The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos (2020)

I found DoN's (the name is unpronounceable) combination of XCOM-like combat, skill-based RPG and quirky (and mostly low-brow) humor quite endearing.

There's a lot of tactical depth to offset the lack of any significant way to affect the story and various well-voiced, quirky characters. While I didn't laugh out loud, I did snort amusedly quite a bit.

The only thing that prevented me from giving this fame 4 stars is that I'd made the mistake of playing this in Iron Man mode, which played into the fact that the game had technical malfunctions (related to Epic's semi-broken Cloud Sync feature) that twice set me back several hours in my play-through. While I gritted my teeth and went back to playing after the first time, the second time broke my will to play. I guess I'll never see what the magic Anvil does or what the endgame is like.

Playtime: 38 minutes (i didn't even finish the tutorial)

Review

TL;DR: I got bored during the tutorial.

Bland

I love turn/pause-based strategy. Age of Wonders, XCom, Baldur's Gate, HOMM, Torment, Pillars - all among my favourite games. They all have their own take on combat, with their own quirks. This game has neither. It is completely generic TBS combat. If there was a game-making program with "default" gameplay for each genre, this would be it. Oh wow, the tank can defend? The thief can backstab? The archer can shoot arrows? Super creative guys. The art assets are also so generic i honestly thought i had played this before.

Other bad stuff

• The game is excruciatingly slow. I'm pretty sure the tutorial takes almost an hour.
• The jokes are awful. Even worse is they literally reference games like BG. That's just going to remind me of infinitely superior games, guys.
• The tutorial is so illogical. They teach you about pre-combat positioning, then don't let you use it in the next combat. You have to disable a statue trap but don't give any indication what statue they mean. The map is straight-up disabled at first. Et cetera.
• The interface doesn't show the hotkeys so you constantly have to go into Options to remind yourself that "F" ends your turn. And there's dozens of hotkeys that change based on context too.
• To detect traps you almost literally have to crawl around the dungeon. It's what made me quit.

Conclusion

I wouldn't recommend this even if you got it for free (like me). There are countless better games with turn-based combat. Even a game like Fort Triumph is infinitely more interesting and fun. Also a lot shorter. Apparently this take dozens of hours to complete.

3/10