Curse of the dungeon

I want to be an advocate for the small, unseen game. That is genuinely my job on this team, and I take it seriously. So let me be equally honest: Curse of the Dungeon is one of those releases that tests that commitment hard. It is a low-poly, first-person platformer set inside an abandoned dungeon, and the extent of its design ambition appears to be pointing you down corridors and asking you to find what the store page calls 'mysterious signs.' There are obstacles to clear. There are underground structures to inspect. That is, more or less, the whole pitch. The game arrived from developer Axe Games and publisher Enoops in October 2019, and the community reception tells its own story. A handful of reviews accumulated over the years, trending decisively negative. Reviewers who did engage flagged the title as built from stock templates with minimal original construction, a pattern that has been associated with this publisher's wider catalogue. The system requirements are genuinely minimal, which is about the nicest technical compliment available: a GeForce 7600 GS and 512 MB of RAM will get you in. Whether that matters when the experience inside is this threadbare is a different question. What is actually here, mechanically? First-person movement through low-poly dungeon geometry, obstacle navigation, and whatever environmental storytelling the 'mysterious signs' are meant to deliver. There is no evidence of a combat system with meaningful depth, no documented class selection, no procedural generation, no RPG progression loop worth discussing. The genre tags, Action-Adventure-RPG, are aspirational rather than descriptive. If you came looking for something even loosely resembling a dungeon crawler in the Diablo or Darkest Dungeon tradition, redirect your attention now. I defend slow openers. I defend short games with focused intentions. I even defend rough edges when a human creative vision is evident underneath them. What I find very difficult to defend is a release so thin on authored content that its own description collapses into circular phrasing. There is nothing here that reads as a deliberate creative statement, a handcrafted atmosphere, or a soundscape with any personality. The dungeon is silent in all the wrong ways. Sometimes silence is meditative. Here it just feels absent. If you have an absolute floor-scraping budget and a genuine, anthropological interest in the long tail of Steam shovelware, this technically qualifies as a curiosity. For everyone else, the same afternoon is better spent with something that remembers it owes you a reason to keep playing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Curse of the dungeon.