Diorama Dungeoncrawl

Delightful art style and overall very charming retro game. It feels like a 3d adaptation of an NES Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania game, but also exemplifies the aesthetic of classic pulp D&D that I personally love. On top of it all, I would recommend this game to anyone who loves to support independent solo developers. We all like to talk about how we want to see indie games take off and inherit the world in the wake of destruction left by our rapidly crumbling AAA game industry: here's a chance to make a difference!

increasingly frustrating as it goes on. wouldn't have wanted it any other way. surprisingly lenient when it counts, just mean enough to make you say things like "i can do it this time" or perhaps "next room has to have a save in it or i'm going to cry"

A difficult but fair 3D action platformer. Arcade style in the original sense, and feels like what I would expect from a modern take on the SNES/N64 era.

Honestly not a terrible game, but not a good one either. Pros: +I like the diorama aspect and some of the levels look nice. The inner sanctum especially has great colors and environments. +The design of your main character is funny, and some of the enemies stand out positively among others. +3 of the songs in the soundtrack are actually really good. The rest are forgettable. Cons: -Depth perception is a problem in some cases, it can be very difficult to tell where floating platforms are in relation to the camera. -You can run past most enemies, making the first few levels a joke and the last two levels really absurdly difficult. - Most of the charge attacks are more powerful, but hard to actually hit anything with. Only the shockwave is what I would consider "good." - HUGE difficulty spike on the last two levels. - Bosses are uninteresting and too similar to each other, the boss rush at the end makes this painfully obvious. I might have recommended DIorama Dungeoncrawl if it had proper playtesting and difficulty balance, but as it is, it's all over the place. 5/10.

Not a bad game, but doesn't quite get there in my eyes to recommend going out of your way to play. At its best there's some nice gauntlets, tricky platforming, and juggling of enemies and boss attacks. Level 5 is solid on the whole, and the lich is a good boss (quite polarising with/without powerups since the AoE is so essential, but once you figure that out it's still interesting to execute, jumping away from enemies to charge the strike mid-air but needing to land close to as many of the enemies as possible). At times it does feel like a pretty effective 3D castlevania. On the other side, there's a lot of rooms, especially early on, that you can either just waltz through without really engaging with what little goes on, or where there's a bit of challenge but the save points come so frequently that with 7 hp (iirc) you can just shrug off the hits you take and not look back. The bear is a notable difficulty spike, and I'm curious how many players walked past it, only to have to learn its moveset in the boss rush. Including the bear, when it does get harder, it's often through poorly conveyed depth, and/or contact damage that feels awkward to avoid, usually as a result of you hi…

As much fun as the first 3 or 4 levels were, how they choose to increase difficulty not by having harder enemies, but by level 7, 90-95% of your deaths will be from falling in to pits. There are so many platforming sections with ranged enemies, this game becomes less of a combat game, and more of a bullet hell game with tight platforming. A single shot from a enemy will bounce you 20ft back and off your platform with no chance of any save. The amount of rooms you need to clear in level 7 before checkpoints is beyond stupid. Boss's from previous levels become normal enemies here, fighting them back to back with no saves and no items. . . fun? Some will have a item and health spawn, but the most do not, so if you win hit a checkpoint then die, you loose your power ups for the next fight. TLDR: Game was fun at the start but level/skill curve becomes less combat focused and more tight platforming and boss fights with no items.