DemonCrawl

I've seen some interesting twists on minesweeper, and hoped this would be a fresh one. sadly, what I found was a grab bag of disjoint mechanics which almost entirely serve to undermine the core fun of minesweeper (deduction), with the "roguelite" and "RPG" aspects (i.e. the "bursting with content") being low-effort skinner box fluff. which could almost have worked if I were especially bored, except instead of the cheese I came for my bait was styrofoam. the interface design is aggressively mediocre. this extends to a lot of things, but to avoid typing too much I'll focus on the landing screen which frankly feels like it was designed by brand managers who have never played a video game. I had to guess which among the horizontal row of indistinct icons was intended to be "new game" because even though they gained labels on hover, none of them actually said that. meanwhile I could not possibly miss the Discord link or the "buy DLC" messaging: clearly tuned for engagement metrics uber alles, the game merely a vehicle for Acquisition. the half-assery runs so deep they couldn't even be bothered to make sure that when you hit the first shop there's at least one item you can afford with …

Insanely replayable. Every run feels different and the synergies can get really fun once a build starts coming together. The devs have recently been updating it again, so it's worth it. That said, the crashing is honestly very very bad. It crashes way more than it should and it’s super annoying when you’re in the middle (or the end) of a good run. But somehow I still keep playing it anyway because the game is just that fun, in spite of it crashing. It actually makes me use my brain and I always feel weirdly tired after playing for a while. In a good way! But I notice I'd sleep longer after playing this.

There are genuinely fun ideas in this game, and at the beginning it's quite entertaining. But the longer you play, the less actual minesweeper you are playing. There is less and less deduction actually possible, instead you have to rely entirely on chance and on getting the right items to survive getting unlucky. For a game this simple and out this long, the technical sate is also quite horrible, there are tons of bugs I encountered along the way. I still recommend getting it on sale since it's just a few bucks, and the first few hours I genuinely enjoyed, which was enough to make it worth the purchase in my book.

The game crashes all the time, this has been the case for years and will probably never get fixed

YAY FUN

kaboom