Last night I (re)discovered this game.
I really dug
the original so I hopped on the Deluxe Edition preorder, so many years ago. And oh man...was I disappointed. What is with all this extra
stuff? It's ugly, slow, and you have to
grind to do stuff
? In a
roguelike?! I gave it a college try because I spent twenty-five whole dollars on it, then wrote it off as a total loss. Caveat emptor, sucker. Don't preorder digital downloads.
Fast forward to, I dunno, six or so years later. I'm blowing the dust off my Steam library looking for games I haven't earned all the trading card drops from, in the vain hope that I'll get more booster packs if I exhaust my opportunities. Bonus points if it's playable on my Surface, which means I can make progress on it over lunch. Enter Desktop Dungeons, which checks both boxes.
I'd forgotten most things about it other than my disappointment with all the Stuff added to the non-free version, but I've mellowed out over the years about grinding. It's still shit but I've soldiered on with it in a few games now in order to beat them instead of just dropping them, so I figured I'd give DD a shot.
Shockingly, my (non-Steam) cloud save from however-tf-many years ago was still there. No clue what I was doing though, so I started a new campaign (kingdom) to go through the tutorials. You can have multiple kingdoms on a save (also nice), so I figured I'd just switch back if I caught up with myself.
...
What an excellent, excellent puzzle game.
It's not a roguelike; I wouldn't even call it a roguelite. The stuff I bitched about wasn't "fluff" or "padding" but additional complexity. The artwork is super skilled and amusingly grotesque. (Taking off your weeb blinders is good, folks.)
Amazing how a few years' distance can completely reframe your approach to a game, and thus change what you get out of it.