Desktop dungeons

I played another almost-procedural game today, Desktop Dungeon. It's a little game, very pared back to it's basics. You are an adventurer with a race and a class in a dungeon, you start at level 1 and your goal is to beat the level 10 monster.

I haven't managed to beat it yet, but it's a fairly simple little ditty I should be able to, the biggest problem is that I haven't beaten it yet.

Now, some would say that it increases the difficulty factor if you know you're not going to win all the time. But in this game it's not 'not winning all the time' it is 'you only win one in ten games' more-less. It's all at the whim of the RNG, because of the locations of the monsters and the mechanics of the game, there are hundreds of ways to generate impossible scenarios, and only a few winnable scenarios - even then you have to know what you're doing.

The map is linear, literally. You start off iwth a solid 2d space, and start drawing straight lines through it. When you wind up with no wall thicker than one space, you go to monsters.

Monsters are roughly one for every four open spaces in the dungeon, or maybe every five or so. There's a lot of them, and with most of the space linear corridors, that means you have to fight through one monster after another to explore. Okay idea, but where the problem comes in is monster levels. Each monster is assigned a level from 1 to ten, with only one monster being level 10, and more of each level the lower it gets. But just because there are lots of level 1 monsters doesn't mean they're based near you. Or even after you beat them all you'll have enough EXP to fight the level 10 monster. Some games, you'll start trapped in a hallway with no exit but to fight a level 6 monster. There's no fun there.

I think the game is good, but not great. There are lots of things that could be improved upon, especially regarding the dungeon generating. if the monster's strength was based on where it started relative to you, you automatically drop out most of the unwinnable scenarios, only leaving those where there's not EXP to be had on the map.

More on this later though, I just wanted to give you guys something to read.