters follow that philosophy, with the game having you assemble a strange, disparate cast of characters that range from standard adventures, to robots, to a cat, and to a nerd that’s been transported into that world. You only get the tiniest of snippets to explain who they are and why they’re there, and even then you might not get a clear picture. Your group’s reason for being and their dynamics together are entirely up to you, as is the story of what they encounter along the way.
Dungeon Encounters is so aggressively a digitized tabletop RPG that it’s amazing the director, Itou Hiroyuki, had no familiarity with them going into the project. Despite that, though, that is my biggest takeaway, and its whole vibe has made me immensely nostalgic for the days when program assets were just poorly taken pictures of the physical object by a camera that didn’t even know what a megapixel was. Just toss a Windows 95 title bar on top of Dungeon Encounters and I’m home.