Dungeons of the Fallen

My first impression of Dungeons of the Fallen was the kind of mild surprise you get when a tiny Steam page punches above its weight class. This is a solo-developer project, free to play, with pixel art corridors and a boss-fight loop that sits squarely in the lineage of Hammerwatch and old Gauntlet. That is a crowded neighbourhood, and the game knows it, so it leans hard on two things that separate it from the pack: a classless build system and a couch co-op design that actually thinks about party composition. The classless approach is the heart of it. There are no warrior or mage archetypes locked at character creation. You pick your abilities freely, which means one run you can be a frost-slowing archer who keeps enemies at distance, and the next you can be a fire mage in heavy armour detonating yourself in a crowd. The enchanting system layers on top of that, letting you customise weapons and armour with resources dropped from enemies, nudging your build in directions the raw loot pool does not always reach. Loot itself follows four rarity tiers, common through legendary, which is familiar territory but satisfying to chase. Crafting weapons and armour from gathered materials gives you something to do with all the monster drops that would otherwise sit in your bag. Where the game earns the most goodwill is in its co-op design. Up to four players can run the dungeons locally, and the encounter design actually rewards a spread of roles. Healing, crowd control, and split damage sources matter in a way that feels intentional rather than incidental. A solo run is entirely viable but measurably harder on the boss encounters, which are the game's centrepiece. The developer himself was actively asking players for boss feedback in the community forums, which is a good sign for someone who cares about tuning. The caveats are real and worth naming. The Steam community threads flag persistent gamepad support issues, particularly with xinput controllers, that affected the local multiplayer experience at launch. For a game whose central appeal is four-player couch co-op, broken controller inputs are a serious stumbling block, and the evidence of post-launch patching activity is sparse. Resolution options were also reported as missing early on. The player review count is small (just over fifty at the time of writing, roughly 72 percent positive), which tells you this is a game that flew almost entirely under the radar. Coverage is minimal, there is no Metacritic score, and the community hub is quiet. That obscurity cuts both ways: the game has a handmade quality that larger productions rarely bother with, but you are also somewhat on your own if something breaks. If you have three friends, a couch, and a few spare controllers that you are confident will work, this is an easy evening experiment at zero cost. Solo players who enjoy freeform build tinkering and do not mind the rougher edges of a one-person indie project will find a compact, honest dungeon crawler underneath the surface. Manage expectations about polish, verify your controller setup before diving in, and you might find exactly the kind of small, sincere game that gets traded between friends as a quiet recommendation. Kai, Scout Team

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