Blood Dungeon is pretty much what if you were trying to play Vampire Survivors but someone was shooting at your feet then a Satyr fell on your head minutes after you’d killed a giant skeletal worm with a laser and there was blood and bats everywhere and then you drowned.
Not to worry though, you got your dog a bone or a few hundred.
Generally, I am largely in Camp Brendy (subscriber link, but you can get the gist without) when it comes to autoshooters (though I have been thinking recently just how far ahead of its time Neon Wars was), I generally find them -at best- an okay way to pass the time and at worst, I would wish them into the infernal heat of the sun for being little more than a loose wrapper around gambling mechanics and a spreadsheet.
I don’t really care for the “are they a game?” argument because ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me one way or another, I just find them pretty shitty in general, whatever they claim to be and they could claim to be a banana for all I care.
Also, I am really tired of being asked to pick an upgrade from one of three things. Really tired.
Blood Dungeon falls into the earlier category of “an okay way to pass the time” for me, which for anyone else is probably “woah, love this videogame so much”. It is, in essence, an attempt at mashing the autoshooter into Spelunky-ish platforming and at that it is largely successful. By necessity it leaves a lot of the comedy cruelty of Spelunky behind in favour of chaos but it is not without its moments.
The introductory stage, the catacombs, is pretty forgiving even with its armed sentry doors and time gated walls, however once you start adding tighter spaces, different (and destructible) environments into the mix a bit later on, there are more ways to get yourself in a pickle and a panic. Having managed to lock myself between two time gated walls, whilst underwater and with my oxygen depleting, during a particularly vicious banshee attack, reader – I swore. I did, I did, I did.
Having spoken to a few people about this sort of thing, I realise this is not an entirely universal experience with autoshooters but I find the spreadsheet and incremental upgrade dominant play kinda flattens a game out in ways I struggle to enjoy myself with too much and so, it’s the same here.
When I play something like, I dunno, Tempest 2000 I am genuinely enjoying my time with it, I play it more not because it’s designed to keep me playing but because it thrills me – the movement, the lights, the sound, the game, all of it thrills me! Geometry Wars thrills me. Devastator, Bezier, Evil Egg thrill me. And obviously this is different strokes for different folks here but none of any of the current batch of autoshooters I’ve tried come close. Blood Dungeon is on the higher end of the scale compared to, well, pretty much most of the ones I’ve tried to date and yet still my mood goes no higher than “barely interested for a bit”
A lot of it is I struggle to give a shit when it comes to having to choose incremental upgrades. Plenty is certainly that I resent games built around traps and time wasting but as I say, Blood Dungeon is mechanically at least trying to be more than that and it has a character with a swinging pixel nob out as well so bonus points there too.
So yeah, I won’t say I don’t enjoy my time with Blood Dungeon because that is certainly not true, it’s just the amount of joy I can extract from any of these things seems to have a hard cap pretty much across the genre. And you know, that’s fine, not every genre has to be super exciting to me! It’s fine to not be that tense or involved, I just sometimes wish I could enjoy them more than I do. Alas, it is not happening and so it is for Blood Dungeon too.
It’s a perfectly fine thing, I just can’t get too excited about any of it. Maybe some day, someone will crack that one for me but as most people seem intent on just replicating the showiness of slot machines without any substance, maybe they won’t either and this is as good as it gets.
Which is a long way round of saying you’ll probably really like this here videogame.