You’ve landed on an alien planet in your dome spaceship. Above is a slew of shadowy aliens looking to smash your dome and eat you. Below you are a wealth of resources to help you escape. Good luck.
Dome Keeper
Developer: Bippinbits
Price: $17.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
That’s the basic premise of Dome Keeper, a new roguelike where you play as a miner just trying to survive long enough to escape the planet before certain doom. It’s the first game like this since possibly even FTL that managed to perfectly balance the feeling of relaxation, but also tense urgency as you calmly dig through the mines, but with that alarm in the back of your head reminding you of the imminent danger.
Waves of aliens will periodically attack so you have to keep a keen eye on the timer so that you can make it back to the dome in time to be able to fight back. Each wave gets increasingly more difficult so balancing when you upgrade your dome and when to upgrade your mining gear is a key part of the game. Between waves, you’ll be able to venture below to mine for materials that you can then use to upgrade yourself, the dome, or whatever gadgets you currently have. The game offers a lot of opportunities to experiment with builds, like maybe you want to focus on upgrading this dinosaur digging buddy you found, at the risk of leaving your dome more vulnerable, or maybe you go all in on dome. The fact that you can find random relics while digging, like a teleporter or the previously mentioned pet, helps change up what your goals might be in a particular run.
Digging for resources is an immediately calming formula; if I could turn off the enemies or even slow them down drastically so that I could focus on just digging around I’d do it. There’s just a soothing calm to digging around, finding a gold vein, carrying it back to your dome, and going back down to dig some more. Some of the gadgets you can find can really help automate the process as well. At one point I unlocked a tractor beam that shot straight down where I could toss my resources and it would carry it up to my dome for me. I started digging in downward angles toward the beam so that I could easily push resources down into it and let it worry about bringing that stuff back to my dome while I focused on digging. My only gripe is that I feel like there aren’t that many gadgets to acquire since I would repeatedly see the same handful across various runs. Regardless though, you never know which you might find in a run so the surprise element is still there.
Dome Keeper also features two modes of play: Relic Hunt and Prestige. Relic Hunt is simple enough, dig until you find the relic and bring it back to your dome to trigger the escape. That mode can be played in three different sized maps which is nice for allowing you to decide how long of a run you want to play. I found myself playing a quick small map every once in a while between work breaks, or the larger maps when I knew I had more time to dedicate. Prestige is a bit different however, as you score points by collecting resources and you can’t escape until you buy the upgrade to allow you to escape.
The Final Word
Dome Keeper’s loop is instantly addictive and is a damn great game to play on the couch. If you’ve got a Steam Deck, you’re definitely going to want to give this game a try.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
