Dwarf Delve

Dwarf Delve wants your patience before it gives you anything back, and I say that as someone who will happily spend forty minutes rebuilding a spellbook. This is a run-based, first-person extraction game set in randomly generated mines, which means the very first thing it asks is that you make peace with losing. You go down as a fresh Delveling with a pair of gloves and a Battlemallet, you dig up whatever the mine decides to hand you, and then you either walk out with it or you feed it back to the dark. That contract is the entire game. How you feel about it after three hours is how you will feel about it after thirty. The loop is simple enough to describe in one breath, which is both its charm and its ceiling. Descend, break rock, grab riches, dodge hazards, get out with the beard still attached. The mines are procedurally generated, so layouts, loot placement, and the various ways the ceiling wants to kill you shuffle each run. Combat is close and blunt. The Battlemallet is a swinging melee tool, not a build engine, and the real tension comes from greed management rather than character sheets. Do you push one more chamber for one more vein, or turn back while you still have the health to make the climb? That question is genuinely good. Plenty of great games have been built on less. The fundamentals are more thoughtful than the store page suggests. Controller support is full and covers both DualShock and DualSense pads, there are subtitle options and custom volume controls, and, more unusually for a small release, the game flags camera comfort settings and can be played without timed input. First-person mining is exactly the genre that makes people motion sick and locks out anyone who cannot hit a reaction window, so a studio the size of Gloom Box actually budgeting for that deserves a nod. Steam Cloud, achievements, and trading cards round out a tidy package. The trouble starts right where the RPG genre tag does. I came in hoping for what that word usually promises: a progression spine, builds that diverge, some reason for my tenth Delveling to play differently from my first. What is actually here is far thinner, and somewhere around hour ten the mines start rhyming with each other in ways procedural generation cannot paper over. There is also no co-op, which is a baffling call for a subgenre that runs on shared panic and last-second betrayal. Everything about a hazard-stuffed mine full of haulable loot begs for a second voice on comms, and instead you clock in for a solitary shift. Players have not been gentle about any of this. Steam sentiment sits firmly negative on a small but consistent sample, and that is not a signal I would wave off as a handful of grumpy outliers. So who is it for? Someone who wants a low-commitment loop they can run in twenty-minute chunks on a controller, who enjoys the specific full-body anxiety of carrying too much loot too far from the exit, and who is not counting on the RPG half of that genre list to mean anything. If you want dwarves with skill trees, a dragon curled at the bottom of the deepest shaft, or writing that rewards a second pass, this is not the mine you want to dig. If you want something small, honest, and mean about greed and gravity, there is an evening or two in here. Go in knowing the pitch is thinner than the tag list, and set your expectations at the mine entrance rather than at the bottom.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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