[Review] Dungeon Munchies

Games are similar to food, there’s a plethora of different types to pick from, each one feeding a different person’s specific craving. Dungeon Munchies is a quite spicy take on 2d Action RPG games that might just satisfy the itch of some players with particular plot tastes, but deter others with its stale gameplay.

You play as an unnamed and mute protagonist zombie who has recently been reanimated by Simmer, a highly skilled necromancer who also happens to be a professional chef. She has tasked you with gathering ingredients for her wide range of dishes, and become her new star pupil. Those ingredients, however, happen to be derived from the remains of all the monsters you encounter in ‘the dungeon’, a massive facility shrouded in mystery.

The main idea is to advance across different areas, beating enemies along the way until reaching an area boss. These enemies drop ingredients and Insight Points that can be used to cook different dishes that give you abilities. There’s a limited amount of slots where these abilities can be added, granting you passive effects. These effects range from things such as life regeneration, to mobility options such as double jumps or even air dashing. Some of these ingredients can also be used to craft weapons.

As you keep advancing through the game’s story, more characters will join the cast, each bringing a different flavour of humour to satiate any comical hunger. The game’s strength is in its story and characters. Things start out quite silly, but given time things develop more meat on their narrative bones.

The game is divided into three chapters, as you keep advancing you end up discovering exactly why you were reanimated. It’s during the later chapters where its premise starts turning darker, bringing interesting viewpoints to the player with a teaspoon of dark humour. As Simmer mentions in one line, there’s no workforce efficiency if the workforce is dead, quite funny considering that you yourself are a zombie.

As early as the tutorial area, interactions between the aforementioned characters are littered with scrumptious social satire and jokes. Character interactions ooze with lots of charm, helping to craft a memorable cast. Fun moments await at every corner. You might be being lectured about work ethics by Simmer, who is absurdly wrong much of the time, and a while later, you’ll be interacting with a masochistic banana.

This is genuinely the part I enjoyed the most, the relentlessly charming characters, the interactions you have with everyone, and the story itself are really well cooked. The pacing was really smooth and it always kept me at the edge of my seat, making me want to play more. I could keep engaging with corny but fun dialogue and discovering what antics might happen.

Unfortunately, not everything served can be a five-star dish. Dungeon Munchies is sadly riddled with glaring bugs that range from bothersome to exploitable. The exploits are not good for overall gameplay flow, since they trivialize any challenge the game might bring. The idea of gathering ingredients from monsters you kill is amazing, however, they never deplete when you cook your passives or craft new weapons, making the system pointless.

Along the bugs also come other basic issues that are lack of foresight on part of the developers. There was this time I beat a boss, but the boss also killed me, and it caused dialogue to play while I was dead and that made me respawn in an early area of that map that I shouldn’t be in, fortunately for me, leaving the area and re-entering made me respawn in the correct location that appears after the boss. It was disappointing to see this happen, since things like this are basics you have to keep into account while coding a game. Despite not getting hard-locked in any way, it still felt rather sour to my palate.

Gameplay balance feels weak, while there are a bunch of options and builds to choose from, these decisions are often trivial. Your main source of upgrades comes from the food you cook, but most of these dishes give passives that are overpowered. There’s one passive that heals life when you get hit, but since you are able to equip dishes that augment your defense, this can often result with you winning health instead of being damaged, a very common thing during bosses. You can end up with an infinite health build thanks to being able to equip multiple dishes that are health related, and have no limits on how they operate. Your only limit is that you can equip a limited amount of food at any time. Later in the game, you are also able to upgrade those dishes so their passives become even more broken. To do this, you have to use Insight Points, an important resource that you collect from the monsters you slain. Insight does not get used when you craft or cook, another bug to add to the bunch.

Since making the gameplay trivial is so simple, enemies feel like uninspired pushovers that you can just dash away from. Bosses can be a bit time-consuming, but you will find yourself dying more often to early bosses rather than late game encounters, since by the time you meet them you’ve become near invulnerable. Even when using a suboptimal build, bosses will feel like a walk in the park during late game, all of them follow the same formula for their attacks, making them boring to face. Each boss has a special desperation attack that gets triggered during a certain point of the battle, all of these consist of different bullet-hell patterns, but they all look samey and uninspired.

Resource farming is useless due to costs not being applied. Therefore, returning to past areas is also pointless, since you will have farmed everything you need when you traverse for the first time. Bosses also award a ton of Insight Points that you will never use, unless you are upgrading passives. It’s very easy to just get the ones you need to max level which makes the later half of the game irrelevant. The difficulty curve is more of a slope, stage traversing is more time-consuming and complicated than the bosses themselves.

Controls are another issue, they are often janky and unresponsive due to input lag, making many stage obstacles frustrating to traverse. This is not due to them being challenging, but because level design is quite flawed and performance makes it worse. Late-game there was this platforming section with ice hazards that was by far the worst designed area of the game. This is due to the lack of mobility options and performance issues that often made you miss pixel perfect jumps. RAM usage really skyrockets in this area for no apparent reason.

Performance is terrible, despite looking simple in style, the game consumes a lot of resources that make bigger 3D titles look like child’s play. It’s often that these performance issues affected how I played, making me miss inputs, and even slowing things down to a crawl. During my playthrough, I have suffered from many other issues related to this, aside from the terrible ice zone. Thanks to memory leaks I was unable to play the game for prolonged periods of time, I’m unable to know if this problem persists in other platforms however. Being a game that has some time out of early access makes the issue even more concerning, as it’s clear that it still needs to be seasoned better.

Dungeon Munchies has minor Metroidvania elements sprinkled as a secret seasoning, however, it’s very lacking when it comes to map design, everything feels like a quick set of corridors with very obvious “secrets” hidden in them. These secrets are a way to obtain new recipes to cook even stronger passives, have powerful weapons, or even permanent ability upgrades, such as air dashing. One good aspect is your ability to fast travel and along with plentiful checkpoints you can quickly explore previous areas for missed items and secrets.

It felt as though things were undercooked in this area, and that made it all a bit boring since nothing could stand in my way. I decided to use and upgrade those health related passives to be able to tank the bosses and progress throughout the plot, which was the thing I found kept me playing. It was quite disappointing there wasn’t much of a challenge , since there was a great amount of potential here.

The art is charming and memorable, the cast is full of colorful and vibrant characters that ooze identity and personality. With plenty of still portraits that are funny to look at, loaded with anime and pop culture references, there’s always some reference fans from other franchises might end up enjoying. The monster design is really varied and full of unique foes with spicy sprite art, there are no palette swaps to be found. All of them have a repertoire of various unique animations that are very comical and expressive. The enemy roster ranges from mundane things such as mosquitoes, to ridiculous ones such as angry durians, further cementing the chaotic energy of the world they belong to. Bosses are really cool too, each one with their own 2D cutout in the background for when they do their special attacks. There are some minor visual glitches here and there, but those are barely noticeable.

Music is imaginative and spicy, with genres ranging from Phonk to Hip-hop, and even religious choir during some boss battles. It can feel like quite a chaotic mix of genres, however, all tracks are fitting for the situation they’re heard in. While a few tracks can feel dull and uninspired, the vast majority of them are fun to listen to, with some even becoming quite the earworms. Despite that, the soundtrack is affected by the buggy nature of the game, the most common bug to find is that music will often get more mute based on sound effects being played. It’s a shame that these sorts of sound bugs happen, since they kill the enjoyment one could have had with the wide and varied list of tracks. Sound effects are the worst offender when it comes to bugs, most of your playthrough you will be unable to hear them due to audio related bugs and this makes the experience feel dull, quite unfortunate because some of the sounds that come from weapons are pretty satisfying.

I feel like this game had a lot of potential, but it was short on time in the oven, these chefs needing more dough to craft their perfect recipe.  The tasty dialogue alone keeping me motivated enough to trudge through an experience that otherwise would have been just a forgettable appetizer.