Though I'm often one to avoid certain recurring characteristics in Indie games, most notably roguelike behavior by way of procgen level design and permadeath states, there's a few that will likely draw me in despite any other misgivings I might about a game from its reputation or early impressions borne from browsing the Steam marketplace or watching a Quick Look. One of those positive characteristics is my beloved spacewhippers: games with large open worlds that become gradually accessible over time from acquiring new abilities and equipment. Another is the idea of returning home once the action's over and spending your ill-gotten gains on improving your home base, building up a large outpost with multiple facilities from a humble shack out in the woods or a shed with a wonky front door. It's why I'm curious to try out a game like House Flipper, despite its rudimentary "default UnReal Engine assets" look and repetitive cycles: there's something appealing, especially in this day and age, to create something out of nothing and walk away from a project proud of your work. Ideally, I'd be doing that more often in the real world, performing maintenance on a number of household items that could use some DIY, but not being the handy sort I usually find those jollies from games or wiki projects.

So the premise of Guild of Dungeoneering, in which you have to develop the titular institution from basically nothing by sending expendable adventurers on assignments, was a compelling one. I'd played games like it before, most notably Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King from the Wii shop and Recettear on Steam, but I'd always been drawn to the latter where you'd participate in both the management sim side and the action-RPG side. I could do without Guild of Dungeoneering's boring monochrome aesthetic (though I appreciate the graph paper background) and its sneering "comedic" tone, but I was prepared to enjoy the game for the promises it intimated.

I can't say that it totally reneged on those promises. The guild building is far more rudimentary than I'd hoped, but there's a great deal of customization and areas to emphasize over others to suit the way you prefer to play. Approximately half the "wings" you build onto your guild provide new adventurer unit types, each of which are relatively interchangeable but for a different focus on magic, brawn, or a balance of the two with a few other perks. Other areas to craft include "blessings", which provide a bonus effect on entering a dungeon (though the lowest tier versions of these blessings only last for a couple of battles), and crafting stations, which add more equipment to the game's randomized assortment of spoils earned after battle similar to the unlocks in The Binding of Isaac: you don't "own" these items, despite building the blacksmiths and woodworkers that manufacture them, but you will start encountering them in the wild at least. Later tiers require a lot more money: I've been regularly earning around 100GP per successful quest, but the second-tier structures alone cost 500GP each. If I wanted to focus on improving the particular parts of my guild that I see the most benefit from, or some stronger classes, I'm going to be on that grind for a while.

Then there's the questing/dungeoneering portion of the game. They have a similar board game-like structure to the guild construction, where you are given tiles to place - these can be new rooms with specific exits, which can only be placed in gaps where their exits match up to what's already there, but also new enemies and treasure for the sake of levelling up your dungeoneer and earning some extra reward cash, respectively. Each of these quests requires completing a basic objective in that dungeon - kill a boss, or plunder a certain amount of treasure - before you're suddenly kicked out and given the reward money. Unfortunately, at least as far as I'm concerned, the "RPG" part of the game's equation is very light: your dungeoneer starts at level 1 each time they enter a dungeon, and it's simply a matter of planning a route that allows them to level up to the point where they can survive completing the quest objective, and then complete that objective. No time for exploration or unnecessary battles: every quest is best resumed as quickly and efficiently as possible, because the money you earn from fights and random finds is significantly less than the quest rewards. In order to not waste time, then, it's best to make a beeline for those quest rewards and keep moving on. It's not like your hero benefits from sticking around, either; they'll be back to level 1 with zero equipment again the moment you leave.

There are those to whom the above sounds ideal. That they never have to worry about losing a high level dungeoneer (the only thing that sticks around are battle scars, which can provide a mix of positive and negative effects) or being underequipped for the dungeon at hand. No losing their champion, and being forced to take on lesser quests with the game speed busted to Rocky-montage a new guy back up to that level. On the other hand, everything feels very repetitive and fruitless as you continue to complete what are almost identical gameplay sessions one after the other for the many resources needed for the next big step. You simply pick one of your dungeoneers - some are more suited for the task at hand than others, but it's not always easy to tell who until you've failed that quest once or more - have them run around bashing level 1 monsters, then level 2 monsters, then level 3 monsters, and then they're probably in a good spot to defeat whatever boss is (or is guarding) the quest objective, after which they repeat the process for as many times as is necessary until the game runs out of content or the player runs out of patience.

As with most roguelikes, you either make progress or you don't the longer you play. Guild of Dungeoneering is probably closer to what folk are calling a "roguelite", where some small form of progress is being made with permanent upgrades to your home base and stronger versions of dungeoneers with better starting boons. In that respect, the game's not totally unlike a turn-based version of Rogue Legacy with some goofy blobby characters and a bard that makes fun of you after every dungeon until you go into the options and silence him (he has a separate sound channel, which suggests to me that it was an addition that came about after the QA testing phase...). Certainly not a bad game from the time I've spent with it, but I still can't shake that feeling of it wasting my time with this endless cycle of fresh starts that I get with almost every roguelike/lite I play. I should probably should try to be a little more wary of that Steam tag from now on.

Rating: 3 out of 5. (Upgrade to 4 if you like roguelikes.)