Catacombs 1: Demon War

I went into Catacombs 1: Demon War expecting something forgettable, and came out with a grudging respect for what SimProse Studios was trying to build, even if the execution lands short of the ambition. This is old-school RPG design worn honestly on its sleeve: arrow-key movement, turn-based combat resolved through menus, full-page text windows for story beats, and absolutely no auto-save to hold your hand. If you grew up on early dungeon crawlers and miss that particular combination of tension and inconvenience, the DNA here will feel familiar in a way that is genuinely comforting. The structure is compact. You start in the village of Glendoe as Galahad, a young hero fresh from burying his father and inheriting a very dangerous errand. The hub is a town square branching into a handful of locations: a tavern cellar crawling with rats, a royal library hiding goblins, and eventually the demon-filled dungeon that gives the game its name. That first rat-cellar quest is no joke. You begin with 150 gold, a thin equipment loadout, and a shopkeeper whose stock randomizes each session. Die without saving, and you start clean. The game does not apologize for this, and honestly, that honesty is part of its charm. The loot system is the most interesting thing here. Over 300 weapons, armor pieces, and items cycle through more than 160 prefixes and suffixes, which on paper produces hundreds of thousands of possible combinations. In practice, the randomization extends to attack damage, dodge rolls, and hit chance, which means early fights can feel chaotic in ways that planning cannot fix. That unpredictability cuts both ways: sometimes a lucky item drop salvages a run, sometimes the shopkeeper has nothing useful and a rat finishes you. The point-based character customization lets you shape Galahad toward your preferred approach, but the variance in random drops means two playthroughs can feel meaningfully different. The orchestral soundtrack sits above the rest of the production in quality, giving the whole thing a tone it might not have earned on visuals alone. The problems are real, though, and they deserve candor. The menu navigation is sluggish, keyboard-only players will find confirm actions unreliable and may need to reach for the mouse mid-session, and the writing does not quite reach the depth the story setup suggests. Collision detection is loose enough that initiating conversations or combat sometimes requires walking through characters rather than up to them. These are not catastrophic flaws, but they add friction to an experience that is already asking players to accept a lot of old-school inconvenience as a feature. The total runtime sits around four to five hours for a full playthrough, which is either just right or not enough depending on your appetite for replaying with different loot outcomes. Steam reviews sit at mixed, with around 64% positive across a small sample, which tracks with the general sense that the game has real charm buried under rough edges. Who is this actually for? Players who find comfort in the mechanical vocabulary of early RPGs and do not need modern quality-of-life scaffolding around every interaction. If the words "no auto-save" read as a feature rather than a warning, Catacombs 1 has something genuine to offer. If you need polished menus, tight collision, and prose that pulls its weight, look elsewhere. Chapter one functions as both a self-contained story and a proof of concept for a trilogy, and there is enough personality in the randomized loot loops and the orchestral score to make the short runtime feel intentional rather than thin.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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