Dungeon Tycoon
As background the first thing you must know is gamelit. The second thing you must know is Dakota Krout.
Allow me to explain.
Gamelit (game literature) is a genre of fiction in which the rules of reality follow the logic of a video game. Characters have attributes that can be described in numbers. They have distinct levels potency and can level up after gaining experience (or through some other mechanism). Sometimes they even have actual character sheets, a concept from tabletop role-playing games.
Dakota Krout is an author of some popularity who publishes electronically first and tells stories in the gamelit style set in various fantasy worlds. In his first series, beginning with Dungeon Born, Mr. Krout told the story of a dungeon core named Cal and of the person who first discovered the dungeon named Dale. Knowing the potential value of a dungeon Dale purchases the "worthless" mountain that houses the dungeon for practically nothing and then gains money and notoriety for allowing people into "his" dungeon. As time goes on the dungeon grows deeper and deeper into the mountain, adding rooms and monsters to challenge would-be heroes who then meditate in the cleared dungeon levels to absorb the ambient energies of a dungeon in order to level up.
A dungeon in progress. I have several more rooms and passageways I would like to add and, of course, more monstrous minions. I'm not sure if I will actually be able to fill the entire available area with my dungeon without stretching my resources too thinly, but we'll see!
The hero portal from, presumably, the overworld that surely exists. The dungeon guardian lets in heroes that pay the entrance fee that is adjustable. Lower tier heroes may not be able to afford a very large fee, limiting who can access the dungeon.
Okay, knowing all of that, I can explain Dungeon Tycoon.
Dungeon Tycoon scratches a very particular itch. I'm sure people who have never read Dakota Krout would have fun with this game if they enjoy management, god sims, or dungeon building games more generally, but for me this was a Cal-simulator and it is wonderful! The lovely, chunky pixelated graphics are just a bonus.
Heroes pay money to get into your dungeon and fight monsters so they can level up and gain loot. They want a challenge but they also want to win and make it back out with their lives intact. If adventurers enjoy your dungeon your rating improves and attracts additional (and more powerful) heroes to your dungeon to risk their lives slaying monsters, filling up their pockets with gold, and leveling up from Tier 1 (the weakest) to Tier 3 (the most powerful). Your dungeon has both a potential popularity rating based on the elements you add to your dungeon including rooms, monsters and decorations that sets a maximum cap on potential popularity, and an actual popularity rating that determines, among other things, how many and which Tier of heroes will attempt your dungeon each day. As you become more popular you will see fewer and fewer Tier 1 heroes and more and more Tier 2 and Tier 3 heroes. You may even test yourself against legendary heroes once that research option is unlocked.
And there's research!
Very much like Cal, the dungeon core, learning new tricks and expanding his repertoire of beasts and traps, you can unlock new features in your dungeon including new decorative elements, new traps, and the aforementioned legendary hero option. The research is divided into four areas, a dungeon basics level which appears to be the largest, and then the three realms from which you may summon creatures to your dungeon: Underworld, Inferno and the Forest. You can initially summon creatures from the Underworld but must unlock the other two realms with in-game currency.
There is a sort of secondary research track in the quests menu. As you complete quests, such as killing a certain number of heroes, you unlock bonuses. I've capped that out now but it was a nice extra feature as I was building my dungeon, especially because it produced a steady stream of additional income as I prettied up my dungeon and increased its size.
The entrance to my dungeon. Note the potion dispensers in the corners and the fancy tavern table. Heroes can gather around the table to form parties and then purchase potions from the dispensers to be better equipped for the adventure ahead.
The respawn pedestal. Heroes slain by your minions will respawn in your dungeon at a respawn pedestal assuming it has charges left. Each pedestal has five charges.
Research has a lot of variety and even several hours in there are undiscovered options. Among the power-ups one may unlock include raising the monster cap so you can increase the number of monsters in your dungeon and also features made to help heroes face the horrors of your macabre halls.
But wait, help the heroes?!
Remember, you want to be popular. Killing everyone who enters your domain does not tend to help with word-of-mouth reviews by successful dungeon delves. The worse the heroes feel about your dungeon (and dying certainly sours their mood), the lower your popularity is going to sink. Heroes like getting loot and leveling up so you want your visitors to do those things to be able to attract more and more vict--, er, "customers".
You can place healing potion dispensers around your dungeon to allow heroes to buy potions (which gets you more gold) so they can heal up between (or even during) fights. You can also, once researched, place campsites in your dungeon where heroes can restore their energy reserves. Running out of energy will make heroes run out of your dungeon even in the middle of battle. They have an upward limit of stamina and, once drained, they leave in a hurry. Campsites allow adventurers to refill that stamina bar so they stay in your dungeon longer, fight more monsters, collect more loot, level up more and, generally, enjoy themselves more, upping that popularity meter.
The popularity meter, by the way, is a star rating system from no stars to five stars with higher ratings attracting more elite adventurers to your domain. You want these dungeon delvers to enjoy themselves and I did say you can't kill everyone, but you do want to kill some of them.
There are two currencies: gold and souls. Gold is gained through entry fees and shop sales (like a potion dispenser). You are supposed to gain the contents of any filled loot chest at the end of the day but I haven't actually seen that happen. It may be a bug that will eventually be fixed. Souls are gained by killing heroes. Souls are a secondary, and much more rare, currency that is used for several purposes in your dungeon such as upgrading shops and monsters. You'll need more powerful monsters as your popularity increases to be able to provide a challenge for the higher tier heroes you will be attracting.
The reward for besting the boss: equipment upgrades! The goblin blacksmith can bestow a damage-increasing buff on adventurers who can meet his price (and fill your coffers). To the right is a healing well, one of the many features you can research and place in your dungeon to either aid or hinder the heroes who come to explore it.
Individually, heroes are not especially powerful. Exploring your dungeon solo is a sure way to get oneself killed and gain the tycoon another soul to spend. The best way to dungeon delve is with a team of complementary heroes, of course, and that option does exist. Once unlocked, you will be able to build a tavern table in your dungeon that heroes can use to form parties of four. I have my table in my entrance room along with some potion dispensers so teams can come in prepped and ready to adventure. As they enter in random order, you may get parties composed of heroes of different tiers and different classes. It is funny when a Tier 1 hero sits down with three Tier 3 heroes. It's just like, okay, somebody's getting rushed! Heroes receive huge bonuses to health and damage for being in a party.
There are four classes of heroes: warrior, ranger, ice wizard and fire wizard. You could argue the last two are different specializations of the same class but that's just splitting hairs. The wizards have ranged attacks, of course, and seem to be able to empower themselves occasionally to do even more damage. The ranger's special is a rain of arrows. I'm not sure what the warrior does, they don't seem to have a special ability that's easy to see in use. Monsters will prioritize warriors, if present, to allow the warrior to play the role of tank as is appropriate. Wizards and rangers will seek to gain distance from monsters in order to attack from relative safety.
I say "relative safety" because there are some threats that have more reach than others: enter the boss monster.
I assume there is a boss for each realm, but I have only unlocked the first boss so far: the Skeleton King. Using a Boss Door (a researchable item) makes the room beyond it into a boss room. Boss Doors will only open to heroes that are in a party. The Skeleton King is both huge and deadly. It has a large area whirlwind attack that will damage every hero in a fairly large radius around itself, including those pesky wizards. It is not a rare occurrence to see four souls loosed from their mortal coils during such an attack. The Skeleton King is often the reason heroes die in my dungeon, currently. I have a lot more building to do and, presumably, two more bosses to unlock so I'm looking forward to reconfiguring my layout to accommodate these other bosses.
That's one of the very nice things about this game: moving things around doesn't cause diminishing returns. Very often in building games of various types, you can destroy a building and gain some of your resources back, but very rarely do you get them all back. In Dungeon Tycoon, removing a door or decoration fully refunds the cost of constructing it. You can even relocate entire rooms with all of their innards intact if you decide you want to change up the order of things or otherwise tweak your layout.
There are a couple of minor bugs. I have a hallway that consistently becomes unservicable every time I load in. It doesn't throw up any warnings (exclamation points on unreachable rooms) but heroes simply can't pass through. I have to select the hallway and move it (which refunds the doors), putting it right back where it started and adding the doors back on. After doing this the problem is gone until the next time I load in. The only other really noticeable bug I've found is that sometimes the camera can kind of stick behind the boundary wall of the map if you are zoomed all the way out and rotate around so that the camera manages to slip behind the "wall" there.
I currently have just shy of eighteen total hours of playtime and at this point I can wholeheartedly recommend Dungeon Tycoon to any fans of dungeon building games (like the venerable Dungeon Keeper), tycoon games, god sims, or similar titles. There is plenty of content that I haven't mentioned so that you can discover it yourself. I'm still discovering new things even now. If you have a Steam Deck the good news is that support is on its way. The last patch fixed a crash on startup that was plaguing Steam Deck owners and the devs have stated that the next patch will come with full controller support. I have found the standard WASD+mouse template to be perfectly serviceable for controlling the game on the small screen, but I haven't put in a lot of time on the 'Deck yet.
And it's only $15!!!
Buy this game today!