First and foremost, as others have stated, this is not a game for everyone.

If you are looking for voice acting, a gripping story, tons of abilities, and flashy graphics, you won't find it here.

If, instead, you are looking for a dungeon crawling RPG with nice art that has been stripped down to its most basic form - that is, dungeon crawling, killing creatures, leveling up, and looting - but that doesn't require large amounts of time in one sitting, then this may be a game for you. The animations are minimal and your characters are represented in battle with portrait cards.

Combat is quite simple. Creatures and your own characters have physical and magical defenses, and HP. Upon one of said defenses being lowered to 0, any further damage of that type will directly hit your HP. If that hits 0, you die. Some attacks can also attack HP directly (such as unarmed or poison). There's no mana, no stamina, the only limiting factor for attacking is the ATB gauge.

With all that said, there are some challenges to the game, which you may have already seen in other reviews. Did you get poisoned and don't have access the the passive ability that prevents it? Well, you'll need to drag yourself back to the nearest shrine/statue/whatever that you found to clear it. And petrification. I got petrified on floor 9 and had to leave the petrified character behind to haul the rest of my party back up to floor 7's Gorgon Altar to clear it. It wasn't a huge deal to me since it was only 2 floors away, it only took me a few minutes to backtrack. But I could see that being problem later in the game. Also, at this time, if a character dies I have to go back and find the nearest resurrection shrine to get them back in the game. If any of this sounds not-so-fun to you, you might want to skip out on this. Perhaps later there will be abilities or something that allow you to revive your characters aside from the shrine, but I'm not far enough in yet and information on the game seems to be relatively scarce at the moment.

In the end, I would recommend this game as long as you don't mind that it has next to no story, the minimalist style and gameplay, and having to backtrack to revive or otherwise heal your characters.

Edited 1 day after original review:
So I encountered a group of 4 monks on floor 15 that had about 10 times normal defenses and health. I didn't have time to whittle them down before they wiped my party, and was unable to flee despite attempting to use the Withdraw ability (I haven't yet had this succeed). I was forced to either restart from what appears to be an earlier save (around floor 4 or so), restart anew with levels intact, or return to the main menu. Those monks essentially deleted my party. For some reason I thought you would continue with current progress using other surviving characters but apparently not.

My recommendation still holds, but, man, that kinda hurts lol.

First off, I was enjoying this game. I was on floor 11 and ran into a bandit enemy. It had way more health than anything I had fought, but often these types of enemies are very lucrative if killed so I tried it. I had about 3500 gold going in to the fight. Right off the bat, it steals 10000 gold. I'm thinking welp. I'm out of money. Might as well try to kill it and get it back. After awhile I don't get close and it runs away. Oh well. I'm just out of money. Not a huge deal. I look at my gold and it reads -27,894. I've never played a game that an enemy can steal your money to put you into debt. At this point I'm getting roughly 100G per battle. I continue for a little while. I find some shops on the next(?) floor and excitedly see new items. Then it dawn's on me I'm 27k in the hole. I just turned the game off. This new player trap is such outrageously bad design that it ruined the game for me. Very disappointed.

If you are like me, you'll read the negative reviews of the game and go "Wow that sounds like an amazing game." If you don't have that response from the negative reviews, this game probably will not be very enjoyable for you.

After 23 hours playtime I stepped on a invisible pitfall at floor 99 which scattered my whole group. All of them where changed to the "wandering" state with hidden locations. The only way to get them back is to start again with my other (low level) characters and search them and hope to randomly find them in any of the 99 floors, no thanks.

A dream come true for anyone who skips cutscenes and dialogue

Randomly came across this either in discovery queue or related to recommendation about a month ago and thought it looked interesting so i wishlisted it right then. Fast Forward to now i got an email a few hours to my pleasant surprise that it had released today! I don't find myself purchasing more than 10 games a year as I'm getting older and i felt inclined to purchase this one. It is such a wonderful breath of fresh air and new take on old classic JRPG concepts and tropes. I just finished bingeing the first ten floors to 100 percent and am pausing to write this review. This game fills me with nostalgia to an era of gaming far past where single player games could sweep you up in their story or strategy for hours on end now gaming seems to be where can one get the next quick hit of dopamine from x y or z online game. I will be honest this game looks a bit primitive and in some ways it is but that only adds to the charm for me. It has a massive roster of unlockable allies you can find and recruit as you progress. The difficulty thus far has curved out super nice I have had a few close calls where i almost wiped including one narrow getaway with one party member alive and to me that is the perfect balance for a JRPG where you are riding that fine line between dominance and having that creeping fear in the back of your mind that one wrong move could spell disaster for your entire squad. Also it requires a bit of imagination since all of the dungeons are just tile maps you can explore however if you're here looking and reading this you are probably already aware of dungeon crawlers/ fantasy genre titles. I would pay 30 dollars again for this, however if you're on the fence don't fret waiting for a sale down to the 20 range, but for that price its an absolute steal with all the little nuances and breadth of characters available to command!

TL;DR This game is a breath of fresh air for any fans of classic JRPG games who enjoy strategy exploration/ completionist things. A bit bare bones in the graphical department but don't let that gate you from experiencing this hidden gem! Overall a very good first step back to the genre that spawned a golden era of gaming and tons of fantastical journeys and memorable companions! Hope to see more games come out that build on this very solid foundation of turn based greatness!

Feels like a proof of concept or really polished student game. Very little depth in this game, every character is basically the same and all that matters is the equipment you give them. Despite being a Square Enix game being made by folks who worked on Final Fantasy there is practically no story outside of a couple paragraphs for each person. Combat is simplistic with you having two attacks and any skills you have equipped which you get from searching Dungeon Floors. This is really as bare bones as you can get in terms of a game. The original Final Fantasy on the NES had more depth and complexity than this title.

Its pricey for what it offers but if you just want a not too involved turn based RPG, where you clear a floor and turn it off only to return when you just want to kill 30 mins then I say pick it up when its like 5-10 bucks. Its not worth the asking price though with how shallow it is.

Great game. But only for those that like old school dungeon crawlers. Remember, those where your party travel on a grid based map and you sit there with a list of paper and a pen trying to draw a map so that you don't get lost and remember where all important locations are? If you looked at store page which describes the game and didn't decide to get it right there most likely it is not the game for you and reviews won't change this decision.

Basically the game is played in a 100x100x100 dungeon (most floors are filled with passable tiles only at about 10% so the total density is 88k tiles or just 8% of that cube), still that's a lot to explore. First floors (~40) are quite challenging and you have a lot of ways when something can get wrong - one of your characters get petrified and you have to leave him and go look for a cure then come back for it, suddenly enemies twice normal level appear and if you are not looking at who you are attacking you die before you can flee, the battle which you were supposed to win somehow due to bad RNG goes bad and you lose your party and have to send another party to rescue those guys, ... After floor 40 you get so many useful exploration abilities that exploration becomes very easy, you basically can take your level 1 character to the bottom of the dungeon and if you are careful you will even feel safe with it. And after you collect some more abilities from remaining floors you become so overpowered that you breeze through the enemies.

Overall I liked first part (up to level 40) because of interesting combat and right when I was getting tired of it it suddenly switched to interesting exploration. And after exploration was finished it was just few hours of clearing up the remaining combat stuff using overpowered tools that I got by exploring. I didn't finish all the map and math puzzles, and I didn't kill some extra bosses but completed the rest of the game with 100% exploration and killing the final boss in 44 hours (with maybe up to 4-6 hours of idling) so you can estimate the length of the game as 40-50 hours with all things completed.

It's a hard game where you can get negative gold from a physical encounter, it's not even funny. I feel like I just paid taxes when buying this game, cannot recommend.

Let's be perfectly blunt: you are either going to love this game, or hate it. Reviews so far have essentially confirmed that.

It's a bare bones, stripped down, boiled to the very essence of a dungeon crawling RPG in the vein of Wizardry. You will die, you will be hit with unfair difficulty spikes, and you will be praying for some sort of aid every floor. You find yourself subject to petrification, level based one-hit deaths, and party wipe moments. All the while, there is no grand encompassing story, or character revelations, or cinematic moments and cutscenes. Dungeon themes are ambient soundscapes, while battle themes are guitar riffing public domain tracks.

And yet, there's a strange zen-like feeling to adapting to these mechanics. You'll find that battles are less about brute strength and stats, and more about the most plausible methods of dispatch, turning them into almost puzzle like solutions. You'll be seeing encounter numbers and cross referencing them in your battle guide. You'll be looking out repeatedly for new party members you can rescue as you continue to dive deeper. You'll search for hidden tiles that could lead you to new passive or battle abilities to make things more manageable.

You can tell that all these things are by design. This was definitely made by a team who had a fondness for the PC dungeon crawlers of old.

Still, it really is not a game for everyone, and that $30 price tag as of writing this is a hard pill to swallow. Still, if you can snag it for $20, and you are one of those who want something in the vein of an old 80s PC dungeon crawling RPG (flaws those titles had and all), this may be your jam.