Portal Dungeon

I have a soft spot for the small studios that bet everything on a single game, and DuskDogStudio's Portal Dungeon is exactly that kind of earnest swing. It is a side-scrolling roguelite shooter in the vein of a 2D Risk of Rain, asking you to push through eight levels of escalating chaos, each with its own map layouts, enemy factions, and bosses that demand you actually adapt your build rather than coast on a favourite character. The character roster is the real spine of the thing. More than a dozen playable adventurers each carry one special attack and four skills, and every skill branches into three evolvable variants, so the combinations available to a solo player are already substantial. What makes this pop in co-op is that four different players running four different skill trees can create genuinely unplanned synergies mid-run. The item system leans into this further: hundreds of pickups with no carry cap means you are never forced to hard-dump a build direction, which keeps experimentation low-friction and the mid-run tinkering fun. The game went through an Early Access period beginning in late 2022, and the 1.0 launch in July 2023 landed with a Steam rating that sits around 88 percent positive across nearly a thousand reviews - solid, quiet signal for a game with almost zero Western press coverage. There are honest caveats. New players have noted that the game has a habit of leaving you to puzzle out NPC interactions and item descriptions on your own, sometimes while enemies are actively trying to kill you. The onboarding leans on discovery rather than guidance, which will frustrate anyone who wants the game to hold their hand through the early levels. The English localisation has some roughness around the edges too - nothing game-breaking, but tooltips occasionally feel like they were translated in a hurry. If your group has a few roguelite veterans who enjoy figuring things out, this is a non-issue; if you are introducing genre newcomers, budget time for confusion. For what it is, the co-op experience carries the game. Solo runs are fine, a competent enough loop of build-hunting through bullet-heavy corridors, but bringing two, three, or four people in sharpens everything. The chaos scales in a way that feels intentional rather than just numerically brutal, and there is something genuinely charming about the pixel art aesthetic, which has that handmade quality I always look for in small-studio work. DuskDogStudio has clearly cared about this one. The game even has a free demo on Steam, which is a small thing that goes a long way in showing good faith to prospective buyers.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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