Venturing into the Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk
Looking into the September 2022 Humble Choice's surprise package.
Developer: Artefacts Studio
Release: September 2020
Steam Price: $49.95 AUD
When I put out the call for reviewers for the Humble Choice games this month, a bundle that at first glance I felt was underwhelming apart from the headline act, I was pleased to see that my fellow Blaugustines have all gotten over their post-Blaugust blues and came to the party in a big way, signing up within a day or so to play and review all but one of the games on the list, except one.
I'm not surprised that The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos (DoN) is the one that was missed, because on the surface it doesn't have all that much to recommend it. It has a generic boring fantasy game name, generic boring fantasy game marketing material1, and no name recognition at all, coming from a studio that according to Steam has only four racing games and a point-and-click detective game in their back-catalogue. As I began to dig into it, though, I realised that this is not coincidental, as it's based on a French-language audio series satirising tabletop role-playing games, so the generical fantasy name goobledegook is part of the bit. And as far as I can see, this is both the first videogame and the first franchise-related thing in its twenty-year history that has been released in English, so it's little wonder that we've never heard of it.
In DoN you guide a party of genre-savvy but generic fantasy tropes through a dungeon run by a narrator-cum-GM who seems to not like his players very much, while they bicker and swear at each other2. Movement and exploration through the dungeon is simple point-and-click, although somewhat hampered by a very frustrating fixed isometric camera that means your vision is very limited and you have to rely heavily on your dungeon map to get around. While you can pick up a few bits and pieces with careful exploration, it's not such a big deal, just functioning largely as something to do between battles, and big flashing quest markers make the necessary bits of getting around straightforward. It also slightly grates on me that the game is called dungeon but it clearly takes place in a tower. Maybe that’s just me, or maybe it’s set up for a joke later.
More annoyingly, the game betrays its origins as a humour audio series with many and varied cutscenes in which each and every one of the seven characters need to have something 'funny' to say. The Thief has to say something cowardly, the Elf has to mention that the Dwarf smells, the Barbarian has to say “Crom!”, the Ogre has to say something about food and be translated by the Sorceress, ad nauseum. No one individual moment has been all that bad in isolation, but over and over it all gets pretty grating. When the characters are walking stereotypes it's hard to find their interactions all that compelling, and I'm regularly finding myself wishing that the talking and the plot exposition would end so that the fighting can begin again.
When you do encounter an enemy, the game switches into an XCOM-style turn-based tactics game, complete with XCOM-style grid movement, XCOM-style cover, XCOM-style flanking and hit-chance mechanics3, and JRPG style per-character rather than XCOM style per-team turns4. I have my doubts about the usefulness of the movement and cover system in a game that is largely close-range and has attacks of opportunity, but it largely holds up, even if I do find myself skipping a lot of unnecessary movement turns in favour of just hitting the nearest enemy and then whacking the end turn button.
Though your party in each fight is limited to the seven main characters (and a choice of one addition a couple of acts in) so there's not that much variety, each hero having their own strengths, weaknesses and a range of special skills that grow as they level up makes for an engaging battle experience. Do I use my Sorceress’ area of effect attack now, or save it and use her to heal the Elf that I foolishly left in the open? Do I sacrifice some potential damage now to stun this enemy with my Dwarf so that my Barbarian won’t be flanked? Do I use my Ranger’s team-buffing ability or try to take out this spider before it poisons the Thief? I've only played for a few hours at this point, but the game has kept throwing interesting challenges that have required me to think about my choices, even at the default difficulty level. The battles are good.
I’m definitely finding DoN more engaging than Fort Triumph, a similar Turn Based Strategy game that we were thrown this time last year, and am looking forward to seeing how far through it I manage to get before I lose interest5. Sure, there’s nothing particularly new or innovative here, and you’ve heard most of the jokes after the first ten minutes or so, but it feels like a game that does everything that it is supposed to do made by people that cared about it. It’s games like this that keep me signed up to the Humble Choice6, games that I’d never have bought or likely even have heard of without the bundle, but that spark joy despite, or even maybe because, of that. I doubt there’s anyone outside of the Francosphere getting the bundle for this, if you like a TBS, it's one’s worth trying out.
Look everyone, elf breasts!
I am not kidding about this, I think the characters dropped a dozen F-bombs in the first half an hour, this is decidedly not a family-friendly game, despite the cutesy art.
Though you build up a handy bonus meter whenever you miss or something bad happens, so it’s not all bad. It’s a nice touch to take some of the edge of what many people seem to find a frustrating mechanic.
Note for the non-gamer inexplicably reading this blog: Go try out XCOM, it’s pretty good.
I’ll come back and update the post when that happens.
Other than the fact that games are marked up ludicrously and it’s an economical way to find something new to play.