Recent reviews by EntropyNines

they fixed gam,e :]

You may have noticed I have played this game for about an hour. I got all the achievements in that hour. I have pretty much no desire to play this game again.

The thing with this game is that it's kind of trying to be a roguelike with metaprogression, but it lacks the content to do so. Enemies will drop random powerups that increase aspects of your ship, like the power of your bullets, amount of bullets, amount of missiles, and the speed and area of your bullet-and-enemy clearing field-- basically a rechargable bomb.

Between runs, you can take money you've gotten by defeating enemies and purchase permanent ones that basically have you start with X levels of the upgrade in question. I challenged myself to get every achievement without the use of the health-up one, because I assumed this system, and the lack of downgrading, would quickly cause the game to become too easy.

I mean. I was *kind of* right, I guess.

The thing with this game is that run difficulty swings wildly, entirely dependant on RNG. It's possible to get very few upgrades early on, and then because enemies become tanky quickly, become unable to easily defeat them and get more powerups and oops that's a downward spiral in the making.

Or, you get fed a million fire rate ups, and suddenly the game stops having any difficulty. My final achivement, for getting to Level 12, was basically just me waiting until the game fed me enough that I didn't really have to try.

Not like you particuarly need to try anyway. This game has like, 6 enemy types total, maybe 2 of which are actually threatening. The lack of variety and creativity in *everything*, from enemies to music to shot types (there is none, lol) to upgrades to even shot patterns (if it is possible to have "stock bullet patterns," this game has them) makes the game very dull and very repetitive very quickly, which is a death blow to any aspiring roguelike.

(also you can't rebind controls in-game and there's no autofire button. in *2024*.)

There's good *here*-- there is a certain aspect of mindless fun in becoming a killing machine, even if it never goes very far due to lack of variety in upgrades. Bullet clearing is very satisfying if you can get multiple enemies caught and instantly killed in it.

But it doesn't last. There's not enough here, not enough polish, for me to even feel like I got 5 dollars worth out of the game.

[IGNORE ALL OF THIS, THEY FIXED IT]

This review contains SPOILERS. This is necessary, because the TL;DR is that this game changes quite a lot halfway through, and I very much did not like how it changed and how this was not signaled by either the demo, the marketing, or the first half of the game.

Rungore is a game that caught my eye because of two things-- the frantic yet thoughtful real-time Slay the Spire gameplay, and the ultra-memey humor that is right up my alley.

By the halfway point, the game drops both. Obviously, this is very frustrating.

I have zero issues with the first half of the game. It's great. It feels like there is some real thought put into gameplay. It feels awesome to unload a massive combo that fits into your build. The enemy encounters are all thoughtfully crafted, feeling restrained enough to be doable but creative enough to keep each run and level fresh and unique.

And then you finish a very hard test of everything you've learned. The game fake-crashes. And then it all goes down the drain.

The humor from this point on is basically just straight up gone, replaced with... some attempt at horror that absolutely did not land for me, and an attempt at serious lore that also did not land for me because this is the same game with dog memes in its card icons. So already that makes the game duller.

But the attempt at horror has knock-on effects for the rest of the gameplay. Every level from now on has this aggravating dark filter that makes it harder to see for no real reason. Gone is the awesome, heart-pumping soundtrack, replaced with semi-generic ambiance. Gone are the wacky, meme-y enemy designs and events, replaced with... iunno things that TRY to be spooky and as such are so much more generic.

By far the worst effect of this is what it does to the gameplay.

The level design from the turning point onward can best be described with "complete lack of restraint." It literally feels like the devs put whatever they felt like, whatever they thought up, into the game.
Enemies that attack every frame? Cool, put it in.
Enemies that clone themselves so much they have "may lag the game" in their description? Put it in.
Events that randomly give you cards that kill you instantly and shuffle themselves around in your hand so you accidentally use them? Yep.
Monsters that require you to constantly be moving your mouse or they spawn tinier monsters? Sure.

It's so utterly unhinged, but it's not even in a good way. It doesn't feel like the gameplay is evolving or iterating upon what came before, it doesn't feel like I am actually thinking about my gameplay choices in any different way, it just feels like i'm playing the same classes the same way I did before but this time a particularly lame version of WarioWare is stacked on top. Every encounter is just some new insane "gotcha" where you have to play the game the same way you were doing it already but this time wiggle your mouse or get punished!!!

At one point the game crashed right at the end of a level and I unlocked a potion with a placeholder description and I had legitimately no clue if it was intentional or not. That was the point in which I'd decided I'd had enough.

So, would I recommend this game? Nah. It was promising and fun, but I wouldn't even say the first half makes it worth it-- not when it's building toward an endgame that seemingly doesn't exist. I feel... slightly baited, I guess?

Unpolished, but hilariously fun and inventive, with a breakneck pace and mechanics that flow super well once you know what you're doing. Give it a couple runs to learn the mechanics and it's super worth the low price.

I'm a tester for this game. (Look, ma, I'm in the credits!)

With that being said, when this game launched, I was legitimately very surprised that it was three dollars, because this is not a three dollar game-- it easily has like 10 to maybe even 15 dollars worth of content, more if you particularly like randomizers.

This game has a very specific niche it falls into. If you like top-down zelda-likes with a bit more Metroidvania flair, this game is absolutely amazing. There is seriously so much replay value packed into this, from multiple playable characters to a really expansive randomizer.

If you're looking at this page in the first place, you're probably already interested in what this has to offer. I can tell you right now-- it's totally worth it.

i absolutely adore this game i just hate how the nudity, even censored, means i can't play it in front of friends or family :[

This game is absolutely fantastic.

Don't get me wrong, when you boot up this game you know *exactly* what you're getting into. It's rough. The graphics are rough, often having mixels and slightly janky animations. The gameplay has absolutely zero tutorialization. It's not by any means something with an even average budget. That's its greatest strength.

As I played, I noted things I didn't know and found out by complete accident. I noted design decisions I disagreed with-- the inability to check what items do in the middle of a run, the inability to not pick one up when standing on it, the sometimes awkward and cumbersome UI that I only later found out you have the ability to reduce. A roll that isn't indicated you can perform and doesn't actually give iframes.

And then I kept playing. And kept playing. Surely this time I'll get farther. Just one more run couldn't hurt. And then I realized, *despite* its rough edges... I was having some real fun. It's inherently simple. It's dopamine-inducing-- you get the same power escalation as games like Vampire Survivors with some slightly more involved gameplay. It's just so fun to find all these rare equipment, watch the numbers go up, pick up passive after passive, slaughter everything in your way, eventually get slaughtered yourself when the enemies become so overwhelming they shower you in bullets at the same time you're showering them.

No, The Dark Realm is not an AAA game. It's pretty clearly a passion product. And *that* is what keeps me coming back, booting up the game every now and again.

Just one more run.

EDIT: Game's still buggy, but it's significantly more playable now, so my review's changed to a positive one. Just expect some bugs.


EDIT: Joining games is now much more stable, but basic game progression is still liable to break. It's getting better, but I'd still hold off for now.

This game is free. That's a pretty large plus.
That being said, this game is also nearly unplayable.

Let me explain my experience.

I spent nearly 40 minutes, cumulatively, hopping from lobby to lobby. The reason for this is because the game's multiplayer is horribly glitchy. It takes forever to join a game because 80% of the time, the host will start the game, get stuck on a gray screen, and lose connection.

I managed to get in the game twice. Both times, over half the lobby lost connection or got stuck on a gray screen before even starting. The game has no failsafes in place at all for people leaving the game. If this happens, the game progression is wrecked, and the players who were supposed to be host to their clients will be unable to connect to their client and be softlocked, requiring a debug command so they can be host to themselves. Both times, this ended up ruining the session, and the players left quickly.

I figured I'd start a solo session as a last ditch effort to get the game to work. It worked perfectly up until I was supposed to enter the Medium and then the game stopped responding. I gave up.

It takes a lot for me to actively not reccommend a free game, but the game being so broken I can't even play it properly will do it. This game has potential, and if it lives up to it i'd be happy to change my review, but it's just not worth your time, currently, in my opinion.

So, I bought this game as a quick idle fix. It seems to be something along the lines of The Prestige Tree and its offshoots, and I enjoyed those, so I was hoping it would give me at least a couple of hours of enjoyment for the 1 buck price.

It gave me maybe 10 minutes.

To begin with, this game has no content *at all* pre-packaged with it. All of its generator types and tiers and upgrades are based on Steam workshop. Luckily, the game comes with 5 base mods. Unluckily, those are the only 5 mods the game has. So the "example" content is the only content the game even has at base.
This already struck me as a bad sign, but who knows, maybe it'll be good.

So let's talk about those mods, then, since they're the content.

Mod 1 is a basic currency. The last currency you unlocked can be transferred into this new currency, at a rate that is never explained. (This will become a recurring issue, believe me.) You can also increase total income of it by clicking an X button, at a price and effect that is never explained. You can ALSO auto-generate said currency by clicking a G button, at a rate and price which is yet again never explained.

So, basic as can be, but with an ominous undertone of critical information not being explained.

Mod 2 is... some sort of multiplier? It displays two currencies being multiplied (eg. A*B) and, uh, two buttons labeled X and XX? None of this has any tooltip at all. I have no idea what this does, how it works, what it costs, or even what currency it costs, but occasionally a currency went up faster when I clicked XX.

As for mods 3 through 5? Never showed up. I went 21 layers in, and then just to check, I started a new save, made absolutely sure I'd set for them to appear, and went 9 layers deep, and they just never appeared.

So there's exactly 2 different types of layer at the moment.

After 10 layers, you can prestige to increase your Ticks per Second. It doesn't display what the new value will be. I didn't really notice much of a difference, but it just seems like pointless padding to me since it unlocked nothing new.

Aside from the actual content, there's somehow a lack of polish? This game has one sound effect, for clicking a button, and it eventually stopped playing around layer 3. The buttons are occasionally unresponsive, and popup windows sometimes get stuck. These are not things I would nitpick on, but the lack of content kind of highlights their existence in a nasty way.

As far as I can tell, this is not an Early Access title. But in my opinion, this should not have been put on steam. This looks not just like a pre-alpha, it looks like a game that has just started development. It's not just undercooked, the baker has yet to preheat the oven. It's not worth the asking price of a dollar, unfortunately.

THIS REVIEW IS PROBABLY INACCURATE NOW THAT THE GAME IS OUT OF EA, CHANGED TO RECOMMENDED FOR NOW, WILL UPDATE WHEN I HAVE TIME TO EXPLORE THE GAME AGAIN

I have more than 350 hours in this game.

I think I hate it.
See, on paper this game is an absolute dream-- and in structure, it is too! Thousands of creatures to collect, each with unqiue traits that can assemble many unique teams? Thousands of THINGS to collect?? Wow, this is *exactly* my game!

Except. God, where do I even begin.

First of all, this game will never let you experiment with anything ever. Not without a permanent cost. Making artifacts to equip your creatures is incredibly costly, and if you stick things like trait materials and nether stones on them, taking them off destroys them altogether. Doing anything other than basic exploration costs rare resources, so you'd better hope your team pulls through or that set of traits interacts exactly how you thought they would, or you're wasting stuff like keys, the entrance cost of the arena, etc. etc. There is no training dummy to test stuff out.

I am actively DISCOURAGED from experimenting. When a team doesn't work, i've wasted so many resources that it feels like there was no point at all.

Even if you do have a team that works, there's not much to use it on that won't cost you. Basic exploration is incredibly easy, offers zero variety or challenge, and the game absolutely loves forcing you to spend most of your time in empty realms with basically nothing in them-- essentially, a waste of time.

I loved the idea of this game. And for the first 200 something hours, it was great. But now, my experience has been tainted with frustration and boredom, mostly. If you don't mind losing a lot on things that don't work, feel free, but this game has caused me a lot of rage over its boneheaded design at times.