Dungeon Munchies

My first impression of Dungeon Munchies was that somebody had jammed Cave Story, Monster Hunter, and a fever dream about sentient guava juice into one small, strange package, and honestly, that impression held up. You play as a freshly reanimated zombie in an underground facility, taking orders from Simmer, a ghostly necro-chef who hands you a mysterious cookbook as your primary means of self-improvement. The premise sounds like a joke, but the writing earns its weirdness. The story weaves together necromancy, a sun that literally left Earth to find itself, talking revolutionary fruits, and a lurking biohazard entity, all in a tone that swings between dry comedy and genuine melancholy without losing its footing. That tonal range is rarer than it looks. The central mechanic is the real hook: killing enemies drops ingredients, ingredients get cooked into dishes, and dishes slot into a seven-item meal loadout that defines your entire kit. Eat grilled shrimp for a watery shield, brew crab stir-fry for a damage bump, or layer mana-regen soups under sword-combo buffs for a build that starts clicking in genuinely satisfying ways. On top of that, unusable parts get forged into primary and secondary weapons: swords, spears, daggers with poison stacks, wands that fire laser beams, throwable jars of mosquitos. Scythes, notably, summon familiars and generate healing orbs on kills, which is as close to a "broken" build as the game offers, and finding that synergy feels like a small personal discovery. The cookbook functions as both skill tree and crafting bench, which is a clean design idea that keeps the loop tight across the roughly seven-to-eight-hour runtime. Here is where the gap between concept and execution opens up. The platforming is genuinely slippery: your zombie slides on floors, floats through air, and resists precise input in a way that several areas of level design do not account for. The twin-stick-style aiming (left stick to move, right stick or D-pad to aim) clicks after a session or two, but the first hour of adapting to it coincides with the weakest levels in the game, which is bad sequencing. Boss fights escalate into bullet-hell phases once their health drops low enough, a genre swap that catches newcomers off-guard and that the base movement physics are not really built to support. Player opinions split here cleanly: Steam's overall review pool lands in Very Positive territory (heavily weighted by Chinese-language players who appear to have engaged with it on its own terms), while Western critic outlets rated it considerably lower, citing those exact friction points. What keeps Dungeon Munchies worth your time is the craft underneath the clunk. The pixel art during play and the anime-style character portraits in dialogue sit in cheerful harmony. Simmer and her skeleton crew are written with actual personality; the grumpy skeletons alone justify reading every dialogue box. The visual novel-style cutscene art escalates in ambition as the game darkens in its later chapters, pushing toward demonic imagery that reviewers compared to Carrion, and it earns that comparison. The soundtrack is split across multiple volumes (available as separate DLC), and while opinions on it vary, the boss music specifically lifts those frantic phases from pure punishment toward something almost theatrical. If clunky-but-charming small indie games are your wavelength, Dungeon Munchies will find a place in your memory. It is the kind of game that a bigger publisher would have sanded into something safer and duller. It knows what it is. The cooking system alone is worth an afternoon, and the story sticks with you longer than the friction does. Go in with adjusted expectations around the platforming and you will probably leave satisfied.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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