Drawngeon: Dungeons of Ink and Paper Reviews

Nice rogue-lite game with meta-progression system. World is bizarre in a good way. Unique style is top-notch, paper style is very compelling for me. Battle system a little wonky, you need to get used to it. Overall not bad game for it's price.

Fun game I got it on sale, but it's worth full price. It's a short unique dungeon crawler with a nice hand drawn art style, it does have some bugs and the game doesn't really explain anything too you but if you're willing to test things and learn it's fun.

Drawngeon has a really nice art style , but as a game it kind of lacks imo. Let me explain in short : the game was made for several playthroughs, but nothing really motivated me to go for a second run. There is just not enough variation in levels, quests, items and enemies to justify playing and completing the game several times. Also I found the interface not the best to work with. Sadly, it's a no for me because the game does have potential.

I liked "Dungeons of the Unforgiven" a lot when I was younger, so I thought I would try this. I don't get this game. Played a mage. Apparently you can't even cast spells? No idea what the stats do. The symbol for the space key is the same as for intelligence, but pressing space did not seem to do anything (other than showing you that you were indeed pressing space). There are tons of different item types, but you can only fill three slots (one for a weapon (sword, staff), one for clothing (hat, beard, diadem, armor, ...) and one for misc. (paper, shield)) and they all do the same thing (raise some stat). The gameplay is fairly clunky. The interface wastes most of the space and the field of view is extremely small. So is your inventory. Your first dungeon in the starter city. You enter a house and kill two spiders. Already you need several trips back and forth to sell the items you find. Probably could have started to read forums to figure out how the game is supposed to work. But it didn't seem that interesting. Decided to refund instead.

The graphic style of the game is unique and fun. Sound effects and atmosphere are nice. Character creation is just okay. Very little to no customization. The problem is actually playing the game itself; you spend the entire time fighting with janky controls. I find it is best to keep your mouse in center of the screen as much as you can and not move it unless you absolutely have to do a GUI, click on something, or swing/draw bow. Your movement and action is sluggish to the point you feel like you are in slow-mo the entire game. I can't recall ever playing any first person dungeon crawler with this bad of controls or such slow motion that puts you asleep. I really wanted to like the game (I'm a huge fan of dungeon crawlers), but honestly it is not fun to play. I do want to support this unique idea for a game and hope it gets patched eventually so not refunding.

I rarely refund a game but this one I had to. It was just not fun. And it didn't seem like a dungeon but more like a town with a villager standing there saying "will you kill the rats that have infected our town" or whatever it was. I prefer a more linear dungeon, maybe with a few side corridors to dead ends (with treasure chests!) not this town. Maybe there's a dungeon later but I didn't make it that far. Also, I prefer Turn-Based instead of Action all the time. I got killed once because I was in my inventory looking at things or trying to make room for something I just found in a chest and didn't know that it wasn't turn-based and that enemies could sneak up on me and attack with just a soft wap sound that I did not notice. In some games if you get attacked from behind they flash the screen red to let you know! That would have been helpful. I prefer turn-based so I can take my time looking at my inventory without having to worry about being attacked. In this game you'd better take a quick look! The keyboard controls were difficult for me to use. I kept moving sideways instead of moving my view to the side. Trying to move and control the view was difficult. I kept forgetting which key to use or using the wrong one. When you're getting attacked from something you can't see you have to move your head so you can see to attack! Alas I died again. This game is not for me but I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad game because of that. There may be people out there who like this type of game. More power to them but I'm out of here.

Glorious solo-protagonist reincarnation of ancient "Eye Of The Beholder", only if it was made by a non-DnD fan, in 2018. (and that'a actually how it was) Unique drawn art style, droning ambience and atmosphere. Creepy twist in the end. No real ending, but probably the only thing that got me qualitatively scared for half a minute. Not an ARG or meta-game, but just a well-executed mind trick. Not without its flaws, like eventual off-screen teleports or holes in the floor polygons, but maybe that will get patched out eventually. For a game made by 2 self-funded people, pretty impressive.

Drawngeon is a traditional dungeon crawler, which is equivalent of a first-person roguelite with 90-degree turns. It takes anywhere from 2 to 5 hours to finish without prior knowledge, but it has some replay value through different characters and achievement hunting. Can I just say that I absolutely love the UI in this game, you can actually point&click in a first-person view and move things into your inventory, also works when you need to drop or give items to the quest giver. You could play with a controller, but I find it a little difficult, so I just played with the keyboard instead. The game has pretty nice settings, including a camera lock and key binding. For the most part it's a very creative game with fun gameplay, although it falls apart toward the end due to poor balancing and lack of coherent progression. At the start of the game you can select between different characters and a few items. Each class has some unique traits in the skill tree, and slightly modified gameplay. You can equip up to 3 different items (weapon, trinket, and special). The combat is very basic, just attacking and occasionally blocking (on warrior anyway). While I like the gameplay in general, the balancing and loot table needs a lot of polish. Some of the early game items were much more powerful than later gear, and you can actually become invincible due to one overpowered skill. Obviously, I need to talk about the art style, the entire game has a 3D sketchbook aesthetic - I have seen that idea many times before, but this might be the best example of it. You start the game in the town which is surrounded by dungeons, you explore and collect gear, and when you run out of health you can just use a town portal (a bit like Diablo one). [h1] Pros: [/h1] + good game settings, nice UI + awesome art style + many funky items, skill tree + character choices + creative achievements [h1] Cons: [/h1] - a lot of problems with balancing and loot progression - it might be a little cryptic at first [b] Overall Thoughts: 8/10 [/b] It definitely has a lot of space for improvements, mostly when it comes to item balancing. However, at such a low price, you get a very creative game with some really awesome UI and visuals. [code]For more Hidden-Gems: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]

Drawngeon encountered a code error twice in the first six minutes I played, both of which forced the game to close; once when trying to view the control bindings and once while trying to browse the first merchant’s inventory list. After researching on the Steam forums, others experienced similar code errors last summer and apparently the dev fixed some of those instances for players, but they should not still exist over half a year later and in the first minutes of the game. The dev is responsive but it’s hard to trust this game to ever be coded correctly when he says the problem could be from using certain names at character creation. Update: it's not; it's due to using a controller even though the game cites Full Controller Support as a feature on the product page. It happens with both Steam and Xbox controllers but not with keyboard & mouse. Another player posted their equipped items vanished after using certain classes of weapons, and I never saw that addressed. When the dev says he’s fixed the issues, I’ll give it another shot and update this review but, for now, buy this game at your own risk.

In sum, I'm excited to spend more time with this game. It's cleverly done & kind of quirky/funny (the "skill tree" made me laugh). $5 US is very fair & it looks like there's a good array of content to carve through. I first wishlisted this because of the drawn art. I don't know if it's for everyone, but it took me straight back to middle and high school where I would scribble out adventures on tons of sheets of notebook paper. There's an extras section included in the game with pictures of the actual grid art used and it's really neat, but it also makes me wish the Devs had a higher quality scanner to bump up the detail in game; the side panel and 3d-space, even at max res, still are fairly pixelated. It might be intentional, but it would've been cool to see a clearer transition from paper -> gamespace. In terms of gameplay & premise, you have all the conventions of modern FPP dungeon crawlers with a couple unique twists. One of the areas I ventured into had a large number of projectile-spewing bats, so it kind of felt like a slower-paced horde shooters. Enemies have a decent variety of behaviors from what I've seen, with some avoiding you and other being much more aggressive. Active dodging is possible & it seems like melee combat in general is very deliberate & timing-based. The atmosphere is overall moody, with most of the sound effects being digitized monster calls and lonely howling wind for background sounds. I feel like this is a pretty niche title, but it's a niche I enjoy very much.