The Guild of Dungeoneering (PC and Mac)

The Ivory League has sat on its high horse for too long, raking in gold hand over fist and parading their heroes about. It’s enough to make an intrepid entrepreneur gag. Meanwhile the Guild of Dungeoneering has fallen on hard times but that could be an opportunity of sorts. You elect to buy the Guild on the cheap and build your own adventuring society to save the day… and make enough gold to fill an olympic sized pool with — gotta have priorities. Chumps, Mathemagicians, and Mimes show up daily to adventure — and almost certainly die — in service to the Guild of Dungeoneering.

History

Not a lot here today. Guild of Dungeoneering was made by the five man team what calls themselves Gambrinous and was released on July 14th, 2015.

It’s competition was Godzilla: The Game (PS4 and PS3), Five Nights at Freddies 4 (PC), and Way of the Samurai 4 (PC).

Experiences

I gotta throw another big shout out there for youtuber Kikoskia, without whom I probably would never had heard about this game. That out of the way I’m gonna use this section to complain about my lack of deep experiences. Darkest Dungeon is a similar game with much darker overtones that I’ve spoken about before. The reason I bring it up is because Darkest Dungeon made me feel really attached to adventurers going into unknown depths to get their shit rocked. Guild of Dungeoneering did not. All of the adventurers in the Guild have individual character based on their class but every chump is the same as the last. Ah well, means I don’t feel as bad when they get horrifically petrified by a beholder.

Gameplay

Guild of Dungeoneering is not the typical dungeon delving game. Unlike most games the player does not have control over the adventurer. Instead the player builds the dungeon, places monsters, and treasure in an attempt to guide or goad the adventurers around. Every quest has a goal such as defeating a certain number of enemies or a boss. Some have limits like a set number of turns before the adventurer dies. In others the boss is chasing the adventurer down in a bid to destroy them.

Should your adventurer get too close to a monster they’ll engage in combat. Combat is card based in which both characters execute maneuvers simultaneously. The player chooses from 1 of 3, or more, attacks or maneuvers which deal magic or physical damage or block physical or magic damage. Enemies choose whatever card they’ve got off the top of their deck. The trick is, the player can see it and try to act accordingly. The adventurer gets new attacks and abilities based on the equipment they loot from enemies.

Build the dungeon and try to use your knowledge to take advantage of it.

When you’re not in the dungeon you can tour around the guild. Which basically amounts to building new wings to unlock new adventurers or equipment and checking out the graveyard to behold the great horde of brave people you’ve sent to their untimely demise. And apparently in between adventures your heroes throw all their equipment or spend it on prostitutes or something because they go to every dungeon unarmed and unarmored with just their base abilities.

The Gush

The music in this game is really solid. From the main theme itself to the little ditties the the narrator sings when you win or fail it’s always a joy. The music in the dungeons itself can either strike a moody underground tone or a raucous adventurous one. No matter what, it’s good stuff.

It’s something small but I like how the game looks like a page of graph paper. It really harkens back to the days of making dnd dungeons on grid paper in the back of english class in high school.

Gambrinous is still making content for this game. Having released a pirate themed and ice themed DLC. So there’s a lot of game here… if only there were enough fresh upgrades and classes to keep the systems fresh.

The Kvetch

Because the dungeon tile cards, monster cards, and loot cards you get are all random it sometimes feels more like good luck or bad is more responsible for success or failure instead of player choice. There’s certainly strategy in choosing which equipment is supported by the current class or effective against the monsters in that area. But if those items don’t drop then it feels like failure was a foregone conclusion and that’s just no fun.

Did I lose because I played sloppy? Or because I got trash loot?

The priority system is a pretty compelling system but not involving one. I think it would have been more interesting if different classes had different priorities for treasure, monsters, and unexplored tiles. It would add a layer of complexity that I think it would be a welcome one, and one easily understood i.e. the Bruiser likes monsters more than loot but the Cat Burglar loves loot more than anything etc.

The Verdict

This game is worth a little whirl. It and it’s DLC are modestly priced at $15 for the game and $5 for each of the DLC — and it goes on sale all the time. I got through about three campaigns before it lost my interest and every once and awhile I go back to it. I think I got my money’s worth so if this interests ya’ll then I would say it’s worth the purchase.

Next Week: Warlocked

Darkest Dungeon (PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, and PS Vita)

A distant Uncle(?) has left you the family estate but, like Luigi’s Mansion or the estate from Eternal Darkness, all is not as it seems. As it turns out this Great Uncle(?)  dug too deep, performed dark experiments, communed with Outer Gods, and basically did every bad thing Lovecraft ever wrote about. As the sole beneficiary it lies to you to restore the homestead and the nearby hamlet. And defeat the evil your… Father(?) unleashed. Hire some eager adventurers and set them on the monsters of the dark — or have I gotten that the wrong way around?

This disclaimer shows up everytime you boot up the game reminding you that this isn’t a game you win, it’s a game you survive.

History

Darkest Dungeon started out as a conversation between Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman about how a real person might react to a crazy dungeon delving scenario filled with monsters, demons, cultists, undead, and giant vermin. Inspired by psychologically heroes, particularly Hudson from Alien, they formed Red Hook Studios in order to make this a reality. They funded the game through Kickstarter, raising $75,000 for the project. Darkest Dungeon is still in Early access and as of yet is incomplete.

Darkest Dungeon entered Early Access on February 3rd, 2015. It’s competition was Hand of Fate (Linux, PC, Mac, PS4, and XBox One), Oddworld New and Tasty (PC, Mac, Linux), and Evolve (PC, PS4, XBox One)

Experiences

It’s natural that the player connect with the party… and doing so will hurt you. Eventually the character you rely on will fail you. The best of them will go mad and jeopardize everything. The one you love the most, the one you named after yourself perhaps, will die. At this point, after 30 expeditions, I’ve grown cold to the lives of the adventurers in my employ. I send them with no supplies sound in the knowledge that if they die then I can replace them. If they survive they’ll soon join the higher ups who perform the really dangerous tasks. The whole while the cash keeps coming in and I keep getting ready for a huge expedition with my most powerful party members. But the bodies are piling and I almost feel a tinge of guilt that my best must stand on the corpses of so many others… almost.

So far, the dead number 22 and the game keeps track of their names and how they died.

Gameplay

You take control of a party of adventurers who are about to learn what horrors live below, and in, the estate — I love the eagerness they begin with and how it turns into jaded paranoia and fear of having to go back. They move forward in a formation of four ranks, with certain combat abilities only being usable in and of certain ranks — your opponents will try to fuck up your formation… but you can also mess up theirs. Every quest has a certain objective and when it’s complete your people can go on home. They can also leave prematurely but that’ll stress them out.

And too much stress is really dangerous.

Speaking of stress, when your characters reach 100 stress points they’ll reach a breaking point which will typically cause them to acquire an affliction which makes their behavior more unpredictable and stresses everyone else out — but rarely causes them to fight more powerfully against the darkness. When a character reaches 200 stress they suffer a massive heart attack and die. Characters don’t die when they run out of health, they instead enter a state called ‘Death’s Door’ at which point the next attack against them has a chance of killing them.

Being on Death’s Door stresses them out and it’ll stress you out.

Completing quests nets you Heirlooms, gold, and trinkets which you can take back to the Hamlet and spend. The Hamlet is equipped with buildings that relieve stress, train and upgrade your adventurers, buy trinkets, and remove negative traits from characters such as phobias or diseases. Buildings are upgraded with heirlooms– which can never be taken away– and adventurers are improved with gold — which can easily be spent on expeditions that end in disaster.

The game has got his marvelous pre-Victorianesque setting where crossbows and flintlock pistols cohabit.

The game’s still in early access and as such has no definite goal. Doing quests in areas unlocks bosses and conquering the challenge is a reward in itself but other than that there’s not great conclusion yet.

The Gush

The designs of all the characters is unique and expressive. The different color palettes of the heads alone allow me to differentiate between characters of the same class. After so many battles animations get a little old and sometimes they drag and make battles seem like they take forever. The characters convey a lot based on appearance alone.

There’s something immensely satisfying about my party having their back to the wall and someone reaching their breaking point and becomes virtuous. The pause between the initiation and the reveal builds so much tension. It’s a small victory and I usually pump my fist or launch my hands into the air shouting, “YES!” repeatedly whenever it happens

YOU GET ‘EM PLAGUEY!

The game has created this bizarre system where the town’s upgrades are really what push the difficulty down. Nothing can be done to harm it or undo the work you’ve done to it. You can dump comically large sacks of money into an adventurer, keeping their mind and weapons sharp, when they suddenly turn into a critical hit magnet and die.

If you put together a particular team of adventurers the game will sometimes give them a themed title. I don’t know why I like this so much but I will occasionally mix and match team members just to see if they’re ‘The Misbegotten’ or ‘The Merciless’ or something.

The Kvetch

This game relies a lot on luck. Between your crits, enemy crits, getting surprised, surprising other parties, where the goal is in the dungeon, whether you scout or not, what every interactible item in the game does, and what enemies you fight, it’s difficult to determine where your strategy ends and the Random Number Generator begins.

Sometimes you get the triple crits, and sometimes they get you.

The game has got this really weird difficulty curve. Instead of getting more difficult as the game goes on, the game kind of gets easier. It takes more time to keep your high level characters in ship shape but it’s easier now than it’s ever been to me to reduce the stress of my characters or upgrade their gear. The big reason my people keep dying is because I use them like cannon fodder and pinch my pennies a little too hard, not because the challenge has gone up. Then again, higher level enemies grow more powerful to match the skills of your higher leveled characters.

The Verdict

This game scratched an itch that I didn’t even know that I had. It’s wonderfully eldritch and addictive in the same way that the Binding of Isaac is but it gives me a little more control. I’m really curious about what they turn it into, what classes they make next, and what or if there will be a grand conclusion to this all. I’m not sure if it’s worth 20 dollars but it’s definitely worth 15 so I’d recommend catching it when Steam runs its next sale.