My time with this game has been short and sweet. I write this review both with praise, and as a caveat. I found this game during the Steam Summer Sale and it did not disappoint in the traditional sense -- that is, I had a lot of fun in the short time I spent with The Dungeoning.
That being said, let me clarify some things. Despite being a permadeath game, I found the learning curve fairly straightforward and the deaths in general to not be an issue. I believe I died twice before completing the game, once on the first floor due to just starting the game with utter inexperience, then again on the fifth floor due to the difficulty curve pushing upwards in creative manners.
Monsters pay experience (and occasionally coins) and this allows you to level (and potentially buy items from merchants later) one of four stats: Strength, Defense, Vitality, and Magic. I did not end up using Magic at all in my run with the game and just focused on raising Stregth and Defense mostly, with a slight nod toward Vitality. There are scrolls you can find in chests that may boost your stats as well, so that's a nice find.
The character's controls are fairly fluid, though occasionally a bit spastic. The hero moves fairly quickly and the swings they use have nice range to them. The bow and slingshot both operate nicely and allow for depth in terms of how you approach enemies, provided you have sufficient ammo (which you will, if you don't stick with just one weapon). Again, I never used magic, so I have no comment on staves in general. The hero has several "tricks" that you can utilize involving jumps or swings based on movement input. Also, jumping is a little peculiar but has a nice feel once you get used to it. The hero really does feel pretty loose when moving about and I must say that for all the times when I had an issue because of a mis-jump or a bump into an enemy, I never really felt like it was anything short of my mishandling of the controls. I do wish you could drop straight off ladders or attack while on them, but that's a minor gripe at best.
The enemies are not plentiful by any means, but they are diverse enough to offer a fair challenge throughout the game. There are no bosses or minibosses. Sorry, folks. In fact, the game ends rather abruptly when you find the item you've wandered into this lair to search for in the first place. There is a New Game+ mode, but I haven't messed with it yet. From what I gathered, it's mostly the same fare at a higher difficulty -- which is nice, given that one usually plays procedurally generated dungeon games for the replay value anyway.
The graphics are pretty bland, though the lighting is nice at times (I actually enjoyed wearing the green glowing ring, which left a nice green ambient glow around your character that lit up the general area a little better or worse, depending on your perspective). The sound effects are par for the course. The music is where it's at. Other than a strange lack of music on my last run through on Floor 2, there were some pretty awesome iterations of music that varied between levels.
I cannot state this enough, but the game is very short -- exploring every secret passage in my last run and killing nearly every enemy left me at about 90 minutes of playtime. This is a bit disappointing, especially since there are a number of different background level changes that happen from about Floor 5 onward, so I kinda felt like the game would be made up of blocks of levels that changed backgrounds and aesthetics to let me know I was making progress; instead, it was simply another background/level theme change every few levels after Floor 5. I don't know if there is a defined set of levels. If there are, I finished the game on Floor 16, I believe.
So there is my caveat -- the game is very short, despite being extremely fun. I don't like recommending taking away from a developer's overall profits, but this game really is too short to be worth almost $10, except for the most committed Rogue-ish players who want to see as many variants as possible after beating the game. I do not regret my purchase, and would urge anyone who has an interest in this sort of game to get it when it's on sale, because it is definitely worth it at any sale price. Here's to hoping the developer goes back and adds more to the game, but it's worth a look either way if it's available on a budget price.
