DemonCrawl Reviews

If cloud saves got fixed, I'd say yes.

Mines

I've been waiting this kind of the one.

Great and very fun twist on minesweeper, but don't trust steam's cloud save I lost like a week of playtime in which I unlocked a bunch of masteries when switching to my newer pc cuz of it

The game is pretty fun, but it suddenly stopped getting updates. In its current state, the game is unbalanced and broken. You can buy a >8$ DLC for the game for content in a mode that doesn't work and is stuck in beta. It is impossible to easily find out ANY news for the game anymore. It sucks what happened to this game

Ive played this game a lot but the game has only become more and more unstable, crashing multiple times per stage when you have items that just do too much. Its sad, it was a great game.

The game is abandoned, and that's what you need to know first before you buy. And the game has been left in an unstable state. I am all for games having a lifespan and losing support as time goes on. But, anyone would agree that a game should playable when a developer moves on. The developer had lost then later found his build of the game but will *still* not return. The reason Demoncrawl cannot be fixed is a mix of gameplay and game engine issues. When you first start playing, knowing Minesweeper or not, the game is a blast. It's simple tile clicking, number punching, and mine avoidance. Then the items come into play. You can use a stick to avoid having to click a box, maybe safely "detonate" a mine (in this game they're monsters). And with weak enough monsters or high enough health, you can tank at least one extra hit even if you read the numbers wrong! During this game's service-era, the updates were very positive for nerfing items that were too strong or improving weak ones. There was a great amount of community feedback taken into account! But Demoncrawl was getting old. Bloated. Its engine nearing obsolescence. And a good player knows how to get far in a game. They know how to manipulate items and probabilities, working on saving every coin and piece of health. And that's when the game will start to falter. The further in the game you get, the monsters get more dense. The board size reaches a soft cap, but the monsters will keep growing in population. And it is completely unavoidable to have to start guessing. Even in early stages of harder difficulties, you MUST guess. You MUST gamble. And a run you worked on for an hour can be unfairly ended because the game said "50/50, you must take it, you cannot leave it." Even if you play on the difficulty meant to have no guessing, the algorithm will cave and can force guessing for those avoiding it. Additionally, the easiest difficulty that in-theory has no guessing has unlocks disabled. So you are further pushed towards walking on a mine. There are few items to reduce guessing, and the items that help mitigate guessing are usually weak. If you find a way to power through, punch a hole through the ranks of monsters, a random stage mod can shut down your run before making any amount of meta progression. And if you fight tooth and nail, gathering the god run, hoarding revives and health, finding item combos and gear that make you near immortal... That's when the game itself will again give up. The engine Demoncrawl is built on has no way to stop infinite loops. It cannot handle up to a number of interactions happening in one turn. I've gotten builds where clicking on a starting tile will crash the game with no way to throw away that one item that's ruining everything. Where the Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain ask you to take everything and break everything, Demoncrawl cannot stand even a quarter of the insanity of an Isaac run can handle before a crash. In a game with a rising difficulty curve, say another roguelike Hades or Binding of Isaac, dying far in a run feels like a skill issue. It's what makes a good roguelike. You die but you learn. You feel satisfied when you reach that point again and do better. In Demoncrawl, the difficulty becomes a series of coin-flips. A 6/7. A 2/4. A 1/2. A 3/5. Demoncrawl makes you feel bad for getting better at the game. If you reach a point you died previously your thoughts will not be "Okay, I know this guy's pattern now!", it will be "I hope I get an item or two that can help me with the guesses. Well, I didn't, but maybe I won't have to this time... Oh." I liked Demoncrawl for a long time. I may still return here and there. But there are many bugs with the game and game design decisions that make it unplayable in the long run. Special stages that don't work, items that break or don't do what they say, seasonal events like Easter and Halloween are bugged, and of course the scaling number of guesses is not a solution to difficulty. And this all is not mentioning the multiplayer called Arena. It's been in beta. It will stay in beta. If the servers are up for the 10% of the time that they are, your opponents WILL be computers since no one plays. Do not buy the DLC that's a battlepass, for servers being down a majority of the time means your purchase meant nothing a majority of the time. Hell, I bought the DLC and the game didn't register it for TWO MONTHS. Don't buy Demoncrawl. Demand Demoncrawl get fixed. I want Demoncrawl to be fixed! I don't want it to be left to rot! I want to play this game! But Demoncrawl will stay in a sorry state until someone comes along and finds the impossible way to mod the game just to fix what the developer is choosing not to.