《Deep Dish Dungeon》评测：冲突的风味

There’s nothing I like more than a good dungeon crawl, regardless of the form it takes. Deep Dish Dungeon promised to take this classic idea and merge it with survival crafting elements for what could have been a fruitful combination.

The final product is certainly a combo of the two, featuring a completely handcrafted dungeon with no randomisation, and the ability to craft a selection of items and foods. Yet this combination is far from a harmonious blend of flavors, each element instead working against each other in the long run.

Delicious Dungeon Diving

Deep Dish Dungeon’s narrative is present but far from important, placing you as a treasure hunter entering the dungeon looking for goodies. There’s an opening cutscene, notes to find, and a few secrets hinting at the fate of previous adventurers, but this is otherwise a game light on story.

More focus is placed on the dungeon itself, a series of increasingly intricate rooms and puzzles that require you to explore every nook and cranny. As mentioned earlier, the dungeon has a set layout, and this is generally used to good effect.

See, the dungeon itself isn’t actually overly large. It’s instead made to feel bigger than it is due to the overall layout. Rooms feature lots of hidden extras, and places you can only access later in the game with specific tools. There’s a lot of interconnectivity, giving you a reason to go back and explore, even if it's just for optional treasures.

While there is combat, most of the challenge in Deep Dish Dungeon comes from said exploration. You’re rarely given exact hints on where to go or what to do, even at the start, and this only grows harder as you unlock new sections of the dungeon. There’s no yellow paint or other markers here. You’re expected to scour areas fully to progress.

I like how the dungeon is laid out for the most part. Despite the lack of direct signage, you’re often not completely lost on where to go. There’s always somewhere new to look, or a tool that can open up more places to loot. Yet, it’s all held back by one key annoyance.

Survival Crafting At Its Least Interesting

Despite having the appearance of a dungeon crawler and a solid area layout, Deep Dish Dungeon shares a lot more with common survival crafting games. You have to scrounge for resources, craft new things, and constantly manage your hunger meter and light sources (due to being fully underground, unlit areas are completely dark).

This could potentially work. The idea of being self-sufficient in a dungeon, making use of whatever you find, is a sound one. I just think in this case the balance of resource usage to rewards is completely wrong.

Some of this is due to the lack of any leveling or stats. Outside of armor and weapons, other stat increases come from the food you eat. Similar to Valheim, you have three food slots that can be filled, each stacking for a combined stat boost. Not a bad system by any means when done well.

However, there are two areas where Deep Dish Dungeon slips up in its execution. To start with, food generally doesn’t last for that long. In a regular survival game where you’d often be doing basic tasks or resource collection, it’s not too bad, but in a game revolving around puzzle solving, it can be incredibly annoying seeing your maximum stamina drop to half while trying to figure things out.

The second and more egregious problem in my eyes is that the food is just... boring. You do unlock new ingredients and ways to cook as you progress, yet it rarely veers off from safe and familiar dishes. Despite the game's name hinting at something more, outside of a loose story element, food is exactly what you’d expect from any other survival game, rather than a completely unique mechanic.

Exploration also suffers from a few other grievances, but this ties into another aspect of Deep Dish Dungeon: multiplayer.

Solo No Go

Deep Dish Dungeon is a game that’s clearly designed for multiplayer. You can take two other friends with you, or host public lobbies for people to drop in and out of. However, for this review I only managed to experience the solo side, and it can honestly be pretty miserable.

Starting with the combat, it’s very basic. Walk in, attack, step back - think King’s Field, or Lunacid for a more modern example. However, a lot of enemies don’t flinch when hit, or require something more than just basic melee attacks. This is fine to manage in multiplayer when you can have people bait enemies or use different weapons, but solo you’re far more limited in strategies.

As for why you’re so limited, inventory space is near nonexistent. You start with a measly 6 slots, only increasing this to 9 via an early craftable upgrade. When you take into account weapons, armor, tools, and food all needing slots, there’s essentially nothing left for regular resources or progression items.

In multiplayer, you naturally get more slots overall and can split important items and tools. But for a solo player, there’s a crazy amount of backtracking to deposit resources, grab food, and stash unneeded tools (until you do actually need them and have to run back, of course).

Due to the interconnected nature of the dungeon, this can sometimes be fairly quick, but it gets tedious having to go back and forth so much for relatively little gain. Survival games usually at least have the decency of either having some items take up unique slots, or offer way more inventory space.

As you can see, in multiplayer many of Deep Dish Dungeon's problems cease to exist. But I can’t help but feel like a lot of this could be solved with some extra modifiers for single player, even if it was just extra inventory slots.

Deep Dish Dungeon Review | Final Thoughts

Deep Dish Dungeon features solid puzzles and a satisfying dungeon layout to explore. But it’s held back by an often frustrating solo experience, along with survival crafting elements that do more harm than good.

If you can grab a few friends and don’t mind having to craft all the time, then there are some decent puzzles to take on. Otherwise, I’d recommend waiting for it to have more time in the oven, as some pain points would only take relatively major changes to improve upon.

Deep Dish Dungeon was reviewed on PC with a game code provided by the publisher - All images were taken by the reviewer over 30 hours of gameplay.

Isaac is the Guides Editor at TechRaptor, handling guides — and the occasional review — for games throughout many genres. Some of his more extensive work at… More about Isaac