Dungeon Divers

I really wanted to like this game, and it has potential, but a lot about it just gets in the way. This seemed like a Riff on Minesweeper and it kinda is, but lacks the qualities that make Minesweeper really satisfying. Most of the secret rooms/mines you're looking for involve counting tiles and comparing. This gets mind numbing quite quickly on large maps. My gameplay rapidly shifted from trying to deduce logically to clicking based on vibes, because all the granular busywork simply doesn't feel rewarding. Add to this the angel and devil rooms that ask you to mentally picture a rectangle between certain locations along the lines of which those rooms could be placed. Except on large maps there can be like 8 of these, and you have to juggle them your head. You could do that, but lucky guesses are "good enough" so that it doesn't seem worth it to bother. That also quickly devolves into the game feeling random more than anything else. The real worst offenders are Black Markets and Outsider rooms though. Counting tiles is tedious, but at least I know exactly what to do. These rooms, however, are based on distance in a straight line, regardless of tile layout. So basically you'd need to place a ruler on your screen to properly work on those, which according to forum posts some people actually do, but that's where I draw a line. You quickly get to a point where you have to find the room based on 10+ of those lines too. So, yet again, you resort to eyeballing, at which point this becomes the world's least dopamine-releasing slot machine. Now of course it's not actually random, you can usually make a decently educated guess just from eyeballing the board, but we're long past the point where this is in essence similar to the fun you get from Minesweeper, and that's not because it's something else but equally satisfying. Even on the biggest boards, Minesweeper is a lot of small logic puzzles in a row, that you get faster and better at as you recognize patterns and rules of thumb. Here, a big board is a monumental task at first because you're looking for something that fulfills condition X across all the tiles, and getting there is busywork. Generation is supposed to have been tweaked to rarely present you with 50/50s, but I still encountered more than one such case during my time, which really shouldn't be the case. There are websites that will generate purely logically solvable Minesweeper for you and while I don't think they're infallible, it works much better than this game. The roguelike aspect isn't much to write home about either. It's mostly about getting more or healing HP and getting some extra clues/free guesses. I'm sure there are more exciting unlockable items down the line but even within one hour I mostly saw repeats. Still, whenever random bombs would give me locations of particularly annoying rooms, my reaction was "thank GOD I don't have to bother with those anymore" which is probably a bad sign for a game that consists entirely of such puzzles. Ever since Dragonweeper (which is fantastic) I'm looking for games that further the Minesweeper formula and the Isaac rooms are a cool direction to go. With some better tools that eliminate some of the busywork, a better UI and controls (why is panning the camera just on the mouse button that also places marks on the map? Just let me use WASD!), less guessing and no goddman straight line distances there could be something here. I might return to this from time to time just to try and maybe see more of its good side. But getting into it it was rough, and I was quickly more annoyed than anything else. Maybe it gets better when you're more practiced at eyeballing, but right now, I'm not willing to find out.