Dungeon of Flowers

Roguelikes have the unique ability to keep you engaged for hours on end without actually featuring too much of a story, nor any kind of impressive graphics to keep your imagination focused. Instead, they are based on a very simple and surprisingly effective concept: loot. Thus, players keep going in order to find better and more powerful items along the way.

Dungeon of Flowers is a roguelike RPG in which you have to explore randomly-generated dungeons and go as far as possible without dying. Naturally, you can collect all sorts of helpful items as you go along, all of which have unique stats and special bonuses. The replay value is quite satisfying, but then again there’s hardly anything truly new whenever you start a new playthrough, except for the levels.

Thus, there is no story to worry about and no characters to remember, because everything or everyone you stumble upon has to be killed. You do that by simply bumping into them, so the combat system is as basic as possible as well. There are no special abilities and no spells, but the items you pick up usually have some sort of magic bonus that provides you with extra damage or protection.

As always, the goal is to make it deeper into the dungeon, because the lower levels hold more powerful monsters and better loot. Obviously, the difficulty level increases the more you descend, so it’s a good idea to kill stuff in order to make your character stronger before making a run for it to the lower levels. On the other hand, luck has a lot to do with it as well, given the fact that you can spawn in a room full of monsters from the first seconds of gameplay.

The graphics are as simple as they can get as well, given the fact that most of the screen is black and empty. The level design is very simple too, so there’s no chance you might get lost or forget the way back. On the other hand, the simplicity can get to you after a while, mainly because every level starts looking the same after a couple of playthroughs.

In the end, Dungeon of Flowers may be pretty difficult in certain situations, but the truth is that it’s quite simple and empty most of the time, not to mention repetitive. Although roguelikes are repetitive by nature, there are those that make you forget about it, but Dungeon of Flowers is not one of them, unfortunately.