Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Grasp is a employees administration sport disguised as a dungeon administration sport. At first of every week, your minions may select to go on strike, demanding every little thing from extra cells within the jail to fewer dwarves within the office. If that second instance elicited a startled little “yikes”, then good, you’re paying consideration. Your minions are additionally occasional racists – which at the very least makes a number of the extra brutal choices at hand for coping with putting staff extra palatable.
You may sacrifice your complete picket line to your in-house demon lord, or terminate their employment with out tribunal. You can too lock them up in these prisons they repeatedly declare are so missing in cells. Or you’ll be able to comply with their phrases to broaden the canteen and sack all of their shortest colleagues. However regardless of which possibility you select, minion strikes are inconsequential, solely ever amounting to a comedy apart. Simply because the turn-based Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk got down to skewer D&D, Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Grasp is a courageous and self-aware parody of dungeon administration video games. Nevertheless it’s far too barebones to spend money on severely.
So that you’ve acquired the obvious danger of putting minions, and a relentless collection of jokes concerning the forms of working a dungeon. There’s an enormous, totally voiced script within the marketing campaign mode, stacked to the gills with foolish gags about technical admin-speak and the dungeon equal of an HOA. Every time a gaggle of adventurers invade your dungeon, the outcomes of the raid seem as a type to be stamped and signed off by your belligerent dungeon grasp.
It’s a superbly good angle of assault, however beneath the paperwork gags is a reasonably rudimentary dungeon simulator with simply the trimmings of one thing extra complicated. Right here’s the way it shakes down. You carve out rooms in your fort for the assorted features of your dungeoning enterprise, resembling kitchens, canteens, guard rooms and dormitories. Every of those fulfils the essential wants of your minions, who develop in rank as they work, and turn into extra demanding of high-quality rooms as they acquire expertise.
You enhance the standard of rooms by cramming them with rugs and photos and torches, which serves to extend your dungeon’s fame, unlocking new flooring on your dungeon and attracting larger and extra profitable enemies. You may ship events of minions out on raids and missions to different dungeons on a world map, which nets you small rewards and reputational modifications. And, in fact, you’ll be able to arrange traps for adventurers to stumble into.
In isolation, all of those points of the sport work simply advantageous. However Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Grasp by no means coheres into something greater than the sum of its concepts. Maxing out your rooms is trivial as soon as your tavern begins producing sufficient revenue, for instance, leaving you with little or no to really handle across the dungeon.
The employee strikes are one other good instance of this: your minions actually aren’t so useful or irreplaceable that it’s ever price making an attempt to appease any of them. There’s no highly effective union to reckon with, strikes are simply an inconvenient temper that descends in your in any other case happy staff at random, and which might all the time be fastened with a spherical of redundancies, or just by ready for them to turn into so bored that they stop.
There are extra simple points to deal with too, like how your complete minion workforce descends in your treasure room every week to gather their salaries on the identical time, solely to turn into so aggravated by the queue that they stop in frustration.
Even your highest ranked guards aren’t price retaining maintain of, as sufficient low-ranked peons can handily stave off most adventurer incursions. And in case your dungeon’s defenders fail and die, the penalty of shedding somewhat gold or a handful of sources is so insignificant as to not matter. Whether or not in sandbox mode or within the marketing campaign, the stability of issues means there’s actually not a lot that will problem a dungeon designer right here. The out there actual property is handed over manner too readily – you’re given entry to recent new flooring quicker than you’ve got any use for them, and by ground two you’re already filling the area with extras of rooms you’ve already acquired.
There are many little particulars to like. The sport appears to be like and sounds nice. Setting the dungeon in a high-rise fort quite than a number of storeys beneath the earth means you get a bucolic panorama as your fixed backdrop, as a substitute of miles of plain dust. There’s a enjoyable accounting menu that reveals you graphs of your dungeon’s income and losses, which made me gasp in delight after I found it, till I slowly realised that the display screen largely serves as a superficial extension of the sport’s working forms gag. I additionally then realised the sport’s financial system is so sparsely simulated that there’s no helpful operate to any of its charts and experiences.
Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Grasp scratches on the Dungeon Keeper itch for a short time, however the issue is that it’s a goofy, comedian fantasy story hoping to be carried by a administration simulator manner too barebones to help it. Parody solely works if the underlying supply is fascinating sufficient to be price investing in, and you’ll’t mockingly play one thing for any severe size of time earlier than feeling just like the joke is on you.
This evaluation is predicated on a duplicate of the sport offered by the writer.
