tldr: pretty cool but the horrible endgame progression and stability make it genuinely unplayable after a certain point, and supposedly it's somehow only gotten worse since last time I played lmao
Out of all the disappointments I've had with longtime favorites, few have hit quite as hard as DemonCrawl, a roguelite take on the classic Minesweeper formula. It plays like normal Minesweeper, as you work through a series of boards trying to clear them while avoiding mines, or in this case monsters. Numbers on tiles indicate the amount of adjacent monsters, helping you deduce where monsters can and can't be. It's this classic formula, but now with a trove of items, shops, and masteries to make use of. Coins, treasure, and objects are scattered across each board and can be acquired and used to your advantage, and more mechanics like stage modifiers can help or hinder each playthrough.
The variety in the game is one of its strongest points, with dozens of unique mechanics to discover and make use of. You can send fireballs everywhere revealing and destroying monsters on contact, increase the pathfinding stat to prevent having to clear the entire board, bubble up items to take them with you through the run, electrify tiles to double the power or loot of the object on them, create minions to reveal random tiles and absorb damage from incorrect moves, and that's just a few of the endless ways in which you can make your way through a typical run. Masteries can also be unlocked and chosen at the start of the run to lean more into one of these options, and after completing all Normal difficulty quests, heirloom items can be crafted to be brought into runs at will and further increase the amount of possibilities.
These powerful abilities come at a cost, though. One of the most polarizing aspects of the game is just how straight-up unfair it can be at times. Standard Minesweeper boards are often generated in a way to minimize the odds of running into a situation where you have to make a blind guess to continue, but to incentivize use of its mechanics DemonCrawl has no such protection. Especially on later quests, you will run into many scenarios where damage is unavoidable and it's basically required to have the correct item or ability to get out of trouble, which can be frustrating earlygame when having these items isn't likely. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, as the aforementioned stage modifiers also contribute to difficulty. While there are helpful mods, the majority serve to increase the challenge. There are simple ones that increase monster count or the size of boards and scatter additional objects and hazards around, but there are also brutal modifiers that melt items, prevent using flags on tiles with monsters, and even lie with the tile numbers.
However, those are nothing compared to the most dangerous thing, which are Omen items with negative effects. The most common way to get one is by opening regular chests and getting unlucky, which you'll likely have to do no matter what to mitigate guesses and mods, so they can't really be fully avoided. Some are simply inconvenient, while others are just an instant "you lose" with few counterplays. There are ways to get rid of them, but they're either far from guaranteed or cause other vulnerabilities, so more often than not you just have to deal with them. All these mechanics create an often chaotic experience that can be very frustrating, but that's part of the fun for many. It's a game where truly anything can happen, and nothing can be taken for granted. Each mechanic has a clear role and can often be used to completely break a run, or come back around to ruin one. DemonCrawl may not be for everyone, but it's a truly unique experience with an absurd amount of content that I would highly recommend.
That's what I would like to say, anyway, and then I reached the endgame and realized all that funny chaos is objectively playing the game wrong. It turns out with specific heirlooms and builds, players have found ways to loop levels and duplicate objects endlessly, thus allowing for infinite item generation, maxing out every stat, and generating tens of thousands of metaprogression materials. These strategies require you to sit on the same quest for hours on end clicking on the same items and objects over and over and over with zero chance of failure or variation, and it's ridiculously boring after you've done it once. Now, at first I thought "alright, that's cool, but it's just a cheesy way to break the game, I can ignore it and still play it my way", but after a certain point this actually stops being the case. Endgame unlockables like sigils are effectively impossible to unlock through normal gameplay, requiring emblem items with difficult drop conditions and drop rates less than 1%, and thousands of materials that have dozens of variants and that you'd be lucky to get more than 20 of in a single quest. Achievements are also horribly designed with gigantic grinds (and also requiring you to get first place in the online daily leaderboards ten times for a specific paint) that also encourage these strategies. Of course, you technically don't have to unlock any of this, but it's a perfect example of how players can optimize all the fun out of games, and I really hate how encouraged this playstyle is, as it makes everything else I love about the game feel completely worthless when it's clearly what the developer intends I do.
While that might not be a dealbreaker to everyone and infinite strategies only block off a small subset of content, the primary reason I can't recommend DemonCrawl is just how unstable it is. Back when I played in 2022, I had a bunch of really powerful strategies I actually found fun, which is why it's a shame I could never actually use them as the game is extremely prone to crashing once too much is happening at once. Too many orbs, the game crashes. Dozens of monsters die at once, the game crashes. Explode an entire board that isn't even that big, the game crashes. Enter a stage with a weird group of mods or pick up the wrong item, the game crashes. If the Steam discussions are to be believed, not only have these issues not been fixed, but they've become infinitely worse, with many not even being able to play normally anymore. The game is designed to require being broken, but at the same time it really can't handle being broken. There are also numerous bugs with item descriptions and effects, UI, and the afrorementioned online leaderboards regularly glitching out and giving impossible scores, making that whole thing irrelevant. This and the infinite strategies make the endgame of DemonCrawl a bad experience and a huge disappointment considering everything else it has going for it, and a game I really can't justify sinking as much time into as I have.
Out of all the disappointments I've had with longtime favorites, few have hit quite as hard as DemonCrawl, a roguelite take on the classic Minesweeper formula. It plays like normal Minesweeper, as you work through a series of boards trying to clear them while avoiding mines, or in this case monsters. Numbers on tiles indicate the amount of adjacent monsters, helping you deduce where monsters can and can't be. It's this classic formula, but now with a trove of items, shops, and masteries to make use of. Coins, treasure, and objects are scattered across each board and can be acquired and used to your advantage, and more mechanics like stage modifiers can help or hinder each playthrough.
The variety in the game is one of its strongest points, with dozens of unique mechanics to discover and make use of. You can send fireballs everywhere revealing and destroying monsters on contact, increase the pathfinding stat to prevent having to clear the entire board, bubble up items to take them with you through the run, electrify tiles to double the power or loot of the object on them, create minions to reveal random tiles and absorb damage from incorrect moves, and that's just a few of the endless ways in which you can make your way through a typical run. Masteries can also be unlocked and chosen at the start of the run to lean more into one of these options, and after completing all Normal difficulty quests, heirloom items can be crafted to be brought into runs at will and further increase the amount of possibilities.
These powerful abilities come at a cost, though. One of the most polarizing aspects of the game is just how straight-up unfair it can be at times. Standard Minesweeper boards are often generated in a way to minimize the odds of running into a situation where you have to make a blind guess to continue, but to incentivize use of its mechanics DemonCrawl has no such protection. Especially on later quests, you will run into many scenarios where damage is unavoidable and it's basically required to have the correct item or ability to get out of trouble, which can be frustrating earlygame when having these items isn't likely. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, as the aforementioned stage modifiers also contribute to difficulty. While there are helpful mods, the majority serve to increase the challenge. There are simple ones that increase monster count or the size of boards and scatter additional objects and hazards around, but there are also brutal modifiers that melt items, prevent using flags on tiles with monsters, and even lie with the tile numbers.
However, those are nothing compared to the most dangerous thing, which are Omen items with negative effects. The most common way to get one is by opening regular chests and getting unlucky, which you'll likely have to do no matter what to mitigate guesses and mods, so they can't really be fully avoided. Some are simply inconvenient, while others are just an instant "you lose" with few counterplays. There are ways to get rid of them, but they're either far from guaranteed or cause other vulnerabilities, so more often than not you just have to deal with them. All these mechanics create an often chaotic experience that can be very frustrating, but that's part of the fun for many. It's a game where truly anything can happen, and nothing can be taken for granted. Each mechanic has a clear role and can often be used to completely break a run, or come back around to ruin one. DemonCrawl may not be for everyone, but it's a truly unique experience with an absurd amount of content that I would highly recommend.
That's what I would like to say, anyway, and then I reached the endgame and realized all that funny chaos is objectively playing the game wrong. It turns out with specific heirlooms and builds, players have found ways to loop levels and duplicate objects endlessly, thus allowing for infinite item generation, maxing out every stat, and generating tens of thousands of metaprogression materials. These strategies require you to sit on the same quest for hours on end clicking on the same items and objects over and over and over with zero chance of failure or variation, and it's ridiculously boring after you've done it once. Now, at first I thought "alright, that's cool, but it's just a cheesy way to break the game, I can ignore it and still play it my way", but after a certain point this actually stops being the case. Endgame unlockables like sigils are effectively impossible to unlock through normal gameplay, requiring emblem items with difficult drop conditions and drop rates less than 1%, and thousands of materials that have dozens of variants and that you'd be lucky to get more than 20 of in a single quest. Achievements are also horribly designed with gigantic grinds (and also requiring you to get first place in the online daily leaderboards ten times for a specific paint) that also encourage these strategies. Of course, you technically don't have to unlock any of this, but it's a perfect example of how players can optimize all the fun out of games, and I really hate how encouraged this playstyle is, as it makes everything else I love about the game feel completely worthless when it's clearly what the developer intends I do.
While that might not be a dealbreaker to everyone and infinite strategies only block off a small subset of content, the primary reason I can't recommend DemonCrawl is just how unstable it is. Back when I played in 2022, I had a bunch of really powerful strategies I actually found fun, which is why it's a shame I could never actually use them as the game is extremely prone to crashing once too much is happening at once. Too many orbs, the game crashes. Dozens of monsters die at once, the game crashes. Explode an entire board that isn't even that big, the game crashes. Enter a stage with a weird group of mods or pick up the wrong item, the game crashes. If the Steam discussions are to be believed, not only have these issues not been fixed, but they've become infinitely worse, with many not even being able to play normally anymore. The game is designed to require being broken, but at the same time it really can't handle being broken. There are also numerous bugs with item descriptions and effects, UI, and the afrorementioned online leaderboards regularly glitching out and giving impossible scores, making that whole thing irrelevant. This and the infinite strategies make the endgame of DemonCrawl a bad experience and a huge disappointment considering everything else it has going for it, and a game I really can't justify sinking as much time into as I have.