Depth Dwellers (1994) Steam Charts & Stats

It's Depth Dwellers, alright. Dosbox as usual with these kinds of releases. Controls are very stiff, but it's totally playable on the keyboard. It's a great nostalgia trip to play this again, though I can only take a little bit at a time. Unique mechanics for the time like jumping/ducking, with a focus on saving NPC civilians. Absolutely worth it if you want to play a keyboard-only 3D shooter from 1994 that feels like it's from 1990.

If you know Depth Dwellers by its reputation, well it's not entirely without merit. It's especially true when you compare it to its contemporaries. But, we're no longer in the 1990s. We can look back at this game for what it is rather than what else was out. It becomes something a bit more in that context. First, I'd like to address the technical part. This is emulated with DOSBox Staging, an improved continuation of the original DOSBox. You're getting full screen by default but it's no longer a 320x240 sized box taking over your monitor like with most of the old DOSBox configured games. It's more like a borderless window experience and you can capture and release your mouse cursor with just a middle mouse wheel click; handy for multimonitor bouncing. And going to windowed mode with Alt+Enter also leaves you with a decent sized window rather than the aforementioned small box. It also has the benefit of Staging's CRT filter that auto adjusts to the screen size. If you like CRT filters, you may like this. If you don't, it's not very pronounced or obnoxious like some scanline filters are so it's easy to look past. Onto the game itself. As of the time of this review, they've managed to dig up a lost version 1.73 of the game from old CDs. What that means is Depth Dwellers finally has functioning mouse control! Now, that doesn't mean circle strafing modern mouse controls. You push the mouse forward and back to move forward and backwards with left and right turning. Boost your mouse DPI a bit and you actually get a pretty responsive experience that allows for some better movement than the keyboard alone offered. The red and blue 3D glasses mode is still here and actually worked decently for me with one caveat: finding secret walls becomes nearly impossible. They tend to have a slight bit of different color on them but that's all blended together in the mix of red and blue. You're back to wall crawling trying to find the ones that open. But if you're willing to put aside secret hunting for a few minutes, you can experience a novel bit of early 3D gaming. And surprisingly, the lives system isn't a full reset on death like most first person shooters of the time. You continue on the same level with the same progress. The only loss is your weapons reset to what the episode starts you with so leave those extra weapons as spares if you want to play without the usual PC FPS save scumming. Outside of all that... it's Depth Dwellers! Good, bad, and whatever, it's the same game. But for the cost of a shareware diskette from the local computer show, you get the full game with a proper effort to make sure it looks and plays well on a modern computer. It's obviously an old game. It's obviously not the best of its era. But it's a scrappy little game that I can't help but applaud the effort; moreso today with v1.73 than the older v1.6 or earlier. It's certainly the best version of itself and that to me was worth the $1.99 USD I dropped on it. Take a look at the gameplay video on the page and make your own determination.

Should you buy this game? Probably not. Only if you are curious about old/obscure games. Im not trying to tell you the game completely sucks, because it doesn't. It just gets really really boring and repetitive the longer you play it. All you do is go trough maze like levels searching for keys while killing the same enemies over and over again. The game feels fun at the beginning but for me it started to feel a bit tedious in the middle of the second chapter. I was about to play trough this whole game, but then my save files got corrupted for some reason. Maybe that was for good. The controls are really crappy, but youll learn to move flawlessly if youre patient enough. Theres alot of different weapons that look ugly, but are cool and fun to use. You can also shoot the bullets etc. fired by your enemies to make them disappear which is pretty cool. The story is fine, it involves you liberating human slaves from their alien overlords or something. Oh, and theres literally only 1 song in this games soundtrack and it keeps playing on loop in every single level. In each level you have to find the hidden key and then find the exit. The game also encourages you to free all the slaves on your way out but you really dont have to bother with it. I think theres like 4 different enemy types and the game introduces new enemies very rarely. Even the weakest enemies can drain your health really quickly. Youre gonna end up screwed if you lose some of those stronger weapons, which is why you better remember to load the game after each death despite the fact that the game keeps letting you respawn as long as you have lives left. Most people who know this game seem to have played it for the first time back in the 90's. I bet back in the day a poor kid could have had a whole lot of fun with a game like this, but there were way better fps games made right before and right after this game and most of them can be easily obtained nowadays.

Y'know, I think this is even worse than I expected it to be. I spent nearly an hour wandering around the first level with no real idea of what I was supposed to be doing. Even reading the in-game help file didn't really explain things, though I did learn that I could save the captives instead of just shooting them. Whoops. The music sounds depressed to be associated with the game. Every god damn room looks the same. Occasionally they'll put a chair or something in there but otherwise, identical. I've seen people complain about Wolf 3D's similar looking hallways but that's downright handholding compared to Depth Dwellers! The one cool thing in it is the red/cyan 3D glasses mode. It doesn't make it good but it's a fun gimmick. Taking the glasses out of my Wimmen's Comix collection to play Depth Dwellers seems like a low-point in my life though. Wimmen's Comix is much much better lmao. Game sucks a lot. Highly recommended.