I have always enjoyed a good dungeon crawler, even in the days before you could see he dungeon. Back in the days of the text-based adventure computer games like The Wonderful World of Eamon. From there came the Ultima series and then Doom and Wolfenstein. Stage Clear Studios and Merge Games LTD have recently released a new game to the genre – Crimson Keep. A first-person dungeon crawler that places you in he depths with a will to escape.
A curse befell the small village of Larkstead 30 years ago and destroyed almost everything. You were banished to the dungeons below and now you must make your way through too escape. Your only hope is to find the Crimson Keep, if it really exists, and find your way to freedom. Standing in your way are traps, gruesome monsters, twisting labyrinths and ominous bosses.
You have a choice of 3 characters when you start your adventure. The berserker, who relies on strong melee attacks, a witch, who can cast spells for ranged attacks and a drifter. To be honest, the drifter is a worthless character that has little health, no starting weapon, and when he does get one does very limited damage. Once you make your choice you are dropped into a tutorial level. This level is always the same. It will allow you to level up once, get an item and learn your basic character moves. After this level you are dropped into a rogue-like dungeon filled with monsters.
You can either rush your way through the levels looking for the entrance to the next floor, or slaughter everything in sight. The more foes you defeat, the quicker you can level up and add new abilities to your skill tree. Enemies are easily out run or out maneuvered. Even if they do follow you, they tend to get stuck in doorways making it easy to kill them from the side. Another major issue with enemies is that they telegraph almost every attack. Once you see he movement it is easy to dodge any incoming attack, unless you are backing into a corner. This means that defeating bosses without taking damage isn’t that difficult of a task.
The graphics in the game are dark and unoriginal. You wander through poorly lit caves that are all frighteningly similar. Some may have lava flowing down the walls, but the effect is more of a pulsing orange than actual flow. Enemies are fairly generic and soon get repetitive. There is some voice acting in the game that is ok, must most of it borders on over the top. The music is good, but nothing that really grabs your attention. I found after my 3rd or 4th time playing that the sound was blending into the background and opted to listen to my own music instead.
Crimson Keep carries a price tag of $14.99 -$19.99 (depending on system), and is available on XB1, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. If you are into dungeon crawlers, this game offers some interesting takes on the genre, but nothing ground breaking. Since the dungeons are rogue-like, there is a fair amount of replayability, but if you are not enjoying the experience, will you replay it? If this title is one you have to add to your collection, wait for a sale.
