Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 Review - Puzzling Beats
Many would agree that ‘soft locks’ (in which the player unknowingly creates a game state from which they cannot progress) are bad. In Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret, you can soft-lock your game in a myriad of ways. But, for the most part, this is a very good thing.
Having enjoyed the first Dungeons of Dreadrock, I knew what to expect; one hundred, tile-based, mini-levels crammed full of interesting game pieces (including creatures) to manipulate, avoid or whack on the head. It is puzzle meets rhythm game, and the cleverest moments occur at the intersections of observation and a (kind of) unfolding metric dance. By noticing why, how, and how fast, a menacing creature moves, you can begin to ‘feel’ whether it is possible to reach the closed gate at the same moment the creature can be lured past the pressure pad that opens it. Or, you can’t, and you’ll die trying, until you can.
I always believed I was correctly solving a level, before suddenly (sheepishly) being cornered by an ogre. My dying thought was always some version of, ‘I should have thrown that rock left, not right.’
The first game cast you as the girl who entered Dreadrock Mountain in search of her brother. In the second, you’re provided with a new perspective on prior events. The story is minimal but feels well-planned and carefully curated. Given it has been more than two years since I played the original, however, more of a narrative recap may have been useful. Mechanically and aesthetically, Dreadrock 2 is simply ‘more of the same’ (which is good, because they are good games) so, if you haven’t played the first, consider playing both together.
I’m relatively familiar with the block-pushing genre, so I began to intuit that most Dreadrock 2 levels require a precise solution. A thin corridor suggests timing will be crucial, whereas an open area suggests position needs to be managed; perhaps you can ‘circle’ a creature or reverse its direction. Or, while it may initially seem that a level with two throwable rocks requires one, it is definitely going to require two. And, if these rocks aren’t destroyed, it’s likely you’ll need to return (from the next level), to retrieve and reuse them. No game piece is wasted, which is useful to remember as you reflexively whack a zombie. (His dead body was probably required on a pressure pad, and you are soft-locked once again.)
There are some interesting new creatures in Dreadrock 2, like golems. If you hit a golem, then move away quickly, they’ll bash the ground, then walk forwards (unlike treants, who grab forwards but slide backwards). One of my favourite new levels involves directing the movement of multiple golems simultaneously. They’re quite slow, so you’ll need to multitask. Golems also ‘watch’, which comes in very handy.
What is ‘watching’? Another new creature, the swift devil, can be forced to vanish into a pentagram, but only while being watched. If you try to walk on top of the pentagram, you’ll be burned to ash, so you’ll sometimes need a devil to be ‘watched’ from somewhere outside of your direct line of sight and movement. There is a cool, and terrifying, puzzle that involves luring the devil away from its level. Generally, failure isn’t a big drama and the levels are small so it takes seconds to try again. But, this devil puzzle is one example where if you repeatedly die in the wrong place (back on the first level), three levels’ worth of progress reset, instead of one.
Idiosyncratic design elements, like the above, made me appreciate how much I was enjoying trying to discern what the designer expected me to do, rather than the game being organised around what I may do.
For example, game pieces sometimes act inconsistently. I accidentally bashed a friendly character (by moving onto his tile; I was trying to talk to him) and he died in one hit (another soft lock). But then, a few levels later, I was required to push him by moving onto his tile. I knew I wanted him to move, and to where, but I thought moving onto his tile would kill him, so I didn’t think to try. This probably sounds like an annoyance, but it’s more of an observation because I loved the ‘trust’ sequences that involved understanding how to work with this character.
Similarly, given the game’s difficulty, the incremental hint system is a useful addition, but some hints were too explicit (spoiling the wrong part of the puzzle), or not explicit enough (leaving me stuck). Perhaps more accurately, the hints didn’t always match what I wanted to know. They are what the designer thought I wanted to know. In an obliviously soft-locked state, I found mis-hints quite fascinating. Again, all of this just intensified the fun I was having. Even if you get a lot of hints, you still have to solve the timing of the level, so hints may reveal puzzle logic, but execution remains up to you.
This second Dreadrock game inspired me to reflect deeply on aspects of game design, especially soft locks. Consider Resynth, in which each level’s pieces represent a musical loop, but the level sounds dissonant if you push blocks into an unwinnable arrangement. Or, Baba is You, where if ‘nothing’ is you, the game is very obviously (and instantly) unplayable, alongside ‘softer’, less readable locks.
Of course, a hardcore block-pushing puzzle game, like Sokobos, gives no feedback, if you’ve made your level unwinnable. So, I think this is how the magic of the Dreadrock series is created, for me; it is hardcore (and genuinely challenging), but the light, rhythmic feel of gameplay moderates the experience. Dungeons of Dreadrock is slated to be a trilogy. You can absolutely count on me playing one hundred more levels.
Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
