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Sometimes it's fun to kill people

  • Shinan
  • 08/26/2010 07:28 PM
  • 4277 views
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

Posts

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tardis
is it too late for ironhide facepalm
308
this review is excellent.
Thanks for the review!

I guess there isn't much I can say about your complaints that I haven't said elsewhere.

I think your perspective in this game is pretty interesting. Maybe the fact that you made the voice acting made you feel somewhat... intimate with the character, or the setting? Anyway, I think it's cool that you roleplayed the tortures and had design ideas that weren't 100% score oriented. I do that sometimes, and I expected someone else to do that, but no one had ever mentioned it.

In fact it would be great if finishing this game unlocked some kind of arcade torture mode.
I made a map for it in the game, but I'm not releasing as an actual version. :D
One thing I must comment on and I'll do it here though I guess I should really do it on the main Dungeoneer page comment thing.

Calunio. I've played Marvel Brothel and this game. And they strike me as similar in a very particular way. A way that is the reason I like these games. They both take an outrageous premise, a premise that any lesser gamemaker would turn into some kind of comedy game. But you (and yes I mean you), you take this premise and take it seriously.

Anyone could have made a whoring game with marvel characters filled with dick jokes. Anyone could have made a torture porn game focusing on gory effects and "ha ha I killed people. Aren't I bad?". These games would have sucked. And these are the kind of games one tends to think of when first confronted with these premises.

So yeah. I really like the outrageous premise + taking it seriously. It's something I tend to aim for myself (though unlike you I really have nothing to show for it) and I just want to say:

Good fucking job.
Thanks a bunch, Shinan. :D

It's really important for me to know that some people recognize the effort, especially while there are others who still compare my games to Chrono Trigger and such.

I had never thought of comparing both games like this.

Well, you just convinced me to stick with that formula on my next games... if any/ever.

Let's do something together some time.
comment=41746
Let's do something together some time.


Sounds like a "Come home with me."
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