Dungeon Rats

I have a soft spot for small, honest games that know exactly what they are and refuse to apologize for it. Dungeon Rats is one of those. It drops you into a dying prison mine called the Second Chance, places a gang boss named Barca in front of you who would rather have a fighter than another laborer, and then proceeds to test whether you actually earned that arrangement across roughly fifty carefully assembled turn-based encounters. There is no open world, no dialogue tree that lets you charm your way to freedom. The mine is the game, and the game is combat. What makes the combat worth your time is how precisely it is tuned. Character creation comes down to choosing a weapon discipline, a defensive posture (dodge or block with a shield, never both), and distributing stat points that govern your action-point budget every turn. Charisma is the quietly important outlier: it determines your maximum party size, which means a low-Charisma build is a genuinely different game from one built around a full squad of four. Skills cross-pollinate in pleasing ways, so investing in throwing weapons nudges your crossbow proficiency upward too. On top of that sits a crafting layer for forging and recycling weapons and armor, plus an alchemy system for brewing poisons, healing compounds, and throwable vials. Per-weapon special attacks like Whirlwind and Impale give melee builds identity beyond just swinging harder. Everything in the toolkit earns its keep, and the game will punish you when you forget it's there. The default difficulty applies the same rules to enemies as to you, and there is an Iron Man mode waiting for anyone who enjoys sleeping on broken glass. The honest caveat is that the writing doesn't reach anywhere near Age of Decadence's heights. The lore is delivered by NPCs who essentially info-dump the mine's backstory, and the connective tissue between fights can feel perfunctory. The game itself was developed as a focused side project by Iron Tower while their larger work was in progress, and that origin shows: the world-building has the energy of a capable team working fast rather than obsessing over every sentence. Some players also flag that reliance on random critical hits can swing fights in frustrating directions regardless of preparation, which is worth knowing going in. And if you came expecting dungeon exploration in the classic sense, be prepared to recalibrate. This is closer to a sequence of tactical puzzles with RPG progression bolted on, not a sprawling labyrinth to map. For the right player, though, none of that registers as a serious wound. If you lived through Age of Decadence and wanted the combat stripped down and turned up, this is exactly that. If you have never touched Iron Tower's work before and want a dense, unforgiving entry point into their design philosophy, the mine will teach you faster than any tutorial screen. The game knows when to end, the builds feel meaningfully different from each other, and every fight was placed there by a human who thought about it. That kind of intentional craft is rarer than it should be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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