I'd previously assumed that Desktop Dungeons had ventured in the realm of the NeverLaunch, alongside all the other roguelikes and indie games forever stuck in a state of beta. Since the original alpha back in 2010, the QCF design team have been tinkering, fixing and rebalancing, seemingly with no end in sight. In fact, the browser-based roguelike puzzler has nearly completed its randomly generated quest; it's reward a Steam release, planned for November 7th.
Desktop Dungeons condenses the traditional roguelike into a fast-paced puzzle dungeon crawler. As always in roguelikes, resources are key, but here you regenerate health and mana by lifting the fog of war that surrounds unexplored tiles. That means being clever about where you go, and when you attack - else you could leave yourself battered, and without the dark unknown needed to heal up.
In traditional early access style, pre-orders for Desktop Dungeons have been live for a while, with buyers being allowed into a closed-beta that was run through the game's website. There's even a demo, in the form of the original alpha release , freely playable in all its stagnant glory.
It's a lovely way to fit a dungeon crawler roguelike into digestible lunch-break sized bites, and it feeds into a Kingdom meta-layer that gives a permanence to your progress. Desktop Dungeons was pretty great years ago, so let's hope this full release will be better still.
After 17 years, devs of the only roguelike where players ask 'the best way to get the most limbs' can't believe its success: 'More people have bought Caves of Qud than are in this stadium, how do you reckon with that?'
Despite making a roguelike where you can have countless arms and legs, Caves of Qud's creators say the ideal form is a limbless sphere: 'We started in perfection and only moved farther from God'
