Minerva Labyrinth

I've played a bit of this game, and I played the demo before release: I'm planning to play more soon when I get time. Overall it's a solid indie game, I think. The lore is interesting, and the art and music are a sort of charming retro-pixel-dungeon-horror vibe. I think the pacing is generally good, and the enemies are interesting too. I like the mix of simplicity and tactics that goes into the combat, though there are some elements I think I'm still definitely yet to master. If I had critiques, they'd be that I'd have liked a slightly higher density of discoveries in the labyrinths, and that in general I'm not the world's biggest fan of "you get to tailor your whole party, but they don't have personalities in story terms" as a setup (but a lot of very good games do that, it's just a personal thing preference). If you like party-tactical dungeon crawling and you like the pitch of the game, it's a solid purchase.

I also own Minerva Labyrinth on Itch and have played for a little over 16 hours. I expect to finish the game in 40-50 hours and will update my review then with any applicable changes. More people should be playing this. In many ways, Minerva Labyrinth is an antidote. It insists on substance over style, quality over quantity, deliberation over spectacle, engagement over hand-holding. It does not chase trends. It rewards the deliberate and punishes the careless. The four legacy dungeons each take the form of a cluster of smaller labyrinths. Accessing new portions of a given cluster requires finding keys, hitting switches, and solving puzzles (often one or three at the same time). Each hub functions like a small metroidvania, lending more cohesion to the experience. Exploration is rewarding, with many secrets and pitfalls. Biomes are varied, and new map mechanics (like lava, spiked floors, and dark and bright areas) are introduced at a good pace and with good timing. Each map is sure to contain a handful of illusory walls hiding good loot. Automap is critical, but there is still incentive to draw out a map for yourself. (It feels like this is very much intended, as the icons you encounter for NPCs, loot, and events hearken to a tabletop experience). The player can generally progress without grinding too much, but you can always grind if you want, and grinding is rewarding. Main characters are very unique once you look an inch under the surface, with different demands placed on each with changing circumstances. Each carries an innate ability that informs how they are used in battle. All can cause decent harm individually, but the real sauce is in figuring out how to synergize them. Combat is very engaging, with numerous buffs & debuffs at play during any given encounter. Damage over time takes a prominent role, with small rewards sometimes given if DOT kills an enemy. Each decision carries a number of possible consequences, and randomness plays just enough havoc to keep things interesting. Sound design is nice, with satisfying combat sounds, good ambient noise, and a crisp soundtrack. Background music & sounds vary between individual areas, adding variety even to similar areas within a cluster of dungeons. Puzzles are very good, being challenging and well-placed in their areas (I was especially impressed with the x-ray machine in the hospital). The game also asks the player, gently, to consider the effect of its main antagonist, the Hate. In its power to turn ordinary spaces into tortured labyrinths and people into spiritual aberrations, the Hate is shown to reach far back in time, appearing in the fabric of our oldest myths. Here the careless player is most punished, as this information can be missed by those in a hurry. With Minerva Labyrinth, you get what you give. Highly recommend.

What a nice oldschool Dungeon Crawler. It´s comparable to Wizardry or Bard´s Tale, but with its own unique setting. Grafics look like they were inspired by Wolfenstein 3D. It has some quality of life standards like automapping! If you like turn grid based RPG with turn based fights, you should definitely try it!

This isn't the genre I usually go for, but I was really captivated by this game! The monster design is super cool&creepy, and there's some genuinely clever puzzle design in the labyrinths. I thought I'd dread the sections where you have to draw your own map, but actually I got really into it and felt like an explorer.

Good game overall, I do appreciate shortcuts for backtracking. The opening tutorial can kinda drag a little but it's barely even a taste of the game after that. If you like dungeon crawlers this is a good one.

Wizardry collides with Sailor Moon, or something! If you like old-school first person dungeon crawlers from the 1980s, this one is pretty fun and the setting is different. *edit* Runs great on Steam Deck with Xbox controller. Create 5 badass women in tiaras for some reason, with a lot of class choices and some additional customization (choose a passive), then explore a labyrinth, get smashed by baddies, suffocate from poison gas, and other fun activities!

Played the demo, and it got me hooked. Solid dungeon crawler/JRPG style game. Will update the review if my opinion changes, but right now this is a recommend for me.

Solid turn-based dungeon crawling, you build a party of 5 from dozen or so different classes with different passives and stat allocations allowing for even further customization, you battle in fairly standard and remarkably well balanced wizardry-like turn-based battles as you play through the dungeons, the dungeons themselves are the game's strongest point, they're intricately designed, rewarding to explore and make great use of confounding gimmicks like spinny tiles, dark rooms and teleporters and the game has a strong dark horror-adjacent vibe going on through, in spite of the magical girl theming this game definitely does not go for the cutesy appeal. The basic gameplay loop of trying to make your way through the dungeon, looking for secrets, battling enemies to power up and gathering loot and then making your way back to heal and spend your hard earned cash is satisfying and the dungeons themselves are solidly designed in that you're in most every case always going to be right back where you left ready for another go. It's a relatively bite sized adventure for the genre with 4 major dungeons with several floors and an optional tutorial dungeon, took me just shy of 20 hours to beat, none of the dungeons felt like they overstayed their welcome. Strong showing from what I understand is entirely a solo dev.

I haven't really played a lot of dungeon crawlers before so I wasn't sure if this would hook me, but it definitely did. It's very easy to pick up and play if you know anything about RPGs in general, and the mechanics feel very well-balanced (at least on a single full playthrough). You can scrape by underleveled with good team synergy, which is how I prefer to play, but it didn't seem it would be too grindy to get some extra levels if needed either. In particular I really love the stat system, where you set everyone's base stats at the beginning, and that determines what tiers of weapons/armor/etc they can use, among other things. There are recommended defaults for each "class" to align with their skills/spells, but you can totally take a squishy healer class and make them a frontline tank, or make them even squishier but give them good ranged physical damage, etc. That plus the variety of "classes" makes for a very fun time customizing a party, and the game is short enough (20-25 hours maybe?) and snappy enough that even if a wacky customized party doesn't work out that well, the two options of plowing through anyway or restarting from scratch both don't feel very punishing. Easy recommendation for anyone curious about trying out a dungeon crawler RPG.