Amazing concept, good approach but horrible execution. Let me explain.

The concept of the game is top of the notch: Avoiding traps in order to make progress, dodge enemies to activate stones to open the vault and sprinting away from whatever is following you. It gives a nice twist on the concept of a dodging RPG game which works very well in practise. The game did not give Elmia, the character you play as, a lot of clothes but it makes up for the fact that you won’t necessarily be running into every enemy you meet, traps you spot or something similar.

The approach wasn’t perfect, but it was still good. I do not enjoy scat or defecation at all, I actually gargle at the sight of it but if you like it then you do you I guess. The option to enable it is there (which is disabled by default, thank you game developers).

The dungeon itself has a good approach to it’s concept: randomly generated floors you have to navigate through in order to press these randomly scattered stones around the map to open up the vault to escape. Not only rooms, but also trap locations and enemy positions are randomized, allowing for a completely new experience every boot-up which is crucial to keep the game fun. Instead of moving on, you can keep playing the game and potentially find yourself overwhelmed with a difficult lay-out. You don’t have a lot of health in the game but for the low amount of enemies you will actually get hit by and the potions you can find, that wouldn’t matter.

That is, if the execution of the approach was at least decent. But how bad can it be?

Oh my oh my. It’s the main reason i stopped playing this game. I am an avid RPG dodging gamer and i am proud to say I have mastered the arts to some degree. The game, however, has painful faults that ruin your experience playing this game.

Unfair trap distribution, bad game instructions and even complete softlocks. The game has some nasty downsides which changed their amazing idea to an infuriating mess. There are too many instructions to keep track off: The game has so many aspects you have to pay attention to that you might as well skip the whole rulebook and jump in blind, which I did in fact do. Not my proudest choice as I missed key information to play the game.

To put the game’s goal in short: Escape the tower – Find all shiny stones and activate them to open the hatch.

Fair and balanced I thought – it would be too easy to just find the vault, disappear to the next floor and skip over a potentially fun part of the tower. Unfortunately the game had other plans in stock and I wasn’t really allowed to have fun in the first place. Since traps are randomly located, you can actually be softlocked into rooms that push Elmia towards a different direction than you intended. Sucks when said trap is at the exit of a room and even more when one of the stones you use to unlock the vault is in one of these softlock rooms, undoing your progress as you are forced to teleport back up.

Secondly, the traps themselves have a second nasty thing: Deception. I mentioned before that Elmia has a low healthpool which is okay for dodging games as long as there is a way to finish the game zero-hit style or if you were to auto generate health back. You should be fine in dodging RPG games with any of those two. Both those options are practically impossible as the game mixes traps with key items, like mirrors to regain lost clothes or a chest that contains an item. Like I said, the concept and approach is really good but they executed this very poorly.

Last but not least, the map lay-out itself can be an absolute pain. Corridors between rooms are only one tile wide – making it impossible to dodge enemies and even getting yourself stuck in corridors if they approach you from both sides. Wider rooms, lowering the number of traps and more variety in rooms would definitely up the immersion.

TL;DR – The game lacks on terms of your overal health, usage of the RNG system, and the lay-out of the rooms. The traps themselves nor the monsters aren’t necessarily needing change but changing the aformentioned rooms, health pool and lay-out would significantly better the experience.