This Book Is A Dungeon

I have a soft spot for the kind of one-person project that starts as a half-mad experiment and ends up being a genuinely strange little artifact. This Book Is A Dungeon is exactly that. Nathan Meunier built it in Twine while simultaneously writing a developer diary about building it, and the whole thing carries the slightly breathless energy of someone racing their own deadline. On Steam the dev diary arrives as a PDF bonus, a companion piece that reframes some of the game's rougher edges once you understand where they came from. The game itself is a text-driven dungeon crawler with a Lovecraftian horror skin stretched over a choose-your-own-adventure skeleton. You start in a tutorial area called "Why the Walls Bleed," which does exactly what a first chapter should: get you killed a few times while teaching you the rules. From a central hub, three paintings unlock three distinct horror scenarios, each addressing a different flavour of dread, from existential bleakness to occult ritual gone wrong. Mechanically, you click highlighted words and phrases to move between rooms, pick up inventory items, trigger events, and blunder into monsters. There is a dungeon map that tracks your position, which is a small mercy given how easy it is to lose your bearings in the dark. Combat, when you hit it, is essentially randomised clicking until one of you drops, and most players who spend time with this game agree it feels more like a tax on your time than a meaningful system. That is a fair criticism. The absence of a save system is another one. Death sends you back to the start of a chapter, and because the text cannot be skipped, you will read the same atmospheric passages several times before getting past a tricky branch. Keep a notepad nearby. What holds up, surprisingly well for a micro-budget Twine project from 2015, is the writing and the mood. The prose commits fully to its grim register: occult rituals, demonic bargaining, survival through increasingly horrible means. The pixel art illustrations of rooms and creatures are rough but purposeful, fitting the macabre atmosphere without trying to be something they are not. Steam reviews sit at around 78 percent positive, which feels honest for something this niche. Players who praised it tended to highlight the atmosphere and the density of dark scenario writing. Critics pointed at the combat, the lack of checkpoints, and the complete absence of music or ambient sound, which is a significant miss for a horror experience that lives or dies on atmosphere. The silence is the part that stings most for me. A good horror soundscape can paper over a lot of structural roughness. Without one, the gaps between strong writing moments feel longer than they are. It is a deliberate artistic choice, apparently, but it is one that works against the game in the back half, particularly in the "Four Walls" section, which players broadly found more linear and repetitive than the others. That section asks you to die many times in sequence before meaningful choices open up, and without music to carry you through the clicks, patience does get tested. This is a short game with a specific audience, and that audience knows who it is: people who read Lovecraft for fun, who remember Fighting Fantasy paperbacks, who find text-based horror more unsettling than any jump scare. If that describes you, the writing alone justifies the ask. If you need systems, saves, or sound design to stay engaged, there are more complete interactive horror experiences out there. What Meunier made here is imperfect but honest, a first effort that reaches further than its tools should allow.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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