Review

Lost Depths is a 3-floor dungeon crawler from Bowtochris, described as a short dungeon crawl with 15 optional boss fights. 

In Lost Depths, you wake up injured in a dungeon without your memory or any possessions to your name. The protagonist, Reid, recalls that they were traveling to a big city before arriving here. Reid must travel a mine full of magical monsters to escape. 

The thing that quickly leapt at me about Lost Depths is that it’s a dungeon crawler with technically finite resources and no “home base” to return to. This is a tough game structure to work within because the player is expected to either learn the pace of its resource management over multiple plays and/or simply hope that the designer has placed supplies in the dungeon for the game not to be too difficult. Lost Depths does a clever thing here where enemies have a very high chance of dropping restorative items, sometimes even multiple in the same fight. The result is that it does, at least at first, feel like Reid is not so much exploring the dungeon as he is desperately trying to escape, scavenging what he can from his battles as he constantly moves forward. For an “escape” scenario, I think this makes more sense than having Reid train his body up by fighting enemies near a healing spring when all he wants to do is get out. This kind of structural writing is less visible than things like dialogue, narration or item descriptions, but it is important nonetheless. Bowtochris made a good high-level structural choice here to avoid giving the player a location that feels like a “home.” 

Exploring the dungeon of Lost Depths is a bit of a front-loaded experience.  At first I thought the sparseness of the dungeon was meant to be part of the starting area, with the narrow, yellow dirt corridors giving way to something different as the game went on. However, the environment remains pretty much the same for the entire duration of the game. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it is clear Bowtochris wanted this to feel like a repurposed mine. The mining motif pays off a bit on the third floor, where you can use a collapsed mine track to fall to a previously inaccessible location on the second floor.  Beyond this however, the game doesn’t get much return on its consistent but samey environmental theme. From a graphical perspective it would be nice to have more decorations and tile variety, sure, but this sparseness has some practical implications as well. 

Functionally, this mine feels less like a mine and more like a gamey labyrinth. This is not at all an inherently bad choice, but it is one to keep in mind when figuring out how much you want to adhere to a given theme. Here, the consistent coloring makes it rather difficult to identify landmarks to aid the player in navigating the maze. There are some interesting pathing challenges to be had in this game where the player must return to the beginning of a very long branch to find the right path, but the uniform feel of the environment made it hard to remember when the branch actually happened. A game with this kind of structure and environment does not necessarily need to go into Super Mario Bros territory where you’ve got wildly different aesthetics marking areas of the game world, but it would benefit a lot from having more small touches to act as landmarks. Some rooms that miners (or the dungeon’s creator) may have used, some weird but memorable geography, and some on-theme variation in the tiling and decorations would give the player better tools to take on the pathfinding challenge. 

Other than solving the maze, the principal challenge of this game is surviving the random encounters. There are no objectives or mandatory bosses to fight in this game, so in a way these become the primary test of whether Reid has what it takes to get out. This is a clever twist on how battles tend to work in other RPGs. Usually, random battles are something you need to fight just enough of to be strong enough to defeat the boss that guards the way to your next macguffin, cutscene or dungeon exit. Bowtochris has reversed this, making bosses optional challenges that grant you new abilities. These abilities are sometimes very useful, allowing Reid to buff himself, deal higher damage to enemies, and inflict useful status effects. They also tend to give Reid a tool necessary to defeat the next optional boss, creating a bit of a feedback loop. As the bosses are optional, defeating them feels like a way to get a leg up on the enemies encountered in random battles, which can occasionally be as challenging as the bosses themselves. 

The combat itself is also a bit of a front-loaded experience. The first 30-40 minutes of the game feels well-playtested and tight, with some interesting enemy troops to fight, a good sense of power escalation, and some pretty well-designed bosses. While the boss design remains a highlight for much longer, the enemy troops can go quite a long time without offering much variety. I’ve fought probably hundreds of goblins throughout this dungeon, and while they were a good demonstration of how your stats scale up (they are barely outside of one shot range at the start, and become one hit kills pretty soon after), they don’t really add much beyond that. And with the game’s very, very high encounter rate, this means fighting a huge number of battles that don’t contribute much to the game’s fun. This isn’t true of all the random battles of course. There are enemies that inflict scary status effects which can be countered with accessories, enemies that buff each other and debuff Reid, enemies that are best run away from rather than engaged, etc. The troops necessary to give the game a pleasant variety and danger to its combat are there, they’re just overshadowed by the sheer number of repeated fights with enemies the player no longer has reason to fear. 

The monotony of the fights and exploration combine to make the back half of this game a bit daunting, despite only taking a couple hours to get through. From the player’s side, it was a bit rough to get over the finish line. But a jam game isn’t all about the player — it’s also an avenue for a new creator to experiment and learn the tools. Overall this feels like an exploratory submission, one to figure out RPG Maker’s math and play with the basics of level design. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and I commend Bowtochris on not only finishing a 3 floor dungeon, but in filling it with as many solid bosses and encounters as they did. 

Special Topic: Dungeon Geography 

Lost Depths labels itself as a dungeon crawler, and its mazey environments and reliance on resource management call to mind old school RPGs like Dragon Quest III. As I mentioned above, it departs from the old school by avoiding framing its dungeon as a thing to plan expeditions into or to traverse as a way from point A to B. Instead, Lost Depths frames its dungeon as an escape.  The player is always in danger, and they’re solving basically three encounter-packed mazes in a row with no breaks. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it’s worth recognizing how stressful of a structure this is. It’s also worth considering how much the dungeon gets out of being so linear. Outside of a clever decision to let you fall from floor 3 to 2 to access a new area, you are pretty much always seeking the single “correct” path.

I personally think a key element to making this kind of dungeon interesting to explore is in affording the player some kind of agency in how they go about it. While there is a definite beginning and end, I would suggest offering a bit more freedom in how the player moves between these two points. The game already gives the player agency in how they make themselves stronger through the optional bosses, but I think it’s possible to do this with the pathfinding challenge as well. Here are some suggestions for how the dungeon layout can offer the player some feeling of agency:

• Loop-based area design: This means that some places can be accessed from multiple directions, and that some paths will take a player back to a familiar area. In a game with optional bosses and keys to find, this is something that would come in handy. Loop-based design basically makes it possible to make mazey dungeon maps where players can get lost, but eventually find their bearings accidentally by returning to a landmark via a looping path. It also creates more opportunities to let the player choose how they approach the dungeon. In a tabletop RPG, this may have meant opting for one encounter over another after scouting the area. Here it might mean choosing a path with more favorable encounter types. Using visual indicators of what you might find on a path (for example, poison pools where poisonous enemies lurk, bookshelves where mages congregate, etc) will serve as a helpful indicator for players who pay attention. 
• Hub and spoke pathing: In this structure you have players going off into defined paths that return them to a main area afterward. Usually these hubs will be close to a blocked-off path forward, but that’s not a thing you necessarily have to do. The advantage of this is that it gives the player something they recognize as a discrete and short challenge to complete. It also lets the game designer have some idea of how many encounters might be had at once, how to pace the challenges found along that path, etc. It allows you to kind of have your cake and eat it too: the dungeon can both feel claustrophobic and dangerous while still giving the player the feeling that they are starting or completing some smaller “objective” (exploring a path spoking off from the hub) that offers its own sense of accomplishment and relief.
• Multiple “correct” paths: This is something I think this game could really benefit from, and is somewhat related to the loop designs I talk about above. The idea is to have multiple exits and entrances between floors, some of which may only lead to walled-off areas with treasure, but others which may just be alternate paths forward. This allows the player to get lost in a scary labyrinth without being forced to solve it necessarily. It also makes it more fun to go back and explore for items you missed, since the game now isn’t forcing you to do it. The items found by returning to these unexplored areas will feel more like they’re giving you an advantage rather than feeling like they’re part of an upgrade “schedule.”

The key thing these ideas all have in common is that they give the player decisions to consciously make when they explore the winding tunnels of your dungeon. When the choice between left and right feels like more than just a question of guessing the “correct” path, it turns the levels into something for the player to actually play with rather than be constrained by. That is something that I think is important to keeping a game focused on dungeon crawling fun.