Castle of No Escape

Genre: Top-Down Dungeon Crawler

Players: 1

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Review:

Castle of No Escape is a Top-Down Dungeon Crawler that has players exploring a multi-floor dungeon searching for artifacts and fighting enemies to gain the strength to challenge its final boss. This game was released on PC in 2017, ported to Xbox One in 2019, and then brought to Nintendo Switch in 2020. I feel like I must be missing something here though, because those dates put this release after Castle of No Escape 2. So… yeah, I dunno.

Dungeon of No Escape uses 8-bit style pixel art visuals with an empty black background and difficult-to-distinguish pixel art enemies. This is paired with a dull, droning, chiptune soundtrack that’s not to terrible it’s annoying, but it doesn’t add much to the experience either. Overall I’d say the presentation here is reminiscent of games from the early Nintendo Entertainment System era, but even then those games tended to have an actual personality.

Unfortunately, the gameplay here doesn’t make up for the visuals. Players move from tile to tile through the dungeons, with the contents of that tile remaining hidden until you’re on top of it. Maybe it’s a chest, maybe an unmoving monster, maybe a stairwell, or perhaps a helpful artifact. Regardless of which you encounter, what follows will likely be entirely dependent on the game’s random number generator. Perhaps you can fight off the monster, perhaps he’ll whittle down your health (in this game called strength). Perhaps the chest will contain something useful, perhaps it’ll explode and take down your health (er, strength). Perhaps drinking from the pool will increase one of your stats, or maybe it’ll lower it. There’s no way of knowing until you try.

As a result, this game boils down to a lot of trial and error. Manage to get your stats up high enough and you’ll steamroll over everything and clear the whole game in under twenty minutes. Maybe you’ll have bad luck in the first square you move to, and get killed by an enemy right within the first ten seconds of playing. Neither of those examples is hyperbole or exaggeration – I did both of those things.

Beyond this, another frustrating element of this game is that it explains nothing about how its gameplay works, what the goals are (beyond a generic “evil bad guy collecting magic gems to rule the world” story), or what the various stats on the side of the screen are. Despite that the gameplay here is extremely simple, it nevertheless is still needlessly confusing.

In any case, even once you figure the game out, because so much of Castle of No Escape comes down to pure dumb luck, I can see little reason to play this game. Either you succeed through no skill of your own, or you fail though no fault of your own. Either way, this game feels like a waste of time and money. Don’t give this game either.

tl;dr – Castle of No Escape is a Dungeon Crawler with an ugly old-fashioned presentation and gameplay that is entirely reliant on random chance. It is pure dumb luck whether you die in the first ten seconds or beat the game in under twenty minutes. In either case, there’s no fun to be had here. Don’t bother.

Grade: D-

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