Dungeon Divers was a game I really wanted to like, but ended up finding it kind of frustrating to play, with a lot of arbitrary randomness in ways that were hard to adjust to.

So, Dungeon Divers is basically fantasy themed Minesweeper. You’re given a grid, with an existing dungeon structure mapped out, and a series of “rooms” (not actually rooms – just single square tiles) listed that you need to uncover. Each tile has different rules related to where it could be placed (and thus where you’d find it), so as a player you need to click on the right tile or tiles to find those squares. The layout is generated at random, with each level having the same type of rooms you need to find between runs, so all that changes are layouts. You have 3 wrong guesses, then it’s game over and you start from the beginning.

On the one hand, it’s a quick way to start after you fail. On the other hand, the speed in which you can fail and restart is the thing that can make the game frustrating. Specifically, the game is heavily modeled on Minesweeper, but it basically gives you less information than Minesweeper.

Minesweeper, in each uncovered square, gives you a number saying how many mines are touching that square. For Dungeon Divers, you need information based on how many rooms are touching that square, how many walls are touching that square, and how far a square is from the entrance or the boss room. Aggravating things is that some of the sprites in the tileset don’t clearly indicate if the tile has a wall, particularly on something like the Steam Deck screen (or on a phone, as there is a mobile version), and you have to count tiles manually to get distance. There are tools to indicate that a square doesn’t have anything or might have something, but nothing to say, “This square might have this kind of item.”

There are magic items you can get that might make things easier, but you also have a finite number of guesses, and you have limited healing places staggered through the run, so if given a choice for something that gives you healing after each room, that gets some extra weight.

Dungeon Divers isn’t fundamentally a bad idea for a game. It’s just this execution doesn’t work for me. I want to like it more than I do, and I wish it had more quality of life options that I could turn on to make it more manageable.

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