A top-down Action RPG with Open World Survival Craft elements. There is a surprisingly huge, interconnected map to explore with tons of content. Almost everything is destructible, which has a progression system behind it tied to your skills/levels/equipment. The game is more casual than difficult. Highly recommended, worth $20.


This game has many obvious inspirations from other games, from general design choices to specific game mechanics:

• Fallout, for its apocalypse aesthetic and "loot everything and deal with a constantly full inventory" aspect
  
• Dark Souls, for its punishing enemy damage, bonfire checkpoint system, weapon swing delay (however, no "Souls-like" difficulty is found here)
  
• Breath of the Wild, for its large open world, shrine puzzles, and tower-based map region reveal and fast-travel system
  
• Diablo, for its top-down ARPG feel

You gain XP/levels from most actions and from defeating monsters. Upon leveling you can choose a permanent stat boost, and you may unlock some nodes on the skill tree, although unlocked nodes must still be purchased with materials. There are no rogue-like elements here; enemy placement, drops, and other maps aspects are all fixed and hand-placed. There seems to be very little RNG.

The crafting elements are quite limited. You generally can't craft anything that is perishable or of limited quantity. Almost every resource goes toward permanently unlocked skills, equipment upgrades, or certain elements on the map such as for backtracking shortcuts or sidequests. Food is crafted only one time each for permanent upgrades.

One of the more interesting mechanics is the destructible objects system. Almost every piece of every structure in the game can be destroyed. Each object may require a certain tool to damage it, and the tool must have a certain minimum damage value. For example, after upgrading the Baseball Bat a few times, you can now break refrigerators when looting houses, which drops new useful materials. But the Baseball Bat cannot damage vehicle wreckage; you'll have to find and upgrade a new tool in order to do so. If you choose, you can focus on upgrading certain tools early on in order to have an easier time breaking certain objects, sometimes opening a different path in the world earlier than otherwise. Furthermore, you can eventually backtrack to previous areas with stronger tools, then break and loot objects that you couldn't previously.

Even though I consider the game to be open world with a huge map, you are somewhat restricted in where you can go until gaining certain upgrades, or going around the long way and unlocking the door from the other side to create a shortcut, Dark Souls/Metroidvania style. The quests can lead you along, and in a few places are required to make progress - but for most of the game, where you go and what you do is up to you. Every map region has a Link Tower for fast travel/map unlock, and there are tombs with puzzles, obelisks with combat challenge minigames, fallout shelters with tower defense-style minigames, and more. There are a ton of things to keep you busy.

There is a temperature system where you take gradual damage in certain areas if you don't have the right upgrades or protective gear equipped - but this is mostly a soft-restriction. If you are brave and fast enough you can often run through these areas early.

However, the abundance of choices introduces a few balance issues. You may find some encounters suddenly trivialized after lots of upgrades. You may max out a few tools, then circle the entire map unable to break certain objects, until stumbling upon a quest that finally gives you the next set of materials to create the next tool - and if you had just known to go there first, life could have been easier. But perhaps this only occurs with extremely OCD gameplay styles like mine, and when unlucky. And while the game is not very challenging overall, one or two enemy types are extremely dangerous at all levels and can suddenly one-shot you, while nearly every other enemy is eventually trivialized. On that note, the variety in enemies is somewhat lacking.

This game can be extremely grindy if you let it be - if you are the type to slowly move through every abandoned house in Fallout, carefully looting almost everything, you may enjoy this game a lot.

The story is mostly delivered through small bits of lore at a time, sometimes when you stumble upon a radio or notepad in an abandoned building, or just visually when exploring, such as seeing tire tracks followed by a crashed vehicle. There is almost no music except for the title screen, although the sound design is solid and atmospheric. I found myself turning the sound down and having a stream or a movie up on the side; it's one of those games that's very good for that and doesn't require your undivided attention.

I played this only on single player mode with mouse and keyboard. It does feel like the game was designed for gamepad first, with some small mechanics being frustrating at times on mouse and keyboard. Sometimes it's hard to control your character's exact facing direction, sometimes the attack input or sprint input get mysteriously dropped, but overall it still controlled quite well. Few keybindings are even used as the controls are very simple.

The graphics are decent. I appreciate the extremely fast loading times and good performance, while being pleasing to look at albeit not super high-fidelity. I do wish the UI was a bit more practical and that there were more configuration options, but it is functional and fine with the mouse and keyboard. It does feel like you should be able to rotate the camera more, and it takes a while to get used to that fact - you can't zoom out or tilt it far from the top-down orientation. Fullscreen windowed mode was the default, and I played at a 4k resolution with zero issues and no crashes.

This took me about 75 hours to beat - but that should vary wildly depending on your style of play of these kinds of games. I did not get 100% of everything, but I went pretty deep on a few things.

Overall, I had a very satisfying time with this game. I found it quite addictive almost immediately after starting, once experiencing the destructible object system and upgrading my starting tools. Dysmantle is certainly a gem.