Back in 2022, I spent a lot of time playing the Dome Keeper demo on Steam and I really enjoyed it but I never got around to fully reviewing it which is why I wanted to talk about this game that I’ve been playing a lot over the years.
Developer: bippinbits
Publisher: Raw Fury
Genre: Indie, 2D, Roguelike Tower-Defense Management
Release Date: September 27th, 2022
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC (Win, mac, Lin)
Copy was purchased.
Dome Keeper (formerly known as Dome Romantik before they changed their name for copyright reasons) is a Roguelike-Strategy game that is all about time and resource management. You spawn on an alien planet in a dome to mine resources and uncover a relic.
This relic is very powerful which is why you risk your life to retrieve it… but the local fauna on this planet you’re on isn’t too happy with you not just landing here but essentially exploiting their planet.
As such, you’ll spend your time during so-called “cycles” mining resources and bringing them back to the dome. Then, spend those resources on upgrades for your defences and better mining efficiency so that you can grab resources even more easily. At the end of each cycle, you’ll defend your dome against an onslaught of alien attackers that come at you with everything they got – and more per cycle you spend on this planet. It gets difficult.
It’s a very innovative game that combines core aspects of the roguelike formula, namely resource management and decision-making, with a rather different approach to gameplay.
The game gets pretty difficult quickly, especially in higher-difficulty settings, where your skills and acquired knowledge get their time to shine. As you go deeper, it takes longer for you to mine blocks and resources might become scarcer. Thus, you develop strategies for your character, try to optimize your mining habits, utilize resources well, and try not to get too greedy.
Combat itself is comprised of your dome facing attacks from the sky, the west side and/or the east side. You typically have an attack button and some movement options – and if you dig up corresponding supplements and gadgets, you might even have further active abilities or items to aid you in battle. It’s fast-forward and simple but offers a ton of tactical gameplay.
Furthermore, each dome comes with things they’re good at and things they struggle against.
The default “Laser Dome” struggles against groups of enemies but performs really well against singular enemies, especially due to its infinite range – meanwhile my absolute favourite dome, the Sword Dome, is exceptional in melee combat but struggles against flying enemies due to its reliance on charging up a “stab” attack and also landing it.
Each dome can be upgraded along various paths to either compensate for weaknesses, bulk up defences or further specialize in specific directions. Be it a second laser as the laser dome, wider explosions or higher impact damage on the artillery dome, an agile shock blade versus a slow heavy blade on the sword dome, and more.
There are a lot of options to really customize your experience and perhaps even deal with individual challenges as you please.
I mentioned gadgets before. They’re essential items you pick up as you go deeper into mining resources. You might encounter these 2×2 blocks of tech that, when dug up, grant you an ability of sorts to further upgrade your capabilities. Some of the tech applies to the cellar of your dome, allowing you to grow performance-enhancing shrooms or produce very volatile mining bombs.
Other gadgets might help you with gathering resources – like the lift that transports resources upwards into the dome or the scanner that helps you locate said resources in the mines. There are a lot of them and each one of them can also be upgraded in the resource tree.
Dome Keeper is a pretty simple game at first glance but it has a surprising amount of depth, and I haven’t even talked about two relatively different characters that the game features, the various primary gadgets you can take on your journey, and various game modes that are available for play.
All of this is accompanied by a wonderfully serene soundtrack that really lets you relax in between the vicious waves, as well as a beautifully crafted visual style comprised of relatively detailed pixel art, various colour palettes and “alien world” backdrops & designs, as well as small details, like little critters and various plants inhabiting your mines as you dig deeper.
The experience does struggle, however, to keep things fresh in the long term, in my experience. I’ve played, at the time of writing, sixty hours over the years, which is a good amount of time spent on a game like this, of course, but I do play in sporadic bursts rather than a lot of it at one time, and that’s for a reason.
Once you’ve tried all the different builds, you’ll just end up playing the game with whatever feels best for you at the time. You optimise the experience based on your acquired knowledge and the runs do get pretty same-y. Yes, the procedural generation, especially with the somewhat random distributions of harder and more brittle rocks does aid in making runs more varied but they only help so much.
In fact, that last part is something that I also find a bit rough, personally, as there are times where you might just struggle to find the right resources at the right time, or at all. I’ve had runs that were plagued by a lack of water and hence completely lacking specific upgrades, especially for all of the gadgets. I’ve had runs that were lost due to a lack of gadgets… and looking at the timelapse afterwards, I wasn’t surprised to see that there weren’t any resources I needed anywhere close to where I was.
The procedural generation can be quite punishing at times but the bigger issue here is the repetitive nature of the game that doesn’t get fixed by other core mechanics of the rogue-like genre. Specifically, The Binding of Isaac, a very different game, keeps things fresh either via the introduction of new characters or via the many, many, many different items in the game. Dome Keeper’s list of items is fairly limited in comparison. There are also only two characters in the game and the Assessor feels just odd to play.
The game does, however, also feature a prestige mode that plays a bit differently, as well as the many “Guild Assignments” that provide unique and incredibly interesting challenges, not to mention modded content that you can add pretty easily to get the game and modifiers you can apply to your runs for more custom experiences.
All in all, I do love the game. I spend a good chunk of time here, after all… but I can’t help but sometimes drift away from it to then not play it at all for many moons before eventually returning back to Dome Keeper. I think that’s fine for roguelikes. For most games, that’s how it’s supposed to be played, in a way, and honestly, I’m glad that the game is still getting updates even so long after its 1.0 – not to mention multiplayer being in the works.
If you do like unique gameplay experiences that are easy to get into, highly addictive and relatively relaxed even with the more difficult waves of enemies later on, I highly recommend Dome Keeper.
If you’re a competitive person you might consider racing against other people on the prestige mode leaderboards where you should find plenty of people to compete against and if you’re more laid-back, there are plenty of “pets” to collect and you can even disable enemy waves altogether to just relax in the mines.
Dome Keeper is a game that I do return to from time to time. It’s unique enough in its premise that I just get an “itch” for it whenever I don’t play it for a while. There haven’t been too many games that hit that very same “itch” to this day, so this is some great praise, in my opinion.
Hence, I’m definitely recommending the game to fans of roguelites and tower defence games of any kind, especially if you do enjoy a sense of agency, even if the procedural generation can at times screw you over a little.
On an unrelated note, if you’d like to see me make silly mistakes in this game, feel free to check out my playlist of various runs over here. Been getting back into uploading content more regularly on my channel and figured it would be a nice extension to reviews like this one in case people wanna see some of the gameplay and not just read about the game.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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