As someone who has thrown together their fair share of creative projects, there's a certain irritating process that I tend to call "inspiration evaporation": those occasions when you're hit with a complete image for what your next endeavor will look like and in the process of getting from the conceptual stage to the finished product most of that creative energy has dissipated into the ether, leaving you with a completed project that - while you're happy enough with it - is a shadow of what you originally envisioned. This is especially true for game development, as neat ideas pass through your fingers like grains of sand as they are forgotten mid-development, proven to be infeasible for the coders to implement, or require too much time and resources to make happen. I'm not necessarily saying that's what occurred with Heroes of the Monkey Tavern, a throwback first-person dungeon crawler in the vein of Legend of Grimrock, but you can definitely see the heart of the game's creative aspirations and the sort of drab filler that had to be built up around it to ensure a finished, marketable product.

Heroes of the Monkey Tavern begins with the pragmatic story hook that the player's party, a seasoned group of adventurers, have finally run out of gold after months of revelry at the titular public house; a stranger with a hot tip about a tower filled with riches and monsters is enough convincing to get the entire party to move out on another adventure, even though they'd already sold their equipment for ale. You start on the first floor of the tower with nothing, scrounging together weapons and armor from whatever the dungeon and its secrets can provide.

Right from the start it's evident that - either due to budget concerns or the director's imperative on cutting out the fat (or both) - the game has excised a lot of features and mechanics that usually find their way into these games, most notably the hunger and thirst meters. There is also ample lighting in the dungeon, so there's no need for torches or a dedicated torch-bearer in the party either. Inventory limits are determined entirely by how many slots a character has left, rather than encumbrance, and given the only items in the game are equipment and keys you can easily finish the game without needing to drop anything (I carried out everything I could figuring that they could sell it for more booze money). While this does reduce the challenge it also gives you less micromanaging to worry about; a tricky proposition in a game already this sparse, but a welcome one for those looking for a breezier experience. To that effect, the game is considerably shorter than others in its genre: eight floors, most approximately sized around 30 x 30 tiles, which sounds like a lot but the game counts walls as taking up a whole tile in most situations. Overall the game took me about seven or eight hours on its highest difficulty level - which I'd recommend, if only to make the game's battles of attrition more tense and exciting - which perhaps is another point in its favor, given it doesn't wear out its welcome. Speaking of combat, it's the usual series of attacks on cooldowns and mitigating damage with healing spells - a priest character is an absolute necessity, given how few healing items there are - while navigating your "party blob" around so you're only ever fighting one opponent at a time. There's no "combat waltz" - that process in which you quickly attack and move out of range of an enemy so they have to close the gap and get hit again - as you'll take "flee damage" by disengaging. It really comes down to a battle of attrition each time, and with the lack of any party formation aspect each enemy's attacks target the entire team at once, which can make healing triage a challenging prospect.

Though many of the genre's features are greatly reduced or excised here, I'd argue that the core experience of this genre has still been carefully attended to. The oppressive atmosphere, for instance, which uses background music and distant monster footsteps to build tension around the next encounter (there's a certain floor built like a maze where this is put to great effect) and though there's only two trap types in the game (floor spikes and fireballs), there's more than a few instant-death trap gauntlets with valuables at the end of them to test the reflexes of the truly greedy. Even with limited tools the developers try to make every floor stand out in some way, either by how players progress through it or the types of enemies they face, but the game can't help feeling very samey throughout.

Honestly, Heroes of the Monkey Tavern feels like, if anything, a foundation for future modules. Like the first Shadowrun Returns game, it's not so much the be-all and end-all of what this game concept might be but the start of a series, each one funded by the last and able to establish new mechanics and ideas that previous entries were unable to include. It's a little bit of a shame for this developer that Grimrock raised the bar so high right out of the gate, as this is exactly the kind of dungeon crawler I would've otherwise expected from the Indie set: one that had to take a few concessions for the sake of a limited budget and development time, resulting in a game that is far less feature-rich than even the genre's progenitor Dungeon Master (a 1987 game), but otherwise prioritizes the traits and mechanics that matter most. It looks fine, sounds good, runs moderately well (I had a real challenge with those timing-based instances, given how my PC was struggling to run it at 30fps, as it does with anything 3D these days), and it's very player-friendly with its fast health and mana regen between battles, regular auto-saves, and a full party heal/resurrect fountain on almost every floor. Really, the only reservations I have is that it perhaps just needed more of everything, or the very least a few ideas or gimmicks to call its own. Its imagination is limited to a few floors that play with something different: the sixth floor is a giant maze where its single foe needs to be tricked into damaging itself rather than fought normally, while its fourth floor is full of adventurer corpses but no enemies until you reach the end at which point the door to the exit slams down on you and all the skeletons you've been passing suddenly wake up. As I said at the outset, I imagine the developers had many more ideas planned that they just couldn't squeeze in, leaving us with a game that feels like a pale and flavorless but otherwise inoffensive imitation of the greats of the first-person dungeon-crawler genre both past and present.

Rating: 3 out of 5.