Dungeon Chest is startling... truly a contender for one of the worst games on Steam... and I've written over 19,000 reviews on Steam. This is very much a contender for one of the worst games I've ever played or reviewed. I suspect this might be a joke game, put on Steam Direct for laughs (what a waste of $100)... but these usually get joke reviews on them as part of the joke. More disturbing is the thought that someone genuinely felt this garbage would be acceptable to publish, for profit, as if it was a real game on Steam.
What is this, as a game? Imagine the worst Adobe Flash game you ever saw. "Lulzy" is the best term. It's a top down "puzzle" game... I suppose if you think of Binding of Isaac but with the shooter elements removed and significantly worse quality.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
In fact, it's worse. One surefire way to tell that you're dealing with a lazy minimum viable product bit of junkware is if the developer didn't bother with a full set of customisation options like your resolution, control mapping, sound controls etc. Here, the developer [i]didn't include any settings menu at all![/i] If that doesn't make it clear what kind of lazy junk this is, I'm not sure what will.
The upshot of this utter failure and laziness, there's locked resolution, locked controls... you can't do anything to properly customize the experience here. That's a complete failure.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2026 (and this was released not so far back in 2020), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These flaws make this game fall far short of the professional standards we expect from a modern PC release.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH.
The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Dungeon Chest is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
Finally, remember what I often say... if you don't agree with what I've said about this game, by all means buy it and play it (please don't for your own sake). My review is just here to inform your buying decision, and if you think I was wrong and you bought the game, then I've done what I really wanted to do... inform your buying decision.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
