When it comes to roguelike titles, while I’ve played loads of them for the most part my mind tends to gravitate towards very specific ones that have typically defined the category for a given style of play. Reflecting on the likes of Hades, Dead Cells, Vampire Survivors, Nuclear Throne, and some others also helped me realize that with the roguelike space it feels like more games are at the extremes, being either incredible or pretty awful, with a smaller proportion sort of hanging out in the middle ground. Dunjungle strikes me as a terrific example of a title that fits in that space though, undeniably providing a fair amount of challenge and overall engagement, just not quite possessing the higher ambitions and polish of its top-tier brethren, which in this case would be Dead Cells as the closest comparison.

One of the things I appreciate the most about a good indie game is the ability to just get right into the action, and in that area Dunjungle doesn’t disappoint. Granted, this is in part because the ultimate complexity of the action also isn’t terribly high, but what’s great is that as a roguelike the more you unlock the more nuance you’ll then begin to see, but up front you can just dig in. You’ll be armed with your melee weapon, a secondary and typically thrown weapon, and then two slots that you can use for a variety of purposes depending on what you run into. While you’ll encounter newer and better gear as you go, there will also be opportunities to simply augment what you have, adding either elemental powers or simple boosts to their stats, regularly opening the door to player choice and some degree of build customizing as you go. I’d consider the overall difficulty just about right, with early runs able to last a while, but then putting the player in their place soon enough to keep up the challenge level overall.

While this all works well enough, and can absolutely be enjoyable, there are two areas where it comes up a bit short. The first is that it feels like the meta progression costs could use some tweaking. You certainly want to incentivize people to continue to return to play through more runs, but in particular it feels like the additional class unlocks are kept too high on the top shelf, risking an entire subset of players may get bored before even getting to check them out. I’d argue it would at least be a good idea to throw one at players much earlier on so they can understand how that can help make the game play very differently, giving them far more direct incentive to stick around for more. Another is just that the interface for interacting with your possible meta unlocks is just a bit of a mess, which is a little confusing and just feels like a sloppy implementation. Even still, this is a solid action-based roguelike that manages to stand proudly on its own, and feels just different enough to make it worth a look.