Dungeon Solver

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Dungeon Solver is a character-based Puzzle game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has players moving tiles representing medieval fantasy characters as they try to navigate their way out of a mazelike dungeon, taking down enemies on the way.

This plays out in a turn-based fashion loosely similar to chess, with your characters and enemies generally taking each other out by moving onto the space they occupy. Players will get different characters with different movement patterns – the basic knight moves like a king in chess, the wizard can only move one space horizontally or vertically while attacking in place diagonally. Keeping these movements in mind, players must watch enemy movements so they can ensure they take out enemies without placing their own characters at risk.

In terms of presentation, Dungeon Solver is extraordinarily plain. Characters are represented by a single-color 2D tile, the dungeon is similarly simple-looking, there’s nothing in the way of animation (although some levels do have a basic lighting effect), and the music is similarly simple and subdued. There’s no story or anything like that… this game seems to pretty much want to place the focus on the gameplay.

The only problem is, that gameplay is atrociously slow-paced, simple, and tedious. Moving your characters is a surprisingly clunky process thanks to frustratingly stiff controls, although thankfully the touchscreen controls fare much better here. However, regardless of which control scheme you use, everything in this game is so methodical and slow-paced that you’ll feel like you’re spending just as much time waiting or working through the procedure of simply moving your characters as you are actually doing anything.

What’s worse, some enemies’ movements are random, meaning that you’ll be spending a not-insignificant amount of time shuffling your own character back and forth until the AI decides to be stupid and move its character in a way that makes them vulnerable, again making players waste their time rather than actually “solving” anything.

I strain to think of anything to like in Dungeon Solver. It looks ugly, sounds boring, has poor controls, the gameplay is tedious and slow-paced, and despite being a Puzzle game, this often feels less like solving puzzles and more like wasting time until the AI makes a mistake. Do yourself a favor and don’t waste your own valuable time – skip this game.

tl;dr – Dungeon Solver is a character-based Puzzle game where you move tiles representing medieval fantasy characters through a mazelike dungeon, taking out enemies with gameplay loosely similar to chess. Unfortunately, the presentation is dull and boring, the controls are stiff, and the gameplay is tedious and more about wasting time than actually solving puzzles. My recommendation is that you not waste your time with this game.

Grade: D

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