Desktop Dungeons: Rewind

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind owes its success to its fast-paced, brief yet incredibly entertaining gameplay. The game may be small in size, but its depth and excitement are beyond measure. It's a gaming experience that you never knew you needed.

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a title you'll likely play for weeks if you pace yourself properly. With the multitudes of things to do, you'll be enjoying it for a long time to come.

Although there are some innovations like the Rewind mechanic, this is more basically a remake of the original Desktop Dungeons. That means if you played the original a lot, this will more or less feel the same. But if you are a roguelike lover who will meet Desktop Dungeons for the first time, you'll absolutely love it!

If you're after a different, more cerebral kind of dungeoneering experience, Desktop Dungeons: Rewind might just be the adventure you're looking for.

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind has many classic designs that still look fresh today. In fact, this 3D remastered version hardly improves on the original, the graphics losing the delicate flavour of the original 2D art. If you were to ask a veteran player who has spent hundreds of hours playing desktop dungeons, the answer would undoubtedly be "not as good as the original". But if you were to ask whether Rewind is fun, I think it's still worth playing.

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is what I look for when playing a remastered title. A nice graphical update, plenty of quality-of-life changes, and new content that is not in the original but still adds to the enjoyment without feeling forced in. I love how easy it was to get into the game, and I liked the challenging aspect of Rewind. The new rewind feature is interesting and doesn't break the already solid game experience. If you've never played a roguelike then Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a great jumping on point to the genre. If you've been a fan of them for a while, this one should be added to your collection.

Ultimately, Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a cleaned-up repackaging of one of the most visually basic PC games of all time, with the Dragon Quest overworld-style sprites of the original brought to life in a whole new way. The gameplay is still as gratifying as ever, with countless hours of content on offer to those who want to master the art of dungeon crawling. While it might be light on brand-new content for the veterans, it's still a filling experience for those who want to gorge themselves on numbers wrapped up in images of monsters and spells, especially one that keeps you wanting to play a little more.

This is a game that requires a slow-paced and thoughtful approach and is clever at it, but the downside is that the core loop may become boring if you don’t take a breather now and then. Don’t play this on fast-forward, despite the yearn to keep pressing forward, square after square, one low-level enemy after another. There’s a lot of fun to be had from the mischievous dialogue and bite-sized dungeons, but make sure you give your heroes a well-earned rest.

While I still prefer the original Desktop Dungeons mainly for nostalgia, Rewind this is a refreshing and modernized reintroduction of the game will have a new generation falling in love like I did over ten years ago. Even if you haven't played it before, I think the price of admission is well worth it for a game that offers so much variety and longevity, being infinitely replayable in the truest sense. QCF Design offers a game that lets you peel back the layers like an onion, only to find that it's wrapped around another onion. And once you peel back those layers, there's yet one more onion inside that's offers more depth and surprises. Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a lighthearted and challenging procedurally generated puzzle meets dungeon crawler roguelike, and is the coolest thing you'll play all year.