Review fatcat32594 4/5 · Jul 20, 2026 Abandoned
Throwback Dungeon Crawling, Highly Distilled
What do you get when you take the idea of a classic Dungeon Crawler and whittle down or streamline everything not about the core loop of crawling, getting rewards, and leveling up?
Everything else, from story, to graphics and sound design is intentionally minimal and practical. That doesn't mean that this game looks or sounds bad, but it's all to …
What do you get when you take the idea of a classic Dungeon Crawler and whittle down or streamline everything not about the core loop of crawling, getting rewards, and leveling up?
Everything else, from story, to graphics and sound design is intentionally minimal and practical. That doesn't mean that this game looks or sounds bad, but it's all to serve the purpose of getting you into the dungeon and fight some baddies. The soundtrack in particular is very fitting dungeon synth.
Mechanically, Dungeon Ruins II feels very much like an idle game except that you need to manually move your party around, but without the additional expansion options that such an idle game would include.
Combat is completely automated, with the only real mid-crawl decisions being
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Do you think you can make it back to the entrance before you die?
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Who should be in the front vs rear row?
Classes are differentiated by their singular starting skill, and their general stat distribution. Periodically when your dudes level up, they'll unlock new abilities, but there is no real "skill tree" - only a handful of randomly selected options shared between all classes, including the starter skills. This means that you can get to the point where every adventurer has the same "healing cleric" skill, etc, and these will stack.
Equipment selections come down to "status effects" (which are effective, but do not stack), the base stats used for damage calculation, and stat boots.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this little gem, though it seems that I've seen most of what there is to see. I managed to make it through several of the dungeons before deciding that while this was very relaxing, I'd rather be playing something a little more involved for now.
I may come back and reinstall later. Whenever that may be, this is the sort of game that is incredibly easy to pick back up again.
Windows 11
13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13800H - RAM: 32 GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU - VRAM: 8 GB