Crown Trick

Genre: Top-Down Dungeon-Crawler / Turn-Based RPG / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Crown Trick is a Top-Down Dungeon Crawler with Roguelike elements released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has you playing as a young girl entering a realm of nightmares with an intelligent, speaking crown.

Visually, this game uses 2D visuals with a really nice hand-drawn art style and decent animations that give the characters a lot of personality, and that’s backed by some good writing and a decent soundtrack. There’s nothing in the presentation that’s particularly extraordinary or memorable, but it’s all quite good.

In terms of gameplay, this is a solid but fairly standard entry in the genre, although that’s not to say that it doesn’t do some interesting things with the gameplay here. Players make use of a familiar system that lets them use the magic attacks of up to two of the more powerful non-boss characters they’ve defeated in combat, which gives players some flexibility in making a good build that combines the strengths of these abilities along with your current weapon. Another important element here is the use of elemental and environmental hazards, which make combat considerations not just about the enemies you face, but also the room around you.

There’s a good amount of thought that went into the gameplay mechanics here, but I have to admit that a few elements made it less satisfying than it could’ve been. Firstly, your familiar abilities require both a cooldown and run on a finite amount of magical power, and it seems that once you’re locked in battle you’re limited in your ability to refuel this magic. This results in these abilities having less utility in combat than ideally they should. I would have much preferred if the game didn’t restrict your ability to use magic with a cooldown, or at least made your magic power recharge over time – either give players full carte blanche to use this ability while making its availability finite, or else add a strategic element to moving around and delaying combat for the opportune moment when skills recharge.

Another thing that frustrated me is that in multiple places in the game, the game’s menus seemed fiddly and didn’t want to work properly, with me having to press a button multiple times for me to get it to register, or having to walk away from an interactive object and walk back to get it to allow me to interact with it. This isn’t a game-killing flaw, but it is a frustrating one.

However, while there are definitely parts of Crown Trick that could stand to be tweaked a bit, overall this is a fine entry in the genre, and fans of Dungeon Crawler-style games should be pleased with it. The gameplay is solid, the presentation is nice, and there are enough interesting ideas at play here to make it well worth a look.

tl;dr – Crown Trick is a Top-Down Dungeon-Crawler that has players venturing into a world of nightmares with a talking crown. This is an all-around good entry in the genre, albeit one that’s not without its flaws and frustrations. If you like this sort of game, Crown Trick is well worth checking out.

Grade: B

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