➤ Our Lost in the Dungeon review 🎮

We said it just the other day in our review of Fable Fortune: to emerge in a now crowded market you need to find the winning idea that knows how to hit the mark and, sometimes, unfortunately, not even enough anymore. We mentioned Fable Fortune since today we are going to dissect another card game, but decided to leave aside the competitive multiplayer modes focusing instead on some aspects of dungeon crawler, with a mix of ideas perhaps not absolutely original (the good Slay the Spire he had already given us a taste last year for example) but blended together in an intelligent way. Furthermore, Lost in the Dungeon is a production born from the skilled hands of the boys of Eggon, a software house mainly dedicated to the creation of mobile titles born just over a year ago. We thus spent entire afternoons among goblins, spiders and sorcerers in search of the meaning of this new adventure. Will we be able to find him?

Forgetful

Our hero has lost his memory, he does not know where he is or the reason that drives him to enter the dungeons of a new wasteland. A story that starts with one of those banal and terribly obvious clichés, a small opening line only useful to make it clear that it will be up to you, with your choices to temper the form of this new hero. Wizard, thief or warrior are the three options that you will face, nothing more than a simple decision on the cards that will make up your deck at the beginning of the game. The warrior is obviously prone to cause high damage, the mage will fill his hand with protection spells and spells, and the thief with sneak attacks and poisonous stabs. There is no real tutorial to explain all the basic mechanics in detail, with the exception of some explanatory slides on the main features, so much so that the first games you will pass to die repeatedly in the initial rooms of the first dungeon just to assimilate how it works exactly the whole. Lost in the Dungeon is not in fact one of those easy or permissive games, but rather it is a merciless bastard who enjoys seeing you die every time, as if that were the stimulus to continue the adventure and try once again. And it can work: it is precisely for this reason that in the first few hours we remain entangled in a web of failures from which it is impossible to escape, because there must be a right way to face the enemies that are proposed randomly at each new game, we must be that combination of cards that escapes us to overcome the first dungeons without throwing screams at the monitor, there must necessarily be that quirk that allows us to easily kill these damned rats. Slowly, after tests after tests, we sadly realize that instead there is no way other than to continue to fail, accumulate experience and money and start again from the beginning always a little more powerful, up to breaking the critical threshold and finally being able to juggle monsters and snakes. Simply, in short, it is the difficulty curve that immediately rises in an incorrect and not very stimulating way, transforming the Lost in the Dungeon experience into something extremely frustrating.

Advance without crying

It then happens that for this design choice you find yourself repeating the initial battles over and over again, collecting some loot boxes and then leaving the dungeon while you are still alive. You go back to the city, check the objects obtained, sell the useless ones and start working again trying to earn some extra statistical points. In addition to hit points, our hero has mana and energy, both of which are essential values for casting skills. Obviously, with the increase of the cost usually also increases the effectiveness or utility, so if to cast an arcane wall we have to spend two mana points, to use an area spell we will have to invest many more. The randomness in this case is extremely limited. There are no particularly strange effects on the cards present and the deck (consisting of 20 cards) almost always allows us to have what we need in our hand, considering that we will be able to insert up to five copies at a time. The strategy therefore comes from the possibility of performing only one action per turn, with the card used that is automatically replaced after the damage count and a deck that regenerates as soon as the last card is drawn. It is all extremely simple and straightforward and there are not many feasible strategies: the most useful trend to continue is to have a good armor value, so that enemy attacks do not scratch our reserve of hit points, and poisonous attacks capable of slowly inflict damage over time to opponents. Playing in such a cautious manner becomes essential since not only all the rewards obtained in that scenario are subtracted from death, but also any coins used to buy potions and the entrance ticket to the dungeon, increasingly expensive as they go, are lost. the most difficult ones are reached. The balance between difficulty and rewards is not exactly at home and it will be very likely to leave the title out of boredom before reaching a competitive deck. The skills that will not be assigned to you with the initial choice of the class you will have to unlock them by accumulating experience and leveling up, a sensible choice but plagued by an almost exasperating slowness in growth. The interface is also quite poor, for a graphic impact that just failed to convince us. Pleasant instead the artwork of the cards but not the animations of the attacks, limited and repetitive.

Comment

Tested version PC Windows Resources4Gaming.com

6.5

Readers

Your vote

In short, Lost in the Dungeon tries to leverage difficulty as a strength but ends up overriding that fragile balance that separates the desire to be able to improve from frustration. After the victory of several dungeons we have not registered the slightest intention to go back to face them again, nor the need: a sign that the replayability of the title is substantially non-existent, and after having beaten the four dungeons currently available, you will only have to put the game aside. in a drawer and forget it there until a possible update. There are no competitive or online modes whatsoever capable of making sense of your character's growth, for a production that barely reaches enough despite the truly negligible cost. Such a pity.