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dkirschner's Dungeon of the Endless (PC)

[August 6, 2017 07:41:31 PM]

Wow, long time no updates. I haven't been playing much of anything for about a month. I am chilling in Montreal this week before a conference though, so I find myself playing some games instead of working on my conference presentation. I've officially retired Dungeon of the Endless, which a friend told me about at the tail end of this summer's Steam sale. Sounded cool, and I had some good times with it.

Dungeon of the Endless is a roguelike tower defense game. Interesting merger of two genres that works well. There is some threadbare story and some "narratives" between characters that play out in small dialogue snippets on the elevator between floors. Your ship crash lands and you have to escape the dungeon...But there are some characters who are jailors and others who are prisoners and a couple other types...including Team Fortress 2 characters for some reason. None of that affects anything.

You choose two characters to begin the game, and you start at floor 1, trying to work your way up to floor 13 (with the basic ship; you can unlock other ships that crash deeper into the planet, meaning you have to go up more floors to escape). You begin in a room with a crystal. This crystal is important. It generates a resource called "dust." With dust, you can power new rooms. So basically, open doors, acquire dust from doing so, power rooms. But it's infinitely more complicated. If you don't power a room, monsters might spawn there every time you open a door. Of course there isn't enough dust to go around. So you're going to have to build "towers," aka "major modules" that generate other resources and "minor modules" which are a variety of weapons, buffs, and debuffs.

Major modules generate three other important resources: industry, science, and food. Industry is what you need to construct modules. Science lets you research new and upgraded modules. Food lets you level up your heroes and heal them in battle. So be smart when choosing among modules to build. These resources also let you buy things from merchants, who will sometimes appear and charge one of the three resources seemingly at random for their items. If you don't generate much industry, you'll have a hard time building modules. Not much science, and you won't be able to upgrade modules very well. Not much food, and your characters will be lower level, which means they'll have lesser stats and fewer perks. Always a tough call!

So. How do you clear a floor? You need to find the power source for the crystal. It's hidden somewhere on the floor. Once you find that, you can carry it to the crystal and escape with whoever is in the room. I learned that the hard way one game where I escaped with no one but the hero carrying the crystal, and I lost all my party members. Terrible! As soon as you pick up the crystal power source, be warned that monsters will spawn from every unpowered room. So you need to power a path from the power source to the crystal and ideally power other rooms such that monsters don't catch you (you run slower with the power source) or don't make it to the crystal room.

Enemies are all different. Some go straight for the crystal; some attack heroes; some attack modules. You'll be fine until floor 6 or so, then different enemy types appear and you can't just stand in a room and kill everything.

You know what. I'm about halfway through describing all the systems in the game. If this sounds cool to you, pay a few bucks for it. I probably won't revisit it, and I never escaped, not even on Too Easy mode, but I had fun and found the game unique. Also I hope this was a decent primer on the "Endless" games, because I think I'm going to start Endless Legend next.