Blood Dungeon review

Blood Dungeon adheres rigidly to the autoshooter or ‘bullet heaven‘ format: it’s about moving around a scrolling arena auto-gushing projectiles that turn a steadily increasing horde of enemies into XP. Every level up grants a choice between two or three randomised perks or improvements, steadily turning the player into a blur of pulsating DMG-emitting fireworks. Rounds are usually over in less than ten minutes.

I loved Vampire Survivors but then I got over it. I’ve never been gripped by any of the clones. But Blood Dungeon has some appealing bullet points going for it: it transforms the commonly top-down autoshooter into a sidescrolling platformer. At a glance, it looks more like Spelunky than it does Brotato or Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

The presentation is more appealing than your average bullet heaven fare too: Blood Dungeon is the work of Nidhogg studio Messhof and their distinctively globular 2D art style is a perfect fit for precision-oriented action. Animations in particular are often brilliant, and the music—which its creator Matthew Hoey aptly describes as dungeon drum ‘n’ bass—is simultaneously madcap and hypnotic.

There’s no denying Blood Dungeon is a sleek, well-wrought take on this modern subgenre. It’s probably among the best examples of it. But as the hours I spent with it wore on it started to feel exquisitely meaningless. I was reminded why I dropped Vampire Survivors.

(Image credit: Messhof)

Blood Packed

Blood Dungeon starts like all roguelites: vainly. I am Gun Man, a man with a piddling machinegun which shoots every 1.21 seconds. Thanks to the blood left by my fallen enemies, within a minute I’ve upgraded it to shoot twice rather than once, and then, thirty seconds later, I’ve acquired a sword that rotates around my body, shredding bats as I roam the lurid halls. By the time I die there are four double-sized swords surrounding me, my gun issues five bullets per round virtually non-stop, and the halls have turned into impenetrable walls of monster flesh.

Five hours later I’ve unlocked a handful of other characters and all six of the maps. I’ve upgraded my health, my jump height, my damage output, the amount of weapons I can equip per run, and my repertoire of powerful upgrades has expanded dramatically. If I’m lucky my character will be lost among an overwhelming array of erupting, tantruming firepower by the eighth minute.

My favourite weapon for achieving this is easily the bouncing ball, which can demolish most of the game’s first bosses within seconds if I focus on upgrading it. I also love the turrets and the laser, though the shotgun whose spread can be increased from three to upwards of 13 shots is pretty fun too.

I also like most of the characters, except the unwieldy flying mosquito (I’ll admit it’s a skill issue). They all throb with panic, which well they should. My overall favourite is probably Skinja, who cartwheels around the maps at a blinding pace while issuing volleys of the aforementioned shotgun pellets. I also liked the Baby, whose low health is well-compensated by a revolver that one-shots most early round enemies. There’s also Hypnomancer, who loads out with gas which, naturally, he farts from his arse.

(Image credit: Messhof)

But it’s the sidelong perspective that appeals to me most, even though all maps stick to common survivor archetypes: there’s the X-axis corridor map, the Y-axis pit map, and other gimmicks like the map with a lot of water, and the map you have to mine through. Importantly, every map has a fixed layout but the locations of items and keys are, for the most part—but not entirely—randomised.

Most maps also loop back on themselves, so the genre’s sense of constant, hysterical forward momentum is complemented by a newfound focus on map knowledge: knowing where to reliably find health and explosives is the difference between beating the area’s third and final boss or dying for the umpteenth time to its second. If I spend the less frantic opening minutes unlocking as many doors as possible, it’ll make the final minutes when there’s barely a safe place to stand much easier.

(Image credit: Messhof)

Slot Your Throat

But Blood Dungeon does inevitably feel like a grind. The opening hours are an enticing onslaught of rewards and unlocks, but by the ten hour mark, with my fist deep in its basket of candy, the basket is ripped away and my nose pressed to the grindstone. It lays bare the disappointing truth that the game itself can’t withstand the absence of its rewards.

Still, Blood Dungeon feels superb to play which is essential for an arcade game but oddly, kinda rare for a Survivors-like. I guess most Survivors-likes don’t need to feel good because the genre usually amounts to little more than a slot machine simulator. It fast-tracks RPG character progress so that dopamine hits come thick and fast in units of seconds rather than hours. Then, in the final five seconds or less, assuming the RNG hasn’t been so kind as to make me unstoppable, it steals everything away and invites me to start again.

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I can get better and better at moving around in Blood Dungeon but if the RNG doesn’t favour me I’m still stuffed. Being at the mercy of chance is baked into its design, of course, but there is a big unambiguous line between the story-generating unpredictability of a Nethack or Spelunky and the more-ish, non-nutritive unpredictability of a lottery.

And that’s ultimately what Blood Dungeon and its ilk feel like to me, once I’ve put the controller down and walked away from their exquisitely compulsive loops and dazzling visual noise. It’s addictive, and that’s the only reason I keep playing it. It gets easier as I play, but that’s not because I’ve improved much: it’s overwhelmingly attributable to the wider array of weapons, charms and spells I have at my disposal at hour fifty versus hour one.

Still, Messhof pulls its own Survivors-like off with flair and applies a thin layer of skill reward. I enjoyed the time I spent playing it. But now that I’ve put it down, I never want to think about it again.