This game is an excellent mystery dungeon style game, and one of the sharpest versions of one that I have played. When I say mystery dungeon, I specifically mean the shiren the wanderer games, rather than something like pokemon mystery dungeon, due to the fact that the game only exists with permadeath, rather than that being relegated to a bonus dungeon. Much like shiren the wanderer, the game does have some features to combat the daunting nature of the permadeath if desired, particularly in the form of an item box where items and gold can be deposited in the middle of a run. In addition to this, there are rescue crystal items that can be used to safely return to the starting area with your inventory, and a shop that carries an assortment of items and equipment of varying strength. The final pieces to the web of metaprogression elements at play, and the most permanent, are the inventory space upgrades and spellbooks, the latter of which can provide a large arsenal of single use spells that recharge every run.
Despite all the metaprogression elements, with the exception of maybe the inventory space upgrades, I would say the difficulty of the main game is not to the point where you really need to rely on them, even if the game can be incredibly tough. You live and die by what's in your inventory and how you respond to enemies, and both of these elements are incredibly solid. When it comes to the inventory, there's a good spread of items, many of which are randomized and need identification, that can range from immediately useful to niche but very helpful, and weapons and armor can have a variety of different helpful or evil modifiers. Speaking of weapons, you have a gun in addition to the usual melee weapon, and the gun requires ammo, though mercifully every gun takes the same ammo.
When it comes to the enemy design, this is where I would say this is where the game really starts to shine. The game wears its PS1 survival horror inspirations on its sleeve as soon as you boot the game up and see every safe area has you navigate using tank controls rather than the grid-based movement the rest of the game has, but the general survival horror vibes permeate the gameplay in a way that makes for a somewhat unique flavor of mystery dungeon game. For starters, the area design in the game is generally pretty cramped, with rooms hardly ever being bigger than the screen itself, and movement for both the player and enemies is locked to cardinal directions instead of allowing for diagonal movement. The room size and movement already make for situations where you're more frequently threatened by smaller groups of enemies while also allowing for retreating to hallways to sometimes be a viable strategy, but the enemy variety really makes this bloom into something complex and fun. A good example of this would be an enemy from the first area of the game, the basic zombie. The zombie only moves every other turn, so when the zombie is alone, you can pretty easily go into a pattern of attacking and retreating to easily defeat it, but if you get complacent and run into an enemy that corners you with the zombie, things will not end well. In addition tot his, defeating the zombie has a chance to spawn a zombie with no legs that is weaker and has the same movement pattern, but also acts immediately after spawning. An example from later in the game is the butcher enemy that gets haste upon attacking you, but the haste only applies to attacks, so you can simply retreat until the buff is gone. Enemies with specific patterns like this combine with fodder enemies and enemies that can inflict debuffs to create many situations where you need to be really diligent with your inventory management to stay alive, especially since there is no natural health regen, only hp restoration from items or levelling up. There is also a good amount of variety in the bosses, with each of them having gimmicks that combine with their presence on otherwise normally generated floors to make for many problem solving moments.
Another aspect of this game that I very much enjoy is the pacing. Each area in the game only has about 5-10 floors to it, so nothing really overstays its welcome while still having the ability to instill a terrified death march where you make a beeline for the exit of each floor until you find something that won't kill you, hoping you don't get outscaled by the game before that happens. Runs of the main game clock around 1-2 hours, depending on how much time you spend reading tooltips and planning out your moves, and there is the option to suspend your run and pick it back up later if needed. I have been using the term "main game" throughout this review, and this is because there is a single bonus dungeon that unlocks after you beat a run of the main game. This bonus dungeon is incredibly random, with enemies from any area at the strength that they were in said area all able to spawn together, and there being an extra strength level to elite monsters that almost guarantees your death if you get hit by them. When I played the game, the bonus dungeon very much felt like the kind of place where the tools such as the storage box, rescue crystal and shop are much more encouraged compared to the base game, which I generally enjoy going into empty handed. It's still a fun experience with that in mind, but it doesn't have as much of that pick up and play nature that runs of the main game have.
Overall, this is simply a really good, really dense mystery dungeon style game. If you like what you see in the trailer, I definitely would recommend giving the demo a shot and/or picking up the game for some heavily atmospheric roguelike action.
