No matter how easy it becomes to ignore, sometimes there's no getting past how deeply weird videogames can be. Sonic is a lightning-fast blue hedgehog who collects rings? Ok, no problem, he fits right in with an ultra-athletic plumber who's dating a princess that gets kidnapped by a musclebound turtle. Or farms where fully-ripened crops grow over the course of a day or two, or a game of hide and seek where you paint yourself to blend in with the background, or a fighter where godlike beings can be beaten down by the world's greatest detective. Sometimes games tie themselves into knots to justify their weirdness and other times they just let the weirdness run rampant, and Blood Dungeon lands with both mobility appendages firmly in the latter camp.
Blood Dungeon is a side-view action roguelike where the plot is ???, with no justification for spelunking into its dungeons beyond "Have weapons, need enemies!" I mean, what's even the point of having a nice gun if you don't have a dungeon full of endlessly-spawning monsters to use it on? Each run is through a randomly-generated area built for fighting waves of creatures, all of which can absorb a couple of bullets before going down if you haven't powered up enough. Killing enemies has them drop a splat of blood, which you collect as experience, and leveling up triggers the Survivors-like three-upgrade decision.
Like most games from the genre there are an ever-growing number of options that may show up to be picked from, but Blood Dungeon's thumb is firmly on the scale in the player's favor. Of the three upgrades, one will almost always be an option to improve an existing weapon, because all the fancy abilities in the world don't mean much if the damage per second doesn't keep improving. The enemies come from every direction, some flying and others patrolling the platforms, and while the swarm can get fairly thick your character's movement abilities are enough to keep you alive if used properly.
While Blood Dungeon looks like a shooty platformer every character is at home not only on the floor but also walls and ceiling. The swarm doesn't look like much in its first few waves but as it builds to tougher enemies the ability to be somewhere else very quickly becomes incredibly important, and being able to walk up a wall or hop up to dangle from the ceiling can be just the edge needed when survival gets tricky. Each of the playable characters has several hearts' worth of health, but when the enemies come thick as the swarms level up then every bit of mobility means another few seconds of life.
Once the run is over, though, the traditional unlocks start pouring in, including new weapons, perks, arenas, and other goodies. The doghouse at the top of the hub area sells permanent upgrades, a daily run lets everyone compete for best score on the same map, scholars hang around giving access to books that show how to unlock the next perk, etc. Spend the bones, switch characters if you want, and then on to the next dungeon to try to do better on the next run.
It's fairly standard in its game design, but what separates Blood Dungeon from other games of its type is what an oddball it is. Even if it was normal the action is more than solid enough to make the game worth a look, but the game manages to walk a very fine line between ugly-art and charm, looking artistically amateur-hour in a way that makes it clear a lot of effort was put in to make something that could have felt cheap come off loaded with personality and style. Tie that to rock-solid gameplay that keeps the powerups coming and a run or two of Blood Dungeon can easily become a dozen or so, chasing the high score and maybe even surviving to the end of the level. Eventually. After a whole lot of practice and the determination to survive finally pays off.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://hardcoregamer.com/total-weirdo-action-roguelike-blood-dungeon-hacks-its-way-to-release/
