Block Temple

Dungeons were the least exciting things one could think of before D&D came out, given the fact that the term usually implied nothing but darkness and maybe a place where prisoners are kept. However, nowadays everyone imagines treasure and ancient monsters when the word comes up, and some have spent hundreds of hours exploring underground tunnels together with their heroes.

Block Temple is an apparently simple dungeon crawler with arcade gameplay mechanics and pretty simple rules, yet it gets a lot more difficult when you start to make an effort to win. In short, the goal is to move your hero around the map by rotating and moving the rooms instead of the actual character, which is a lot more challenging than it sounds.

The maps are full of treasure chests, health potions and enemies, although more traps and challenges make an appearance as you manage to descend further down into the dungeon. Your hero moves once every two turns, so you have enough time to rotate or move two rooms and make way for him. His movement is random, on the other hand, so it’s important to force him on a path by blocking every other alternative.

Each encounter costs you a certain amount of hit points, so it’s important to know how much health you have left and avoid confrontation unless you are certain about the outcome. You cannot use special abilities or manually control your character during a battle, so that’s a bit of a bummer, but the tactical part of the game is still pretty neat, depending on how much patience you have.

Lastly, the technical aspects are as basic as you would expect as well, although that should not be a problem in this case. Hence, the simple graphics are more than enough to keep your eyes busy, while the music and the sound effects blend pretty well with the general atmosphere. Obviously, it would be nice to see more variety in the level design, but this is fine as well.

All things considered, the unique combination of ideas in Block Temple should keep you busy for a while, although the repetitive level design might cause boredom rather quickly. On the other hand, the challenge itself is enough to make you go back and try again.