Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer

I have a slight bias when writing about this game. In fact I probably shouldn't even review it. The thing is that I did the voice for the announcer who says all those beautiful things. It took me this long to play it though and I haven't been reviewing anything for a while and...

I mean... conflict of interest never stopped people from reviewing games before right?

I knew a lot about this game before entering the world of Dungeoneering (apart from reading all reviews about it and generally just following the game) so I had all the concepts down. And I also played the updated version with all the lovely visual aids. Basically I knew everything about this game except the actual plot.

Which surprised me. That plot is pretty awesome. As is the rest of the writing. The characterization and all that. The character bios that come up when you talk to people for the first time were pretty nice and everything had a feel of... Being thought-through.

Some of my favorite moments in the game were entirely plot related. Something I did not expect in a game where I get to torture people until they're out of their minds!

Speaking of torture I should probably say something about that too. It was a fun puzzle element that also had some roleplaying in it. I thought through different themes for the dungeons and creating stuff like long stretches of nothing and then TWO RAZORS AND A CHAINSAW. A thing that increased the enjoyment of the torturing was also that all the victims were sort of innocent. Which just made it better/worse.

The game threw me a lovely curveball after a particularily gruesome decision in a torture. Which I really liked. It's probably a very obvious one but I really liked how it made me feel "oooh shit"

But this game is not all flowers and butterflies. There are some annoyances in it too. There's some slow moments and the fact that I can't save where I want to and that when game overs happen they happen after a fairly long stretch of "no natural saving" it's annoying to backtrack after getting that game over. There's also one annoying bit that Strangeluv illustrated very well in his review. That part had me tearing my hair out and cursing at the world. Or something. I actually almost gave up on the game but I felt I sort of had to play it through. Now that I decided I would. You know.

This game is not for everyone. The lovely torturing mechanic is bogged down by things like a fairly bad interface. Creating a dungeon is a slow task and it's not obvious what the icons on the traps mean. (I always had descriptions on, otherwise I would never have been able to tell a water tank from stripping and you know something's wrong when you can't tell a water tank from stripping...)

There's a sound mechanic behind all of this (my high score was 437) that is very open to experimentation. In fact it would be great if finishing this game unlocked some kind of arcade torture mode.

So overall the game's enjoyable, it has good writing and a sound mechanic. The gameplay actual is a bit iffy at times but bearable.

And of course it features my voice of awesome :D