All of the items you pick up early on you have to identify using scrolls or just test without knowing what they'll do first, and it's surprisingly easy to get surrounded by enemies or simply find yourself in a fight without having enough health or healing to get you through it. Although the overall pace of the game allows you to think strategically and try to make the best possible moves, this game is really tough. Things only move when you move, which allows for careful planning, distracted play, or a little bit of both.Įvery game of Shattered Pixel Dungeon presents a newly procedurally-generated dungeon for you to explore-and likely die-in. Speaking of progress, all of this action is managed in a turn-based format, so you don't have to worry about a hunger meter draining over time or enemies coming and finding you while you manage your inventory. Usually, food isn't super hard to come by, so long as you are making good progress downward in the dungeon. Your hero gets hungry, so you have to find or make food for them so that they don't starve to death. You can't just grind away killing enemies, though, as Shattered Pixel Dungeon is also a survival game. At the start, you have some modest class-specific gear and are relatively fragile, but as you kill enemies to level up and find more gear and items, you can turn into a formidable fighting force. You choose a class to play as (warrior, mage, rogue, or huntress) and then you are dumped into a 26 floor dungeon that you have to fight your way through. Runs of Shattered Pixel Dungeon begin with little fanfare.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon takes things back to a more conventional place-one that forces you to rely on your wits, some light rpg elements, and quite a bit of luck as you move a little pixelated hero around a grid-based dungeon, one step at a time.

There's a trend to take this classic mold and apply other game mechanics to them, like cards, dice, or even slots. Dungeon-crawling games have gotten kind of complicated and abstract, lately.

Shattered pixel dungeon battlemage