Given that this is a title I was able to check out on Steam quite a while back, and that really managed to grab me in my short time with it, I was eager to see it come to the Switch. My love of pretty much all things roguelike should be well-known at this point, and what typically excites me more than almost anything else is seeing how well it can work with weird new ideas. With its turn-based combat and the central use of a claw machine there’s no question that Dungeon Clawler has that aspect covered, so even if you may not fall in love with the results, you should at least be able to appreciate the unconventional ambition behind it.

In the end, outside of the claw machine mechanic, this is a dungeon crawler. You’ll embark on your mission, work through some combat trials, find loot and vendors, and then eventually begin to face some tougher bosses. Though you’ll need to unlock most of them, there ends up being a pretty wide variety of characters to work with, each of which tweaking the base formula to lend themselves to different tactics and styles of play, with that alone providing for quite a bit of variety if you simply love to experiment. From there it’s all about working with what you’re given, and trying to find the best synergies between base perks that give you boosts and new items in your deck that you’ll try to fish out of the pile every turn.

What this does manage to do very well is take the deckbuilding strategy genre and give it the kick in the groin it has been deserving of for some time. As great as some of these may be, there are just so many of them at this point, and mechanically too many of them have far too much in common. By introducing the claw machine, and the unpredictability that it can represent, it has at least found a way to once again make turn-based combat a bit more interesting. The fact that so many items can have critical synergies between them, compelling you to desperately do everything you can to grab them, really points to how deep the game can go. I think the biggest problem it tends to have though is lulling you almost asleep, often feeling too easy, and then suddenly slapping you down with what usually feels like disproportionate and sudden force. Yes, roguelikes are meant to challenge you, but the difficulty curve is usually pretty even and predictable, letting you feel like you’ve always got a chance. The way this moves from quick and easy to almost impossible in some cases is particularly harmful though, since the majority of the time it tends to feel very approachable for just about anyone. But if the curve tends to feel too skewed as it knocks you down yet again, even when it feels like you’re doing well up to that point, the challenge comes through as being too uneven and potentially discouraging.