New release: Deadly Dungeons

I spent some time this past week trawling various mobile app stores, looking for indie RPGs I hadn’t heard of. It turns out that there are a ton of them! I’ll be going down my list over the next week or two, posting about the games I found.

First up, we have a first-person dungeon crawler by the name Deadly Dungeons (created by an unnamed team consisting of Jacob Ensign, Philip Beal, Micha Hoeylarts, Martin Lande and Jillian Hurst). This is a real-time grid-based crawl, very much in the same vein as Dungeon Master–or, more recently, Legend of Grimrock. Unlike those two games, however, Deadly Dungeons is not party-based; you’re all alone down there with a single character!

The basic premise follows:

After being separated from your adventuring party, you must navigate a deadly dungeon, and fight your way through hordes of creatures in a desperate attempt to escape alive.  What first begins as a simple escape to the surface turns into a fight for survival, a confrontation with an ancient evil, and a descent to hell itself.

Interestingly, Deadly Dungeons seems to be something of a roguelike (note the second entry on the feature list):

• Massive and deadly dungeon environments to adventurer through.
• Randomly generated dungeon levels, creatures, and items.
• Pages worth of dialog, journal entries, and environmental descriptions of the dungeon environment.
• Continuous monthly updates that enhance and extend the RPG game.
• First-person dungeon crawling rendered using OpenGL ES.
• Touch-based interface.

A piffling $2.99 on Google Play or Amazon will net you Deadly Dungeons in its entirety. In the meantime, MeAndMyAndroid has a review to help you decide. Unfortunately, Deadly Dungeons is an Android exclusive, so I’m afraid iPhone users will have to give this one a pass.