Bjorn

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I'm not sure what to make of Dungeon of the Endless.

If you don't know what it is, it's a mish-mash of different ideas and genres. You've crashed your space ship, and you need to escape with your power core. You'll traverse 12 levels (on the easiest difficulty) to do so. It's both turn based and real time. You have 4 resources to use to build a variety of Major and Minor Modules in rooms which can help you with producing resources, defense, healing, killing enemies, etc. Opening a door causes 1 turn to pass, which is when your resource generation happens, skills refresh one tick, research advances one tick, etc. If monsters spawn, it becomes real time though, you have to maneuver your people around, killing the monsters before they kill you or destroy your core. Once the exit is located, the game is a mad dash for your ragtag group of heroes to escort the core to the next level.

On paper, this sounds like a perfect game for me. But it's just not clicking.

It's much slower paced than I expected, almost too slow. My first playthrough took me several hours, probably 4-5 hours, with later floors taking 30-40 minutes to clear. Which feels entirely too long for one of these procedurally generated dungeon crawls. I much prefer the 1-2 hour arc for games with a lot of replayability, so I can get in a complete game in one session. Maybe more familiarity with this will speed it up a bunch, but I'm not expecting it to drop to an hour. There's a lot of micromanagement that I wasn't expecting. Monsters don't spawn in rooms with lights on, and between each door sometimes you want to change which rooms are lit and which aren't to funnel them specific ways. There are items that can give your heroes skills they might not otherwise get, and with stuff like Repair, you can find yourself swapping out items in between every wave of monsters to fix your stuff, then go back to your fighting gear. One of the little joys of the game is opening doors. The door slowly opens, the room gradually lights, and then you get to discover what's there. But in later levels, I found myself immediately backing out to map view as soon as I clicked on a door so I could see where enemies were spawning, thus robbing myself of that little door opening joy. Research is done at crystals you find, and typically takes 3 doors to finish. In order to maximize research, you find yourself having to run back across the map every 2-3 doors (depending on the number of research crystals you found), again slowing down the pace of the game. There are just so many little things that kill the pacing the game could have.

It's kind of a death by a thousand cuts for me and this game. No one of the things that bugs me would normally seriously impact my enjoyment of a game. But all the little irritations in this one have really brought it down for me. Which is frustrating, because it is a good game. I'm sure there are people out there who love it.

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I love it, but it is an odd game so I don't really know what to say to people that don't enjoy it.

 

You can setup control groups like in RTS games. Once I discovered that that really reduced the amount of work involved with micromanagement. That's probably not enough to change your opinion of the game, but I thought I would point it out because it wasn't obvious to me that it's something you can do.

 

Anyway, I really love this game, and its something I play a lot anytime I'm just trying to relax. I find the pacing really appealing, and the way instead of a power curve you have something more like a power pendulum where it swings from you feeling super in control and on top of everything to feeling way overwhelmed. And the way dust works it will swing back and forth from those positions. Very clever.

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Do you play on Easy or Too Easy?

 

I didn't realize you could group and hotkey people.  That would speed some things up.

 

I really want to like this game, there's so much good in it.  I'm going to give it one more run, see if it goes better now that I'm more familiar with all the mechanics and have successfully made it through once. 

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I play on too easy. Easy is hard, haha.

 

The current pod I'm playing is armory, and it is crazy how different it plays out because there is so much stuff you can't build. Also if anyone on your team dies that's basically game...

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Easy is hard ;__; I only beat it maybe a week ago. Unlocked a bunch of pods, and the first one I tried was the med bay. It was a really different experience - actually a lot easier, I felt like.

 

I love this game a lot for its mood and aesthetic, but I agree that despite how it might look at first glance it's a really time-consuming and high maintenance game. I like the pendulum effect that sclpls is talking about - I feel that too. I'm still trying to figure out how to best use all the different modules. Sometimes I find a combo that's really good in a certain circumstance, but change the configuration of lit/unlit rooms around and then that combo is suddenly awful. I like it because it keeps me on my toes. I try not to pause the action unless it's absolutely necessary - pausing seems a little overpowered sometimes!

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Amplitude Studios are amazing. They just released an update for the year-old game. Some rather minor things, but as I'm obsessed with the game I'm very happy. They also said that a big free update is coming soon, a new ship and character and gamepad support.

 

Counting the posts it seems the game flew a bit under the Thumbs radar. Why, I ask you, why?

 

It's my favorite game of the last year, my favorite game since FTL. You people should play it!

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Amplitude Studios are amazing. They just released an update for the year-old game. Some rather minor things, but as I'm obsessed with the game I'm very happy. They also said that a big free update is coming soon, a new ship and character and gamepad support.

 

Counting the posts it seems the game flew a bit under the Thumbs radar. Why, I ask you, why?

 

It's my favorite game of the last year, my favorite game since FTL. You people should play it!

 

Yeah, Dungeon of the Endless is pretty awesome. I have become a bit of a fan of Amplitude, which is the first time I've had a "favourite developer" in... a long time. They've had a pretty fantastic couple of years.

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