There’s something oddly satisfying about Blood Dungeon’s minimalist design and aesthetic. When you boot up the game for the first time, you’re dropped into a hub area with no explanation as to how you got there. Why does your jittery character (I later discovered his name was Gun Man) have a jagged frown? What exactly is this “blood dungeon” I find myself trapped in? Why is there a witch holding a machine gun, welcoming me to this underground abode?
For a game developed by Messhof – yep, the same folks who brought us other lo-fi classics like Flywrench and Nidhogg – it should probably come as no surprise that a lot of my questions would go unanswered. What I didn’t necessarily expect is just how effectively Blood Dungeon sunk its hooks into me, and it wouldn’t be long until my planned, quick 20- and 30-minute sessions would balloon into hours-long marathons.
As an auto-shooter roguelike, Blood Dungeon’s core loop is easy to come to grips with. Your chosen character will use their weapon automatically, so whether you’re rocking a giant sword or a machine gun, you won’t actually have to contend with manually aiming and shooting/swinging. Instead, you’ll have to contend with platforming and making quick decisions on what to do next. Sure, your weapons might auto-fire, but there is a lot of nuance as to how you actually position yourself at any given moment.
Staying in one place is rarely a viable strategy – it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by increasingly hostile waves of enemies, so maneuvering from one safe space to another while avoiding enemy attacks becomes your core focus. Thankfully, you have a few skills up your sleeve – your character can climb up walls and hang from ceilings, grab onto grates, and shimmy across chains. Admittedly, the “stickiness” can take some getting used to. In my early runs, accidentally grabbing onto walls or ceilings was a common occurrence, but after a dozen or so runs, I found myself coming to terms with Blood Dungeon’s platforming.
Of course, you can’t just avoid enemies forever. As you (automatically) mow down all sorts of different monsters, they’ll drop blood, which you’ll need to collect to level up and unlock more weapons and abilities. From the onset, you’ll only be able to carry two weapons at any given moment, but when leveling up, you can upgrade them to make them more viable in combat. Upgrades will differ based on what weapon you’re rocking, but they usually come in the form of upping base damage or rate of fire. If you’re lucky, your upgrade might end up shifting the tides of battle – while I wasn’t a big fan of the machine gun at first, it began to grow on me once I realized there was a chance to add bouncing or piercing bullets into the mix.
Blood Dungeon has a bevy of weapons for you to experiment with.
As is sort of expected for this type of roguelike, the fun comes with finding an interesting, if not over-the-top, mix of weapons, spells, and other power-ups that turn a run from rote to rampaging, and Blood Dungeon delivers this in spades. Finding the right balance of weapons (I’m particularly fond of dual-wielding a whip and a machine gun to handle enemies both nearby and afar), and rerolling for the perfect upgrade is an addictive cycle that will keep you coming back for more.
Sure, some runs will fall flat on their face, but occasionally, you’ll unlock a jetpack, allowing you to zip around the map with ease while your basketball weapon fires projectiles that bounce between walls, ripping all of your enemies apart and leaving a sea of blood that’s just begging to be picked up so you can unlock another upgrade. Needless to say, these memorable runs will make you forget the ones where you stumbled right out of the gate.
As has become standard for the genre, Blood Dungeon has its own meta-progression. After a run concludes, you can choose to head back to the game’s hub area, where there are a few NPCs and sub-areas to poke your head around in. The Bone Shop, for instance, is where you can spend your hard-earned bones (Blood Dungeon’s version of currency) in exchange for permanent upgrades to a wide variety of stats – think damage, reload time, movement speed, that sort of thing. In another room, you can take a look at all the characters you can play as, as well as the ones you have yet to unlock. The hub area also expands over time; as you embark on runs and get further and further into each of the game’s levels, you’ll eventually come across bosses that can be defeated to unlock more playable levels.
In fact, unlocks are the name of the game, so to speak. Aside from the six playable levels and nearly a dozen characters to try out, there are hundreds of different enemies, weapons, upgrades, and quests to complete, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it’ll take most folks a few dozen hours (if not more) to uncover everything. That being said, it’s a tad annoying that all of Blood Dungeon’s key sections (its in-game shop, its character select area, its quest log) are spread throughout the hub area, as opposed to being easily accessible through a few menu screens. Sure, it’s occasionally fun to jump and climb around the main hub to see what might have changed, but it doesn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, especially considering the time it takes to quit a level, load back into the hub, and then make your way back to said level to kick off another run.
Good
The Final Word
Even though Blood Dungeon occasionally stumbles when it comes to its platforming or its hub world, it’s hard to deny just how effectively it sinks its teeth into you, convincing you to do “just one more run,” even though that’s the exact same thing you said to yourself over an hour ago. The slow drip feed of new unlocks, completed quests, and bosses to conquer is more than worth the price of admission, and I don’t see myself uninstalling this one any time soon.
