Drawngeon: Dungeons of Ink and Paper

Genre: First-Person Dungeon Crawler

Players: 1

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Review:

Drawngeon: Dungeons of Ink and Paper is a First-Person Dungeon Crawler where the world is depicted as scribbled drawings on paper. This game was originally released on PC in 2019 before being ported to Nintendo Switch later that year, making it to other game consoles in 2020.

For those wondering if there’s some sort of fun gimmick or storytelling device to explain this game’s presentation, the answer appears to be no – this game doesn’t seem to have any reason for why its visuals are depicted in such an unimpressive manner aside from what one could guess is a lack of skill or effort.

While it may normally be a bit presumptuous to jump to such a conclusion, it’s hard to imagine otherwise when you see what’s on offer here. The visuals here are terrible, not only consisting of archaic-looking 3D visuals all plastered with the game’s ugly scribbled low-resolution pixellated look, but lacking any attempt at animation, personality, or in most places even color. This is paired with some dour sound devoid of music, just a dull oppressive hush over everything, with unconvincing noises for enemies and actions where appropriate.

The gameplay here has little to offer as well – this is a pretty standard, mediocre First-Person Dungeon Crawler, albeit with some pretty terrible controls, a lack of any compelling characters or plot, a lack of any interesting gameplay elements, and making use of a few mechanics that were tired even back when they were in common use, like having to shuffle around inventory to make space, or having to individually select a key to use it on a door.

At the very least I can say that opting to use the touchscreen controls improves the gameplay here marginally, not because they’re so great but because the traditional gamepad controls are so bad.

I’m not sure what else there is to say here. Drawngeon is an ugly First-Person Dungeon Crawler with a miserable, oppressive atmosphere. It plays poorly, doesn’t have any compelling gameplay, story, or narrative elements, and players on Nintendo Switch have plenty of better options in the genre. Even for a $5 game, this isn’t worth it.

tl;dr – Drawngeon is a First-Person Dungeon Crawler with a faux hand-drawn look. It looks bad, sounds bad, plays terribly, and doesn’t have any compelling elements to compete with the numerous better games the genre has to offer on Nintendo Switch. Even for this game’s low price tag, it’s not worth buying.

Grade: D

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