I do love me a good dungeon crawler, or at least I think I do. I was there, when the OG crawlers were introduced. Might and Magic. Ultima Underworld. Eye of the Beholder. Dungeon Master. I’d play those for hours on end, which is why I’m a bit confused as to why I can’t seem to get any of these modern treatments to stick. Is it me? No, it’s the games who must be wrong.

Dverghold is tough to type without slowing down, and takes me longer to type than I was able to spend playing. It starts out in a room filled with paper doll NPCs that we can talk to. Doing so throws up a wall of text that I honestly did not read. These NPC represent various aspects of my prep work including shopping, party recruitment, and a few options that weren’t enabled in the demo, sadly.

My party member choices were fairly limited, although a rotating roster of transient heroes will be made available at launch, I’m told. I got to pick three from the pre-mades, so I went with a warrior, a ranger, and a thief. Each member has three skills they can use in combat and seem to follow the “standard, emergency, and wind-up” variety. All of them are specific to combat or combat related accessories.

Once I descended into the dungeon, the UI is minimal. There’s the 3D viewport front-and-center, and my party on the left. Each of their three skills are available for when I need to use them. Combat is turn based, it seems, depending on an internal and unseen motivator; walking up to an enemy allowed me to roll through all three of my member’s actions (one per round) before the enemy got to attack. The first room, however, was just lousy with enemies, and I was getting attacked from front, left, and right at the same time. Enemies who flank get to hit on their own time as I apparently needed to be facing them to get any actions of my own. Poor Uldra died at the foot of the goddamn stairs leading up to the lobby. I could have gone back up to replace her, but at this point I was sighing heavily and decided to just see how far I could get before uninstalling.

I really want to revisit this genre of dungeon crawler, but I’ll be damned if the developers aren’t just making shit difficult for the Souls-like crowd mentality. Believe me, I know that part of the game is that the party isn’t legendary, and keeping everyone in fighting shape is literally a central game mechanic. But come on! Five enemies in the very first room? Since I only have so many NPCs to choose from, I can’t keep running back to replace them, and resurrection and healing services aren’t in the demo. Making matters worse, the UI isn’t super-intuitive. I didn’t know how to sell some of the stuff I had found in my limited run through the dungeon, although I did find a pickaxe and was able to mine some raw gold for my purse, so that was nice. It was really the only nice thing about this game.