Adventure Corner ~ Dungeons of Dreadrock

Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.

In this edition of the column, we take a look at Dungeons of Dreadrock (Switch version).

Dungeons of Dreadrock

Back in December, I received an alert from Nintendo encouraging me to use some points I had left on the eShop before they expired, so I did what I always do: trawl the discount bin to see how many little things I could get with whatever I had on hand. One of the two items I pulled out this time around was Dungeons of Dreadrock, originally for iOS and Steam, and also available on Switch. Somehow, I had never heard of this title ere now, though it earned itself accolades the year it was released.

One of the reasons I grabbed it was because its design aesthetic resembled the top-down view of many Zelda games. When the heroine gets her sword at the start, the combat feels similar to the bump-hit style of Ys games. However, it was quickly apparent that neither Zelda nor Ys provide the bedrock for this dire dive to dungeon depths.

No, this game feels like a good portion of its DNA is owed to The Tower of Druaga—but in a good way. Just as that infamous piece of gaming history presented an edifice of maze piled upon maze, so too does Dreadrock provide one hundred floors of dungeon with a dread master at the bottom. Some floors may require monsters to be slain, often in specific ways or in a certain order, while others have strange interactions of levers and traps. A few require back-and-forth with previous floors and their denizens. Every level is a puzzle to figure out, and while they generally are not so obtuse, the existence of a hint feature is welcome.

Live fast, fight hard, and leave a trail of re-dead-inated corpses

The story is simple enough. The titular Dungeon of Dreadrock is home to the Dead King, and every year a young man from the surrounding villages is chosen to be the Hero who must venture into the depths and destroy the Dead King once and for all. None have ever returned from this quest, and this year, the job falls on the shoulders of the younger brother of a certain young lady who is not willing to let things go as usual this year. Defying tradition and risking divine wrath, she takes up a blade and follows him into the depths before the worst may come to pass.

Graphically, Dreadrock mimics the palette and style of an SNES game while featuring much cleaner spritework. The dungeon floors are replete with minor visual cues, such as loose bricks that might provide material assistance or items that are just enough out of place to be significant. While everything is sized appropriately to fit within the bounds of a single screen, the pieces fit well together, and all feels like it is the proper size.

Get the feeling they don’t want any visitors…

The musical arrangement provides a nice background to the exploration, and the final battle is appropriately portentous. There is minor voice acting, mostly in the narratively styled descriptions of certain items or the reading of hint-providing scrolls. The main story segments, provided at regular intervals via resting points, are not voiced, but nothing is lost by keeping the text moving quickly.

It is a stretch to call Dungeons of Dreadrock an RPG, as it lacks most of the basic mechanics associated with one—not even hit points, a fact that it jokes about from time to time. In its essential motifs and style, however, Dreadrock is a quintessential product of someone who grew up alongside the genre and wanted to play with the imagery while hewing to a somewhat different genre. As I learned after writing all this, the developer is a fan of old CRPGs and adventure games, rather than my initial impression of Druaga, but it all comes together into a thing of its own. The final product has its ups and downs, but the ups are all good and the downs take the player further into the dungeon, so it’s still all good. For a short, fun, puzzling adventure, RPGamers are well served to look no further.

And as a further bonus, there’s a sequel that I need to look into, sometime soon…

Silly elder; heroines wait for no one!