Dungeons of Dredmor

This game is arguably the best attempt made by an indie developer to bring the roguelike genre into the mainstream thus far. Inventory management may be an absolute chore, but you’ll be willing to forgive that thanks to the intense, strategic combat and sharp humor. It also bears mentioning that if you’re a little turned off by the thought of permanently dying and losing all of your progress, the game does enable players to turn off the permanent death feature (although, we think you’re kind of missing the point if you do that).

The siren call of sparkling loot is a temptress that's tough to spurn. Indie studio Gaslamp Games knows this well. Dungeons of Dredmor's voluminous depths are littered with an abundance of wacky treasure to horde and enticing weaponry to cleaving all sorts of evil beasties in twain with. The fact you';ll die incessantly in pursuit of such delights doesn';t dull the fun, since a glut of intriguing character skills to tinker with makes re-tooling your hero over and over again a blast.

The game barely takes itself seriously enough to have proper swords, much less tell an epic story or rewrite the rules of a genre. Gaslamp Games’ mission was to make a fun, accessible, lighthearted dungeon crawl with enough interesting mechanics to make exploring the game’s systems as intriguing as diving through its dungeon. Dungeons of Dredmor is a solid success in those terms, and easily exceeds expectations for its five-dollar price tag.