Dungeon Encounters quick thoughts
First of all, gonna link Jel's post, naturally.
Great game if you can get into the swing of things. Feels like an extremely acquired taste, but I've been into dungeon crawlers lately (play Kowloon High-School Chronicle) and so I was finally ready to jump in.
If you're reading this and did not read Jel's post, you may not know what the "swing of things" is for Dungeon Encounters. Basically, you're playing a dungeon crawler in its purest form.
There's a 100x100x100 dungeon with a perfunctory grid map. You might as well be playing on actual graph paper. Ambient sounds are about the only suggestion you get as to what kind of "biome" you're in, which can be surprisingly effective. For example: the 50s floors are all long straights and toll tiles with a bunch of mechanical clanging sounds, giving the impression of some kind of metallic, factory-like location.
Combat is basically a pure numbers game. you have to deplete an enemy's physical or magical defense before you get at their HP, and damage doesn't overflow, so every enemy takes a minimum of two hits to kill (under normal circumstances). So you might get enemies with high PD and low MD, enemies without defense at all but huge HP, or enemies with low HP but super high defenses, and anything in between.
All your weapons do either fixed or random damage. Do you want the sword that does 300 flat damage, or the mace that does a random amount of damage in between 1 and 570? The rub is that enemies are liable to have something like 350 HP, making you constantly weigh the risk and reward depending on the kind of encounters you're coming across in the dungeon.
The clarity and simplicity of these mechanics mean the game can pull interesting tricks by tweaking the numbers only slightly. For example, there's a weapon that has 70% accuracy but will deplete MD to zero with no questions asked. Unarmed attacks do a palty 1 damage but ignore defense, and most undead-type enemies have exceptionally high defense but only a single hit point.
Even filling out the grid map gets some fun wrinkles, especially as you start unlocking new traversal abilities. The entire "find the stairs to go down a floor" concept gets tossed out the window once you get the "dig straight down until you hit a valid tile" ability, among others. There's nothing stopping you from dropping to floor 99 and trying to fight a black hole; you simply will have to deal with the consequences of your actions. If you're careful and observant, you can reap incredible rewards that far outpace the floor-by-floor balancing.
Dungeon Encounters is a game that pulls no punches, but leaves all the tools to punch right back out in the open. That feels like a rarity these days, and it's easy to appreciate it for that.
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