It’s just five floors, I thought, as I ventured with my party onto the first floor. We barely made it through the first two fights, losing our healer in the third and our enthusiastic Valkyrie in the fifth. Later on the second floor, the reanimated corpse of our Valkyrie warrior decided to come back at us and bring us to Valhalla. Fun stuff. Guess we’ll start from the beginning.
Demond Lord Reincarnation tries itself at the First-Person Dungeon Crawler formula that games like Wizardry and Oubliette created, and while they try to pay homage to those RPG Classics, the developers over at Graverobber Foundation ultimately fail to understand why game design has moved on in the last forty years… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Developer: Graverobber Foundation Publisher: Graverobber Foundation Genre: Indie, Turn-Based, First-Person, RPG, Dungeon Crawler Release Date: July 19th, 2023 Reviewed on: PC Available on: PC Copy was provided by the developers.
Long ago, a party of heroes defeated and sealed away the Demon Lord. Now that the seal is weakening and now that monsters are swarming the dungeon again, it is upon you and your band of companions to venture down there and defeat the Demon Lord once and for all.
It’s a very classic though generic premise but in the end, Demon Lord Reincarnation doesn’t beat around the bush.
Starting off in a little room above the dungeon, you draft new comrades to venture with on your grand conquest. While you select comrades, you’ll need to cover all damage types.
Explanations about each class can be found in the manual that the game comes with.
The dungeon consists of five floors on a 20 by 20 room grid. There is no map, meaning you’re required to manually sketch out the rough layout and check for your position using the “check” option in the menu (spacebar).
This is also explained in the manual that the game comes with.
The empty corridors and rooms you traverse are dimly lit and incredibly gloomy, adding to the tense atmosphere that the music provides you with. It’s an incredibly immersive experience, although I’d wish there was at least some sort of graphic for treasure chests or static enemies to add to the immersion.
Sporadically, you’ll encounter enemies to fight in a turn-based manner. Select the attack you want to use, the target you wanna focus on, and the fight plays out on its own.
In combat, party members can find inspiration enabling them to learn new attacks, adding much-needed utilities or status effects to their repertoire. These skills also can then level up through repeated use, as your party member’s proficiency with them increases.
This is explained in the manual. There is even a recommendation to unlock and max out as many skills as possible before the last fight.
Demon Lord Reincarnation features a non-traditional levelling system where your party members will gain stats after tough fights instead of just levelling after receiving a set amount of experience, as the manual also explains.
And well,… the game comes with a manual. Did I mention that already? It’s kind of the big gimmick of Demon Lord Reincarnation because the game design hasn’t moved on from that for a reason.
As cute as having a manual is, I wish the developers would just let me check out stats and skills in the actual game so that I can learn what each thing does. The ability to read about skills was only recently added to the game. This certainly is a step in the right direction, but why do I still need to open a PDF file to see what different stats affect?
The manual is a gimmick. Modern games feature at least the option to hover over stats to explain what they do. Most modern RPGs feature skill descriptions and other features that make the game more enjoyable.
I get that the devs are trying to go for a retro experience but they mistake the limitations that developers faced forty years ago for genius design decisions instead of actually playing their own game.
Furthermore, they don’t value the player’s time at all. At least, I find it ridiculous that the developers made enemies scale with the player. Your high-vitality tank can get oneshot by an enemy on the first floor after you backtrack to explore more. This isn’t fun. It’s just stupid.
Your very first dive into the dungeon is an immersive and tense experience. It’s an atmospheric adventure that I personally enjoyed a lot. Once your party meets its demise, though, the game just has you try again from the beginning with a new party that matches the level of your previous party. In a way, this is very much similar to incremental gaming. Not so retro after all?
The fact that the game doesn’t explain anything and has enemies scale with you while also demanding that you grind skill levels and random (perhaps deadly) encounters only to then possibly meet your demise against the Demon Lord is stupid. It’s bad game design. It’s very much anti-fun.
I’m not hating on the manual for being required literature for a video game, btw. It’s a cute gimmick… but also, it’s just that. The developers aren’t doing anything with the idea of a game manual. Instead, they just have it be there to not program a glossary or tutorial into the game.
If it looked pretty, that’d be cool – after all, older games also put a lot into the design of their actual manuals. But all the information that the manual provides could also just be in the actual game, especially in 2023. It’s not even like one excludes the other.
If the manual featured small puzzles that you’d have to solve to crack a code and unlock a cheat code of sorts, that would very much be a retro thing that I’d stand for – and an interesting way to use a manual, on top of that, possibly enabling auto-mapping or giving you a one-time revive.
As it stands, though, the game ruins all immersion by having the player tab out of the game to browse the manual for any questions they may have.
What’s the point of First-Person Dungeon Crawling if you’re non-stop pulled out of the game’s immersion by having to doodle on your self-drawn map or look through a document?
Another big issue for me is the lack of accessibility settings.
You cannot disable the flashing lights you encounter when you enter a chain of rooms, like on the second floor. There’s no photosensitivity warning anywhere… not even in the manual.
There are very realistic-looking tarantula enemies that trigger my arachnophobia and make the game unplayable, in my opinion. How about introducing an arachnophobia mode that just replaces those with other enemies? After all, whether it is a snake or a spider that poisons me doesn’t matter.
Simple quality-of-life changes and accessibility options like the option to rebind keys aren’t much to ask at all and yet the developers fail to even think about it because they focus way too hard on creating an experience that is stuck in the 80s, and it’s not even that great.
I really wanna like Demon Lord Reincarnation, especially as the second half of the game lets you play as the Demon Lord breaking out… but as it stands, I will never get to that point because the game is just designed to be anti-fun, overly grindy and unreasonably harsh.
There are a lot of aspects that made the game frustrating to play. Some of those aspects have been fixed, so I’m willing to give it another try after many more updates… but at the moment, I just really can’t recommend this to anyone who values their time.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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