Darkend

Darkend is a retro 2D dungeon-crawler from Kodots Games that plants itself firmly in the old-school tradition: party assembly, grid-style exploration, turn-based or action-adjacent combat, and dungeons that shift to keep you guessing. The pitch is simple enough - pick your heroes, descend into procedurally changing floors, survive long enough to piece together a haunting narrative about humanity on the brink. If you grew up on early dungeon-crawlers and have a soft spot for lo-fi pixel aesthetics, the premise is at least pointing in the right direction. The dungeon variety is the game's best argument for itself. Floors do not simply repeat their layouts, so there is a baseline of replayability that keeps early sessions feeling fresh. Treasure hunting has genuine appeal when the map is not fully predictable, and hunting down mysterious secrets gives the world a slightly more textured feel than pure combat loops usually allow. The retro visual style is committed rather than half-hearted, and the atmosphere leans into bleakness in ways that fans of dark fantasy will appreciate more than casual players will. That said, the 52% positive score on Steam is not a number you ignore, and spending time with Darkend makes the divide legible. The writing rarely rises to the level of its own premise. A haunting past sounds promising, but the narrative payoff is thin - choices do not carry the weight you want from an RPG, and the worldbuilding gestures at depth without fully delivering it. For someone who cares about whether dialogue rewards a second read, Darkend is frustrating. The story content clocks in at roughly ten hours, which is honest for the scope, but those hours include stretches that feel like padding rather than purposeful design. If you are grinding the same encounter type to unlock the next floor, the game is not hiding that fact well. Build variety is present but limited. Hero selection gives you different stat profiles rather than deeply differentiated playstyles, and past the early hours the mechanical novelty flattens. The dungeon-crawling loop does enough to sustain attention, but players expecting Darkend to flex into genuinely complex party synergies will find the ceiling lower than hoped. The game was clearly built on a modest budget, and the seams show in the UI, the combat feedback, and the occasional rough pacing of dungeon progression. Who actually enjoys this? Players who are specifically nostalgic for early 2000s shareware dungeon-crawlers, people who value atmosphere over systems depth, and anyone looking for a low-commitment dark fantasy crawl that does not demand forty hours of their life. It is not the RPG that will reshape how you think about the genre. It is a weekend project that lands somewhere between charming and unfinished, and whether that ratio works for you depends entirely on how much you value ambition versus execution. Monika, Scout Team