Review: Drop Duchy Demo

Genre / Tags: Puzzle, Strategy, Roguelike, Singleplayer, Indie, Adventure
Developer/Publisher: Sleepy Mill Studio / The Arcade Crew
URL: Drop Duchy on Steam

I actually just found out about this unique take on a Tetris-style game called Drop Duchy this evening, and I couldn’t help but immediately try out the demo. Not only is it a puzzle game because its Tetris, but there’s the added strategy of it also being a roguelike game because each Tetris piece has a functionality to it. Like when the piece is played, it then reacts what tiles are around it or connected to its tile.

Traversing through the world of Drop Duchy’s campaign is very much in the vein of ‘Slay the Spire’-esc where you pick your first location, then it branches after you beat that level, to giving you more options of where to go from there.

(Image Credit: Drop Duchy)

There seems to be a few different tiles available currently in Drop Duchy. These are: Plain, Forest, River and Field. The first three are Terrain tiles that are available to you depending on what part of the campaign level you have selected. Some have more plains, some more forest, etc. It’ll tell you roughly the percentages with each peaceful or combat level. Fields only come into play when you’re using a farm tile, which converts all Plain’s in it’s radius to Field tiles.

(Image Credit: Drop Duchy)

There’s three main resources in Drop Duchy, Wood, Gold and Food. All of which you gain depending on what you play, as well as gaining additional depending if you fill up the board all the way across, like it would normally in Tetris.

You can spend these resources to either give you additional cards to play on your next round using your food, or using any of the resources to upgrade your cards and make them stronger. There’s a lot of uses for your resources, ultimately you want to try to get as many as you can.

(Image Credit: Drop Duchy)

Something that is unique about the game, is you also play the enemies’ tiles as well. So there’s a lot of strategy of where to place them, or even not place them by holding them in reserve as long as you can.

Currently, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of meta-progression that you’d see in other roguelike style games, or at least not that I can tell in the demo.

So far, Drop Duchy has a 8.9 in my book. The gameplay loop is pretty solid, and its pretty challenging even in the demo. I gave the game a good 8-10 attempts to try to beat the boss that is available currently, and had no such luck. Definitely going to have to keep my eye on this game and pick it up when it comes out.

Check out Drop Duchy on Steam, As well as The Arcade Crew’s latest video about Drop Duchy below!

FGM –