The Deep Paths: Labyrinth Of Andokost

My first instinct when I loaded up The Deep Paths: Labyrinth of Andokost was a familiar one: the grid snapped underfoot, torchlight caught a stone wall at just the right angle, and for about twenty minutes I was back in the headspace of a late-night Dungeon Master session on a borrowed Amiga. That nostalgic warmth is real, and it is also essentially the entire pitch. This is a solo-developed, first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler in the oldest possible mold, and it commits to that identity with no apology. You assemble a party of four from three classes: Fighter, Rogue, and Mage. Fighters haul the widest range of weapons and can smash rubble with pickaxes. Rogues find secret passages and crack locked chests with a set of lockpicks. Mages wield wands and are the only class able to brew potions from reeds and empty bottles found along the way. Each character rolls four attributes - Strength, Dexterity, Intellect, and Vitality - and you can re-roll as many times as you like before descending. The practical optimal party is fairly obvious early: two Fighters up front, a Rogue, and a Mage. The game does not punish you much for experimenting, but it also does not reward you with enough build depth to make a second playthrough feel meaningfully different. The labyrinth layout, enemy placement, and item locations are fixed every run, so party composition is the only real variable. The thirteen floors of Andokost are a mixed bag. Puzzle design is the clearest strength here: button sequences, block-on-floor-plate combinations, and a genuinely clever approach to maps (each floor hides a complete map of itself somewhere within it, rewarding thorough exploration rather than handing it to you for free) show that one developer thinking carefully about dungeon structure can still produce moments worth hunting for. Combat is where the wheels come loose. It shifts to turn-based when enemies engage, but the loop is blunt: click your weapon, wait for the cooldown, repeat. Potions are scarce, enemies scale alongside you so the difficulty curve never really opens up, and getting caught between two monsters in a corridor is less a tactical puzzle and more a slow emergency. The inventory interface is clunky and has no quick-access slots, which becomes especially grating mid-fight when you need a potion fast. The story is a light frame: an earthquake cracks open the sealed Labyrinth beneath the city of Theraborn, a king's steward sends four adventurers in to assess the danger, and scattered journal entries plus the occasional telepathic message fill in the lore as you go. As someone who lives for the kind of writing that rewards a second read, I will be honest with you - this is not that game. The narrative exists to justify the descent, nothing more, and the ending lands with a soft thud rather than a payoff. If you come to dungeon crawlers for character arcs and meaningful choices, look elsewhere. If you come to them for the tactile pleasure of mapping corridors and hunting for the hidden wall that opens onto a cache of better gear, The Deep Paths has enough of that to justify its modest price and a weekend afternoon.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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