DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold

Dungeon crawlers are part of a niche genre and they are certainly not as popular as regular RPGs, mostly because the difficulty level is usually much more gruesome and the gameplay does not show any kind of mercy on beginners. Permadeath is a given and there is usually the risk of catching incurable diseases, or simply walking into a deadly trap as you scour the narrow corridors.

DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold tries a different approach and it includes some puzzle mechanics as well, by integrating them into the gameplay and making them mandatory in order to pass the levels. Hence, exploring and staying alive is not enough anymore, given the fact that you must also calculate your movement path and battle the enemies in a chess-like manner.

The game starts with a vague story about a man and his nephew exploring a dungeon, as if that was the kind of place you take a child to. Naturally, the boy goes missing after a few minutes in and you have to search for him, while also avoiding death yourself and navigating the intricate mazes that lead to the exit. Armed with a sword and the ability to move in every direction, including diagonals, things quickly become rather difficult and frustrating.

The basic gist of the game is that you can only move a fixed distance at a time and everything else moves when you move. Thus, the enemies remain motionless if you do the same, but they also get close and closer if you decide to move. It is possible to attack them using the sword, which in this case basically means running into them sword-first, otherwise you die.

You can rotate the sword between the eight available directions as well, but the swinging doesn’t do anything special and it certainly takes more effort than walking does. The combat can be compared to chess, but not because it is complicated and intricate, but because you must calculate the optimal path in order to avoid being eaten.

In the end, there are plenty of things working against DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold, especially when it comes to voice acting, graphics and the general gameplay mechanics. However, you can still keep yourself company with game when you have nothing better to do.