Desktop Dungeon: Rewind is a bite-sized, tactical dungeon crawler filled with tough tactical gameplay and plenty of humour, developed by QCF Design. This 3D remake of an award-winning classic features cartoon visuals, strategic gameplay, and some kingdom management that ticked all my boxes for features I enjoy. With a demo released during the Steam Next Fest, I took that chance to jump in and see if the game was as interesting as it looked.
For a roughly hour-long demo — at least that's how long it took me — Desktop Dungeon: Rewind packed in a good showcase of the core gameplay, and it proved to be quite an enjoyable one. It started with a few blurbs and images explaining your situation, detailing your caravan's unfortunate fate at the hands of monsters before leading through the game's tutorial.
Desktop Dungeon: Rewind is primarily a tactics game, where players are dropped into a dungeon, caves, and other typical fantasy settings to explore and conquer while fighting their way through enemies of various types and strengths. To explore these dangerous environments, you simply click a tile and move to that space, uncovering the surrounding tiles as you go. It's that simple.
The strategy and tactics come into how you tackle these adventures. As you explore you'll find plenty of items shattered around from magic glyphs that provide new spells, gear to increase your damage and health, or passive puffs to your mana and damage to name a few. These quickly become vital in your adventures, as going into combat unprepared or weaker than your foes will mean you'll die — a lot, like sometimes in one hit, and it makes for a challenging experience. You'll need to plan and think through your moves every step of the way, but that was in turn what made it quite a fun and rewarding gameplay loop. Plus it's one that doesn't stop, as healing and recovering mana happen as you are on the move, so there's no dilly-dallying here.
In its own way, the game plays out like a puzzle. To solve it, you need to take out the correct enemies that match your level and stats, to do so, you need to find the right areas you can access, then make sure you are strong enough, and progressively defeat enemies till you reach the boss or choose to retreat with your loot up to that point. What it does is create this interesting sense of exploration that is more like finding pieces to the puzzle than simply killing minions. With each piece — these being enemies or buffs — an area blocked by a stronger foe can be opened and now you can overcome it.
There is a little freedom in that process too, as you freely choose where to go and normally have a couple of choices in how you progress or use what you find like instead of using an item, you can use the convert mechanic to destroy it and get a stat buff. Together it makes this really interesting blend of challenge, deduction, and discovery whilst also being a pretty solid yet simple tactics game with some light RPG and strategy thrown into the mix.
Between the adventures and looting, you'll manage a settlement that grows over time. From your adventures, you earn and sell trophies that help fund your town and spend it on new buildings, which in most cases unlocks more classes and attracts new races, or “Kins” as the game calls them. These provide more ways to play and take on your quests, with each class and Kin having different abilities and quirks that give them different play styles, offering some choice as to how you undertake each adventure and giving some variety.
If that sounds like quite a lot of information for a demo, it is, which is partly why I was quite impressed and pleased after my time with the game. Finding my way through each dungeon was a challenge, but a welcome and rewarding one, and the process of solving each dungeon's “puzzle” was an engaging one. Add to that the taster I got for the options and variety the full game will hopefully offer, and it made quite a great little package that's put Desktop Dungeon: Rewind on my radar.
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