Quest of Dungeon originally got my attention simply for the funny trailer, however as I sank a few hours in, I felt like it was the devs that got the last laugh. This is not worth your money at all. And here's why in this long list of issues.

-The game is overly simple. The game throws at you ton food items that any experienced Roguelike player would expect them to serve a greater purpose aka hunger. Here, their only purpose is simply to (restore a bit of HP). They are basically just lesser Health Potion. Also, The only strategy involved with any character is to spam skills whenever they are available. There's no wands of teleport or rings of polymorph to be found here. No fun silly deaths that you'd find in other roguelike eitheir. Here. Your deaths will be solely attributed to dying to a boss you shouldn't have tackled yet. (But you had no way of knowing prior).

- One design choice of other turn based Roguelike is to walk or pass a turn to restore HP, usually you can fast foward this to make this take second and you can't do it forever or you will starve. In this game however. It becomes a gigantic issue that ruins replayability.

As the Warrior. You gain a very small chunk of HP by walking 5-6 steps. It takes about 2 minutes of walking back and forth aimlessly in a room to be fighting fit again. THIS IS THE OPTIMAL WAY OF PLAYING. THE GAME ENCOURAGES YOU TO DO SO SINCE THERE'S NO HUNGER SYSTEM. So if you're playing on Hard difficulty. You'ill want to save as many health potion as possible for later. So after every encounters. You should be ready to do the tedious task of regenerating HPs. By walking in a circle around the room. Also, enemies that doesn't appears within your view range just doesn't move at all. So you'ill never be taken by suprise by doing this tedious task. By the way, The Mage character only restore MP while walking around, not both. Enjoy the tedious task of spinning right 'round the rooms for MP instead of HP.

Now I want you to picture this: You open a door, a boss appears a few square away. You use any skills available to prepare for the encounter such as Defense Skill and the Warrior's Shout Skill that can stun an enemy for a long time. You manage to stun the boss, you go in for the kill, inexplicably miss thrice. Then the boss acts, he gets a critical hit. You took half you HP bar on that one crit. You get out of the boss room into the other square shaped room you came from, then walk in a circular motion around the room as the boss tails you the entire time without any way of actually hitting you, since nothing will ever come and block your path. You keep turning around the room for a solid 2 minute to replenish all your HP. Then go in for a hit, you hit the boss a few times and so does he, your HP are at critical. Which only means... More of the silly cat and mouse chase around the room until your HP bar is full again

-Quest of Dungeon encourages grinding, as much as possible to progress. The anwers to everything is just to have a stronger character instead of having more knowledge then a less experienced player. The only thing to learn are the way to cheese the skills you learn trough randomly dropped books. Basically. All the Warrior's skills has a cooldown after use. (He doesn't have MP to worry about) Let's say your Bleeding Hit skill failed on the boss, You now have a 50+ turn cooldown before you can use it again. You know what that means? You're gonna be running around in circle around the room some more until the skill is available again! Superb! 10/10 gameplay right here. Also on a lesser note, trough the dungeons are stones that activates quest. But there's only 2 variety of quest. Quest A: Kill that boss. Quest B: Find an item that just randomly spawned around the dungeon. Both serves the only purpose of making you revisit the entire floor again with a vague hint of (The item or boss is situated north). You HAVE to do these quest if you want to survive on Normal or above. Pretty lackluster for a game called Quest of Dungeons.

Now on to the smaller stuff...

-Unlimited skill slot, at no point you will have to make a choice of having a healing spell above stun effect spell. The only anwers is just to read all the spell book you can find until all further books you find becomes (Book of Nothing) which you can sell to the merchant for a quick buck.

-Pointless traps that are always in plain sight. In other Roguelike, traps would be invisible to the player until they stepped on it, or had a method of finding them. Here, you will want to step on the spawn monster trap. So you can grind more XP.
Also the game features props like a shelves, pots, boxes and other thing that can be destroyed or search for gold or items. And sometime breaking a pot will inexplicabably trigger a trap that makes enemies spawns from the ceiling. (I guess these skeletons were really pissed I just broke their favorite pot?) One last thing about special tiles. There are invisible stash that can be walked on that yeild more gold, but those are stumbled only trough pure luck, or walking on every tiles of a dungeon. But you'd have to be crazy to do that.

-Equipement makes no friggin' sence. Very rarely weapons has additional attributes like (More gold) or (2+ Crits). There's a multitude of weapon sprite, however, that sweet crystal shield you just found could be beaten by that random wood buckler you had laying around in your inventory stats wise. Don't get me started on the equipement name etheir. In the same playtrough, I've got two exact looking pair of boots. One was named (The Boots) with 12 point of DEF, the other pair was named: (Damaged Boots) with 16 points of DEF.

This is explained by the fact that all piece of equipment you find seems to have random generated names, it slaps random adjective to the item, so you'ill get things like (Dark Sigil Sword Seeker). Way to confuse new players to think there's actually depth to be found here.


-Enemies with ranged capacities are the bane of your existence. And if it's a boss with spells or a bow. Run, and pray that you don't get immolated by that fireball or get a random crit from that arrow. You can ultimately trick them to follow you around the room like other melee bosses, but first you got to walk up to them, and by then you're already on the brink of death.

-Item menu, as far as I know, cannot be used with arrow keys or keyboard imput, you have to use your mouse. Same goes for choosing a skill. It would have been nice to be able set the skills to the F1-F6 keys instead of clicking the spell book every time you want to switch.

-Along gold, you'ill find gems along the way, there's at least 8 or so sort of gems that are worth maybe 15 to then 20 GP each. Each kind of gem stack with each other, but if you find 6 sort of gems in a row and you're short on inventory space, you'd rather just leave that gem there and avoid the clutter, because ultimately, finding just one random piece of equipement will make those gems feel like chum changes when you realise that even the worst shield can be worth 1000+ GP.

-Enemies sometime spout some random lines like: (The cake is a lie) or (You should have taken the blue pill) or even worst (I am your father). Too bad that the humor stops the moment you step in the dungeon. Because the trailer and intro was really funny in comparaison.

-Your sprite will never change to reflect the equipement you've equipped and that's really unfortunate and lazy.

- Last and more important. It's a roguelike where you have to grind and it's never fun to die.


Ultimately, I can't recommend this game to veteran or neophytes alike. At best this game is a good distraction while watching something on the side or eating...

If roguelikes are something you might be interested in, go for a free Roguelike like POWDER which is made by one guy and is much more deep. Or you know, dish more money for a roguelike worth it's salt like FTL or Darkest Dungeon.

If you're lazy like me, and you want to eat food AND play a turn based RPG at the same time, Quest of dungeons is perfect! I can munch on my beefy-5-layer burrito while simultaneously pointing and clicking on bad guys and collecting loot! Imagine the most generic dungeon crawler possible, and you've probably imagined something similar to Quest of Dungeons. A loot-hunt, a maze of randomly spawned rooms, baddies that drop gold, hooded merchants who will buy everything you have without question ... Quest of Dungeons just might be a dungeon crawler in it's purest form. This game accomplishes it's intent save for a few exceptions:
1- The bosses are slightly imbalanced throughout the game. On the first level, they will one-hit kill you, on the seventh, you will one-shot them from across the room. Somewhere in the middle you will encounter bosses at about the right level.
2- The randomized levels have a chance of ruining your game. I finally made it to the last level on my third play-through, and what was immediately behind door #1? THE FINAL BOSS! I discovered later that the final floor has it's own unique bad guys and rooms to explore. So beware, lest the final boss is at the foot of the stairs.

Now this is what I call a good Coffeebreak Roguelike. It's not complicated, it doesn't demand you to teach dozens of combinations (recipes, spells, dieties of Gods, etc.), it is quite dynamical and fun. You progress really quick. You can find an arsenal in a single chest, or you can travel plenty of rooms with a stick and a lid. I was INVINCIBLE!!! I had like 10 skills learned from looted book, but then... A boss happened. Anyway, the game may need some more feats and content, but for a $3 coffee break Roguelike it's fun as is. I'd give it 4/5 in it's genre. Thank you for your attention.

Although technically not a "roguelite", as it's TECHNICALLY a "proper" turn-based roguelike, this game probably more literally conforms to the other genre title than most...

"The Orc and the Pie" is a joke about how, when you get down to it, the lazy standard of RPGs is to just say there's some monster that wants to kill you, and if you kill it, you get some random loot thing, and then get offered a chance to go kill another orc to get more pies. Whoever made this game didn't get that it was supposed to be a joke.

Play as one of four pre-defined stereotypes with no real character customization in a series of square rooms where you can either spam the ranged attack button (if a ranged attacker) or just ram directly into enemies until they all die.

Then, once the orcs are dead, you get to run over anything in the room while spamming the "pick up" button, and occasionally run all the way back to a shopkeeper to empty out your pockets so you can carry more random crap.

This game's version of pies are largely uninspired. You have potions, "food" that are potions in disguise, armor and weapons that just straight give +damage or -damage with very few exceptions, and you'll largely be fighting enemies on floor 5 the exact same way as you did on floor 1. In fact, you'll probably be fighting the SAME ENEMIES, too, since this game palette swaps all the enemies.

Thanks to a lack of enough mana potions, if you play the mage, you'll be treated to a basic attack spell that takes 5 MP, enemies that take several bolts to kill, and needing to waste a dozen turns to get 2 MP back. Enjoy the tactical depth of running in circles or smashing the wait turn button for hours to get your MP back after clearing a cramped room. Since there's no hunger mechanics, you can waste infinite time, and are directly rewarded for doing so, with only the toll upon your own patience as a disincentive.

Bosses may be tougher than you, but thanks to the I-take-a-turn-you-take-a-turn nature of the game, you can simply walk away from bosses to prolong combat as long as necessary for your passive regen to put you back up to full health while the bosses have no regeneration. As a bonus, "poison" type effects keep working, so getting a single lucky fireball to start tapping away 3% health per turn and then kiting the boss across the whole dungeon is easy-peasy boss cheesing.

Beyond that, everything in this game is either scenery or a target for vandalism. It tries to add "humor" by having random quotes put out there like Dungeons of Dredmor did, but honestly, that just reminds me of how Dungeons of Dredmor is a much, much better game than this. The "jokes" are even mostly recycled, and I can't even be bothered to stop to read them, after a while, much like I can't be bothered to stop to pick up the bajillion coins that fall out of the hundredth palette swapped rat I just barbecued with my thousandth fireball.

Procedural content is only as interesting as the effort put into making each area actually feel different. This game is just the same room copy-pasted every single time. Kick in door, kill orc, take pie. Kick in next door, kill orc, take pie. Rinse and repeat until your eyes bleed. Few games manage to be as offensively boring as this...

In summary, don't play this game, it's a lazy knockoff Dungeons of Dredmor wannabe. Play the real Dungeons of Dredmor.

I realize I spent way too much time completing this game. But I wanted to get all the achievements.
Disregarding that, it is actually a really cool adventure/rogue-like dungeon crawler.
It has 5 unique characters with different builds with 4 different levels you can play them on.
The game is pretty challenging even on the easier difficulties but still feels rewarding when completing bosses or stages especially with the achievements that are very well implemented.

I do have a few issues with it though.
The biggest one for me without a doubt is the permanent death, coupled with the useless feature of savegames.
Why have a save feature if you would die permanently anyways? This feature feels overlooked and lazily implemented.

And then there is the problem with character balancing. Some of the characters are literally useless especially on the higher difficulties. The necrodancer for example is awful in most aspects, she has a few good defensive spells but pretty much all her offensive spells are very weak in comparison to the mage. The Assassin class (which is basically an archer build), is way too overpowered compared to the other classes. It has a long range attack without using mana plus it has spells like sleep which can never fail, which is just insane. It can also move much faster in the grid than the other characters which doesn't really makes it more powerful or anything, it just makes it faster to complete a level.

Another thing I noticed is the difference in the difficulty levels. I noticed there is a difference between like Easy and Hell. But I can't really put my finger on what exactly makes Hell more difficult than Easy. Because when i played my Hell playthrough it didn't really feel much differently compared to easy or normal except that I cleared the rooms more subtly. I still got an amazing build with great weapons and armor and stuff. And I easily managed to kill the last boss. It could be the economy system that maybe made it less lucrative to use the merchant or something i'm not sure.

Also a cool thing I noticed when I started playing this game is that it uses the same sprites as the GPS-based RPG game Orna uses. Which I also play and recommend. It's on google play and appstore as well i believe.

In conclusion a good casual game worth playing, I typically enjoyed playing it while watching a podcast or listening to music.
I think I got this game for free somewhere or in a bundle. So content in comparison to my price 10/10. For 5 bucks, I probably rate it 7/10. I would definitely recommend buying this game during a winter sale or something like that.

Mind-numbingly simple combat, completely forgettable character classes and art, possibly the most boring loot / player progression I've ever seen, and mechanics that were proven as broken in 1995. For example:

You recover HP by moving around. Okay, that's pretty standard. But every monster moves exactly as fast as you, and they do not recover HP. So you can beat every single monster in the game by running in circles while they fruitlessly chase after you, chipping away at their HP when it's safe. This is unbearably tedious, but it's the "correct" way to play, especially since the game has no qualms with guaranteed boss monsters that two-shot you on the first floor.

Better games solve this problem (that, again, was established twenty years ago) through a variety of methods. Monsters that are faster than you, monsters that heal when you walk as well, wandering monsters that can show up and block your path, etc. Quest of Dungeons' developer has made a technically competent game, but he is a very poor designer.

Pro Tips for aspiring roguelike developers: read this, the design philosophy of the best roguelike out there. http://crawl.develz.org/other/manual.html#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq . I'm not saying every game has to be exactly like Crawl, but for the parts of yours that are different, you should be able to explain why you chose to make them that way.

Anyway, that was a huge tangent for a very mediocre game. To sum it up: don't buy it.

There are far better games of this type out there. Unless you are really stuck on the 8-bit art style, I'd instead go with Wazhack or Sword of the Stars: The Pit, both of which are excellent. OR try Hammerwatch if you want live-action roguelike as opposed to turn-based, which this is.

Here are the pros:

1) A little humor in the game which is mildly amusing.

2) Scratches your 8-bit nostalgia itch, if you have one.

3) The music tracks are cool if you like 8/16-bit MIDI tracks. I quite like them personally.

Here are the cons:

1) Waaaay too easy on normal difficulty. Only the boss fights are hard. The rest of the time you will rarely if ever need to use your special abilities. Overall gameplay is fairly simple compared to some of the other rogue-likes I've seen.

2) Loot system and the game in general is not well balanced. You gain skills by acquiring skill books. These drop way too often, so by level 3 of the dungeon you've already acquired all the skills for your class.

3) There are ONLY 7 LEVELS for this game. VERY short for a rogue-like game.

4) Generally uninspired and derivative. Absolutely nothing new is introduced to this ancient formula. It's been done better many times before.

Basically this game feels half-assed. The devs did not pour there heart and soul into this game. It is paint by numbers. And the painting is pretty sloppy at that.

UPDATE: Developer has added another dungeon and a custom dungeon mode, as well as a new character - the Necrodancer.

REVIEW:
Permadeath. Get used it.
Premise: Return the "light" stolen by a Dark Lord.
Deceptively simple, easy, roguelike, single player, quest adventure. Can be done in 30 minutes or less if you are good and lucky.
Did I mention Permadeath?
What makes this game a challenge beyond the randomly generated dungeons is Permadeath. Each and every time you die the dungeon respawns and the player must begin again from the very beginning as a new character. No in-game save points. No tutorial. Learn as one goes, and player arrogance and over confidence is the biggest enemy.
7 levels to traverse through with random encounters, traps, loot, side quests, and mini-bosses that will kick your butt.
4 difficulty settings: Easy, Normal, Hard and Hell. For Hard and Hell all those OMG 'these are stupid tricks' come in handy when the monsters are OP and there is no shop keeper to buy health or mana from.
Four character classes: warrior, wizard, shaman, and assassin each with their own unique play style and power ups (which one may or may not get during game play).
Can you go the distance in this scoreboard game? Simple things can be the hardest to achieve.

Unfortunately I can't recommend this game. It's not a bad game, particularly in terms of polish. It's finished, it works, it has a proper structure... But it's very, very low on actual content and challenge. The game is easy, gold is utterly meaningless (therefore shops are essentially just an item creation menu, because you know you will ALWAYS be able to buy anything you want at them at all times) and it has no real storyline... though thats normal for this genre at least. You'll learn all your spells within about 10 minutes, your level doesn't really matter (there's no other progression either), items are all boring with no visual effects and they rarely even have extra stats making it a game where you just look at one green number to choose all your gear and by the end i didnt remember even a single item I had on.

The upside is the game is fast and you can finish it within 30m (so sayeth the achievements, I suspect faster is possible) so if you want something to play in short bursts its good for that. But with so little content I find it hard to believe you'd want to play this much. People are mentioning this being a port of a mobile game, if that is true it certainly would suit that format and I'd actually recommend getting it mobile if that's an option instead. It's a game for thumbing at on the bus or in the bathroom, not fullscreen sit-down PC gaming.

So don't buy it. Not unless it receives a big patch. The potential for a really solid game is here if only it was utilised. Then again, it was released days ago so I do hold out some home we see more content coming.

It's fun until a boss crit hits you and kills you in one hit after 3 hours straight of playing.