As game developers, we have to put up links to our Press Clippings on the company weblog so we have some place to send our parents (who still don’t believe we have real jobs.) So now, it’s time for the Gloat Walk:
Rock Paper Shotgun: “I survived the nameless horrors summoned by the Shrine of Eyeballs. I fought cybernetic aliens, hulking Djinn, moustache golems. I even survived the Monster Zoo, the dreaded room packed wall-to-wall with bloodthirsty enemies – twice. I didn’t survive the blade trap…”
Press X or Die: “It’s a good sign when you’d rather play the game you’re supposed to review than actually review it. I am afraid to run Dungeons of Dredmor again because I’ll spend another hour on it (at best). Sadly, I had to get screenshots for the article, so I lost another 2 hours summoning moustache golems and killing diggles.”
Game Informer: “Dungeons of Dredmor isn’t Diablo III. It’s not even Dungeon Siege III, but it makes no pretensions about it. The game barely takes itself seriously enough to have proper swords, much less tell an epic story or rewrite the rules of a genre. Gaslamp Games’ mission was to make a fun, accessible, lighthearted dungeon crawl with enough interesting mechanics to make exploring the game’s systems as intriguing as diving through its dungeon. Dungeons of Dredmor is a solid success in those terms, and easily exceeds expectations for its five-dollar price tag.”
Game Pro: “I’m quite taken with this roguelike; it feels like a game that came out of nowhere and hits all of the dungeon-crawl buttons — steep challenge, lots of loots, and a ton of monsters. Throw in its humor and soundtrack and you’ve got a roguelike that should appeal to anyone who likes a good dungeon-crawl.”
and Wired, of all people, featured us in their list of “7 Fantastical Indie RPGs worth playing” (alongside such distinguished company as Recettear and Cthulhu Saves The World.)
Have you written about Dredmor? We’d love to hear from you. Would you like to write about Dredmor? Send us e-mail to our increasingly-buried contact list, and we’ll see if we can help you out. Want to talk Dredmor? Same deal.
Actually I wrote a first look on Dungeons of Dredmor a few days ago. It’s in German, so you probably won’t understand too much, but I can tell you: I love the game! 😉
http://nachtfischer.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/dungeons-of-dredmor-erste-eindrucke/
gameshark also reviewed you(very positivly) their on metacritic too
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dungeons-of-dredmor
Saw that – pretty cool, we need one more Metacritic score to go live!
Now has 4 reviews, averaged at 79 on Metacritic, putting it on par with other high-ranking indie titles.
There’s at least one metacritic-enabled review (Gamezebo) that hasn’t shown up there yet, for some reason. That should pull us higher.
Giant Bomb did a Quick Look of your game: http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-dungeons-of-dredmor/17-4564/ I’m sure it got you some more sales, people seemed pretty positive to it.
Congrats for the good reviews!!
Saw this one when I was browsing seemed like it nailed it
http://www.examiner.com/online-games-in-national/dungeons-of-dredmor-review-review
You’ve also been mentioned on the Boing Boing podcast:
http://gweek.libsyn.com/gweek-010-losing-is-fun-
I’ve not listened to it myself, but it’s hard to imagine it being anything other than positive 😉
The game’s promising, but obviously has problems. Do you think these reviewers just kept quiet about the problems? Or do you think maybe they didn’t play the game for more than twenty minutes?
It’s curious, isn’t it, that nobody said “Well, the game’s a heap of fun and has a great atmosphere, but there’s this huge list of problems…”
Is there really such a huge list of problems? I’ve not had any crashes myself, and many of the buggy things aren’t that noticeable (like certain skills not working correctly, but invisibly so). Some other issues would require some significant investment to really get a feel for, and many reviewers will miss those. I’ve seen one reviewer mentioning the lack of skills balance as a good thing, since it offers various challenges (something quite common to roguelikes). On top of all that is the $5 price tag, which makes many quite understanding of some rough edges.
Yeah, Amandachen, you’re being really negative here. It’s a great game, for fifteen dollars or five, and has a very responsive and attentive dev team behind it. Relax and enjoy the damn thing.
Just wondering why some games get mauled by reviewers and some don’t.
Look how critical the press were of Stardock’s Elemental, for example. I’ve not played it, but it still doesn’t sound playable a year later, despite all sorts of promises of fixes and improvements.
Thankfully, Dredmor is being worked on and polished. But I was just wondering about all the gushing reviews. Maybe the reviewers hadn’t seen a game like this before.
I’ve played the game for a few hours, maybe six hours, and I’ve decided to wait for the next patch (unless that breaks something). Maybe I’ll review it when it’s been properly patched up, and I’m sure I’ll have lots of favourable things to say.
I played a lot of dungeon crawls (Rogue, Dungeon Crawl, TOME, Nethack, ADOM, Desktop Dungeons), and there are a lot of problems with this game: 1) there is no rest button, so you rest by tapping space 2) one cannot move or (mostly) melee attack diagonally – very strange (also monster moves because of that) 3) monsters do not shoot or cast spells on you + AI of monsters non-existing = repetitive gameplay 4) inventory is slot limited (as opposed to weight-limited in most serious DC games), so most of the time you wonder what you will regret least to make place for another thing – very annoying when carring lots of ingridients and insane variations of food 5) quests are close to non-existing 6) skills and stats are repetitive and overcomplicated. 7) graphics is not-so-nice (as expected in DC)
Generally, I see DoD as an attempt to simplify dungeon crawling for broad audience (plus humor), but it’s IMO a hasty and failed approach (except maybe humor). There is really nothing DoD does better or in compare to those titles: strategy, mechanics, predefined classes, inventory, story (TOME or ADOM). Considering price: most of those DCs are free to play: no glory in taking few dollars for such bad work and derivative game. Sorry for words of truth.
I wrote an article about this game (and a summary of roguelikes as a genre) for my college newspaper. The published article netted me $10, which of course means that this game more than payed for itself. Thanks guys!