INFERNO CLIMBER

I want to be upfront with you before you read another word: the Steam version of INFERNO CLIMBER has not received a patch since its September 2016 launch, and a significant chunk of its player community reports severe framerate instability on modern hardware. That is the elephant in the dungeon, and it shapes everything else I'm about to say. Set that aside for a moment and look at what the game is actually trying to do, because it is genuinely trying. A fallen warrior cuts a deal with Death, gets resurrected stripped of every piece of gear, and is tasked with hunting down five Purgatory Stones scattered across 20-plus stages of ruins, jungles, and gothic dungeons. You pick from eight character classes, each with a distinct passive ability: the Royal Knight ignores equipment stat requirements outright, the Forest Hunter heals through poison, the Popular Merchant makes enemies drop more loot, and so on. None of them play so differently that the game feels like eight games in one, but there is enough variance to reward replaying with a second class if the first run hooks you. Combat leans on the Souls template: stamina management, blocking, dodging, and a death system where your corpse holds your equipped gear and a soul contract purchased from the hub store is required to swap back to a fallen character. The loop of death, recovery run, and incremental gear improvement clicks when the framerate cooperates. The survival layer is the most underrated part of the package. Hunger is a real pressure, and the cooking system asks you to forage, grow, and prepare food that can meaningfully buff your stats. One player in the community described eventually farming garlic chicken for attack bonuses, and that kind of emergent depth is the exact kind of thing I usually find in games twice this budget. Blacksmithing lets you work the loot pool further, and with over 400 items in the pool, treasure chests that randomize their contents on revisit, and secret paths crackable by bombing walls, there is a legitimate sandbox of systems here. The writing is thin, the story functional rather than compelling, and anyone hoping for Disco Elysium-level narrative payoff is in the wrong zip code. This is a systems game, not a story game. The problems are not subtle. The visual style is chibi-dark, which is a stranger combination than it sounds and will not land for everyone. Combat depth does not hold up against the Souls games it clearly admires. Leveling has been criticized for feeling sluggish in its stat gains, with weapons and armor doing most of the heavy lifting rather than your level-up points. The PC port was designed around a controller from the start (it was conceived as a PS4 title before that version was cancelled), and the keyboard experience has always been awkward. Most critically: the Reborn update, which improved GPU compatibility and modernized the APIs, exists only on the Microsoft Store, not here on Steam. If you own a GPU from the last several years and you are not willing to do some compatibility troubleshooting, there is a real chance this build simply will not run at an acceptable framerate. For the right buyer at the right price point, there is a scrappy, odd little dungeon crawler underneath all that technical debt. It has a genuinely good orchestral soundtrack, Zelda-esque dungeon puzzles, stealth sections, and enough build flexibility to hold interest past the opening hours. But I cannot in good conscience recommend it as a smooth experience in its current Steam state. The Reborn version elsewhere may be a better entry point if you are determined to try it.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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