Etrian Odyssey HD

Etrian Odyssey is a classic dungeon crawler. Descend into the forest and map your surrounding areas while fighting monsters with a self-created party of up to 5 characters with different classes. There is a rudimentary story, side quests and many unlockable items and equipments by selling monster drops. Etrian Odyssey HD is a remake of the first Etrian Odyssey game, which released on the DS all the way back in 2007. It plays very well on the Steam Deck, which is probably the closest you can get to the original feeling, and has a few additional features like a changeable difficulty and automapping. Speaklng of the latter, I would highly recommend turning it on. The original game had you map the dungeon surroundings yourself. It does sound fun, and I did it for the first 5 floors before giving up, because it's so much harder and annoying on a Steam Deck (or even mouse and keyboard) than it would've been on the DS where you can just use the stylus on the bottom screen as you go. In this version, you can't do that and have to open up a separate overlay every few steps to map, which gets very tiring. Automapping helps and there are even several degrees of severity - even on the stron…

Great game, not worth 40 dollars. Grab the bundle of 3 games for 30. More than worth it.

The game that i used as my starting point years ago into the series, the game is great but it fail at making you feel weak, in fact at around lvl 30-40 your characters turn to be incredibly strong compared to what the game offer and difficulty wont come back from there on if you have some form of idea of what you are doing, i'd recommend as long as you are interested in getting into EO or into Dungeon Crawler genre.

TL;DR: Lots of backtracking/repitition. U-shaped, somewhat extreme difficulty curve. Nintendo-tier writing. Good game nonetheless. Flawed, but good casual game. Main painpoints: - No voice acting is a bummer - Expect Nintendo game writing. What little story that exists is just white noise to be tuned out. - Denuvo. - 63 hours for 100% completion (this is on the low end according to HowLongToBeat). - U-shaped difficulty curve. It starts off very hard when you have no skills and no items. It gets much easier as you scale, then becomes very hard again near the end when you reach level caps and equipment costs balloon. The first and final major bosses both required stat sheets, strategy guides, and trial and error from me to beat. - Probably too much backtracking. You only reach "checkpoints" every five floors. So often I'd make it to the seventh floor and want to heal, dump my loot, or recover from a persistent status effect. I'd then warp back to the main town and have to walk all the way back to the seventh floor from my checkpoint at the fifth floor. Every step you take is a chance at a random encounter, so I'd be grinding enemies the entire way. In the early game, warping back to…

This game can be grueling. It forces you to be efficient and mindful of your resources, as getting stranded in the middle of a floor with a wounded party is a death sentance. I love that feeling, where you're teetering on a knife's edge at the best of times. That being said, as the game can only save when you're in town, you will inevitably lose progress at some point. Going into the game, you should keep that in mind. Edit: Okay, when was I supposed to find out there was a quicksave function you can do in the dungeon? WTF game, I've lost hours of progress, all for nothing

The Etrian Odyssey series is one of the few Dungeon Crawler series where you can actually draw maps. I enjoy the series for both the fact that I can do cartography in-game and for the gameplay & story.