Maybe you can relate, but I tend to find I crave twee and colorful things proportionally inverse to my melancholy. If I’m having a good week, give me Fear and Hunger and horrible films like Speak No Evil. If, like this week for some reason, I feel like bursting into tears at inopportune moments, I need silly little guys doing whimsical activities. Enter Dungeon Clawler. It’s a vaguely Slay The Spire-ish roguelite where you grab weapons from a claw machine while you fight. It’s got lazy Steam Deck depression nap written all over it. The main theme reminds me of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and the character I picked is named Sir Bunalot.
Let’s have you, you silly fucking sausage.
Once fighting begins, you wiggle the claw machine with your WASD. My ‘deck’ is what fills the machine. Shields give me armour, weapons do damage. You get as many bits as you can grab with your two scoopy-scoops per turn. You get an upgrade after each fight, which gets thrown in the machine for you to pick up later. Some nodes twixt fights give you upgrades, some are bosses. That’s it! Very simple, very silly, and quite moreish. While certainly not as fiendishly tactical as your Spires and the like, I can feel the stacking buffs and choices having quite transformative effects later on.
Here’s a tip for you, and then some tips for the developer. What can I say, I’m in a generous mood. Player: Turn the game speed up to ‘Ultra’ in the menu. Developer: Please, please add some actual sounds for the claw machine and the subsequent attacks. The soundtrack is glorious but, gosh, you don’t realise how vital some clinks, clicks, and thunks are to the turn-based loop until their gone. Also, everything just a little too slow going at the moment – at least for how few decisions I have to make in what to grab this early on.
Still, a concept this fun will get you a long way. And, yes, I do feel quite a bit better after playing it. I’m going to search for more chucklesome and strange individuals to brighten my day now. Dungeon Clawler plans to launch into early access later this year. You can grab the demo here.