Review: Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret

Genre / Tags: Adventure, Puzzle, Dungeon Crawler
Developer/Publisher: Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier/Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier
URL: Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret on Steam

I saw this game during NextFest on Steam, and was interested in the concept of the game. I have always been a big puzzle / dungeon crawler type of gamer myself. Seeing that I hadn’t heard of the game series until this second game I wasn’t sure if I was going to miss out on story.

The game begins with a song or tale introducing the story, immediately throwing you into the dungeon. Two characters appear on the screen, hacking their way through dungeon spaces filled with green, zombie-like enemies. One of these two people is you apparently, which you find out when the two meet one another through the prison gates that separate you two. The rogue looking character says something about a bloodstone but then hurries off towards a stairwell that you cannot get to, and you have to go in the opposite direction to go up a stairwell of your own.

This is where you start the tutorial on each level, walking you through how the game works and what you can do. The game gives off a strong mobile-first design vibe, later adapted for PC. The oversized buttons and the option to navigate using mouse clicks or a virtual joystick further suggest its mobile-first origins.

There is some voice acting for most of the dialogue that you come across. A number of the game’s non-playable characters (NPCs) communicate through text alone. Any dialogue or thoughts from your character are fully voiced.

Eventually as you get through the various puzzles you get to a point where you’re now doing a puzzle with your wizard character, and the rogue looking character at the same time. Both characters are moving mirrored to one another. That was the only interaction i’ve had with both characters since the first part of the tutorial, but quickly I was back to just playing the mage like character once again.

There’s many puzzles throughout the dungeon leading to a final four-sided puzzle room where you have to do something in each corner to unlock the final area. We come to the end of the demo after the completion of one of these.

I do like that at any point I can choose to “reload” the level if I messed up a puzzle. Or I can choose to use the hints the game gives to get through the level. Lots of options if you’re just not figuring out what to do next.

For what’s available currently in the demo. The game is pretty solid, I’d have to give it a 6.1/10. The game plays fairly well, for being clearly a mobile style of game. It has some challenges, but there are definitely some clunky aspects to it. There’s not a lot, if any settings. The game works with keyboard and mouse, but probably would have been easier to just use a controller. All in all, a pretty solid start.