Let the tears flow. Dungeon of the Endless is a game with an easy lyricism. It is a bright, cruel poetry of doors and what lies behind them. You have crashed your spaceship and now you are underground somewhere. A catacomb of doors. You must get a crystal from one end of each maze to another, but along the way?
Endless DungeonPublisher: SegaDeveloper: Amplitude StudiosPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: TBA on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch
You control several people with their own quirks and abilities. You move between rooms gathering the threads of an economy together. You spend money on turrets and other treasures that you can place in certain spots. Enemies when discovered attack in waves, headed right for the crystal. That’s why the doors are so powerful an idea here: what lies behind each one, something very good or very bad? Eventually you will have sounded out each level, and you must prepare yourself to move the crystal – which is when the enemies attack en masse.
Dungeon of the Endless is absolutely stellar. I love it to its melancholy roots. It’s a one-off, or so I thought. Because here’s Endless Dungeon from the same team. And Endless Dungeon looks like…
Okay, Endless Dungeon looks like a hero shooter, or a hero brawler. Heroes, anyway – a touch of Overwatch, of Valorant, of Samus in weird shouldery places. No crash landings here. Instead various spacecraft are drawn to a certain orbiting station, where they fall into a time loop of sorts, sent out on adventures and resurrected with each death. They are colourful, chunky characters – lithe assassins, clanking droids, rusty gunslingers. There’s a hub, and it’s a saloon that evolves over time, with new possibilities for conversations, for canting each subsequent run until your death this way or that – because this is a roguelite, of course.