Dungeon and Gravestone

Ahem. Anyway, Dungeon and Gravestone is a good time, and has the potential to become really addictive with its solid pacing and varied challenges. Its voxel-style characters and environments coupled with a fun tilt-shift effect provides a nice “toy-like” feel to the entire adventure, and the arcade-style scoring system and online features provide plenty of replayability. This is definitely a great game to have handy on your Switch for when you fancy a quick bit of adventuring; its short-form play sessions make it ideal for play on the go, but there’s enough substance here to keep you busy for a very long time indeed.

With its close-cousin-to-Legos look, smallish levels, and fast load times on current consoles, Dungeon and Gravestone has some addictive curb appeal but ultimately fails to deliver anything really new to a very crowded genre. There is depth to be sure, both in the options for character progression, stuff to find and fight, and the dozens of levels of the dungeons and hidden areas. The buzzkill for me was not the expected and familiar roguelike loop, but the frustrating movement mechanics, the necessity of replaying the uninspired, bare-bones early levels over and over, and the slow progress towards building a reasonably powerful character. Dungeon and Gravestone will scratch an itch for the devotees of the genre but I suspect those without a lot of patience will bounce off pretty quickly.