Overdungeon

My first hour with Overdungeon was mostly me losing, because I kept playing it like a turn-based deckbuilder. I would hold a card, do the math, plan two moves ahead, and while I was busy being clever a line of enemies walked across the board and started eating my base. There are no turns. The energy bar refills whether you are paying attention or not, and nothing waits for you to finish thinking. That friction is genuine and it filters people out in the first twenty minutes. I would still push through it, because what is on the other side of the confusion is one of the more gleefully unhinged combo games on PC. Structurally, this is a roguelike run. You move along a branching route, hit fights and shops and treasure, face a boss at the end of a stretch, and prune and upgrade your deck between stops. The twist is that every fight plays out as a compressed real-time tower defense on a shared lane. You spend energy to drop units, from cheap cows and knights up to the occasional dragon, plant buildings that shoot or generate value on their own, and throw spells at whatever is currently ruining your afternoon. Your base has HP. Their base has HP. Everything between those two numbers is chaos you are only partly steering. What hooks me is the same thing that hooks me in any good build game: the moment a pile of small decisions quietly becomes a machine. Items stack. A modifier that adds a small effect when you summon something starts talking to a card that summons three things at once, which starts talking to a multiplier you picked up two fights ago, and suddenly a single cow card is producing a herd that fills the screen and the frame rate has opinions about it. Nobody here has a character arc, and I will not pretend otherwise, but the mathematical payoff scratches the same nerve as finding a broken multiclass in a CRPG. Build variety is real, and the ceiling on a good engine is absurdly high. The problems are equally real. This is single-player only, with no story worth the word, no writing that rewards a second read, and no one to care about between fights. As runs pile up, the early nodes turn into filler you are clicking through to reach the part where your engine either exists or does not. Balance is loose in both directions: some item combinations trivialize a run, some bosses will delete you before you have drawn anything that matters, and the difference is frequently the shop RNG rather than anything you did. Board readability suffers badly once a fight gets busy, and there are stretches where you are less a tactician and more a person spamming cards at a wall of noise. A 79 percent Mostly Positive score across roughly three thousand reviews reads about right to me: people love the highs and get tired of the repetition. So who is this for. If you want a deckbuilder with pacing pressure instead of contemplative turn timers, and you enjoy chasing a broken engine more than you enjoy narrative payoff, this is a very easy recommendation. If you came for RPG depth in the sense I usually care about, characters, choices with consequences, worldbuilding you can chew on, this is not that and it never pretends to be. It is a 2019 indie oddity from a small Japanese studio that later got very famous for something completely different, and it still has more personality than most polished card games released since. Give it two hours before you judge it. Then check the clock at hour thirty, when you are still trying to make the cows work.

Monika · Scout Team

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