‘Dungeon Hack’ is D&D Dungeon Crawling Comfort Food
Dungeon Hack is the ideal dungeon crawling video game. All the bells without any of the whistles. It is streamlined and infinitely replayable.
Since Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous heading to consoles, what better time to dive into one of my personal favorite D&D games, Dungeon Hack. It’s delightfully retro, but still offers more customization options than many roguelikes today.
Dungeon Hack is based in the Forgotten Realms and uses Eye of the beholder engine. But, Dungeon Hack doesn’t worry too much about the story and focuses entirely on the dungeon crawling.
Break the character creator
Even from the character creation screen, you can tell that this game has a lot of depth.
The absolute best with Dungeon Hack found on this first screen. The game doesn’t do that if it’s balanced. You can roll for stats, or you can just all of them to 18 (with racial modifiers, which was the style at the time). Since it’s on the AD&D rule set, the class selection is different from what you might be used to.
Build your ideal Dungeon Hack
Like I said, this game has depth! Top left. See? Depth.
Funny jokes aside, the dungeon customization appears Dungeon Hack is way beyond what you’ll see in most modern dungeon crawlers. Almost every aspect of the dungeon can be tweaked, modified or simply turned off.
This allows players to ease their way into the game by scaling the difficulty to their liking. Alternatively, you can go all out and set everything to maximum difficulty. Or maybe you have the most fun turning everything to the easiest setting and over-tuning your character to be super overwhelmed. So do it! Have fun with it. Dungeon Hack do not care.
Classic gameplay
Finally, the UI is the most outdated aspect of the game, hands down. But there are still leagues beyond similar games at the time. Namely the minimap. Most dungeon crawlers at the time didn’t have a minimap. In the meantime, it’s good to have your inventory permanently on the side, as you may be changing equipment quite regularly.
The perfect comfort food
Great selection of spells, tons of different weapons, armor and magic items, randomly generated dungeons with tons of customization options and a fun retro vibe that never goes out of style. Dungeon Hack is the best way to scratch that creeping itch. Since you determine the dungeon’s depth, you determine how long the game can be. Either way, it’s going to be a great time.
Matt has loved games of all kinds all his life: board, video, war, RPG. He has been working as a writer for BoLS since 2017. He has worked as a freelance board game rulebook editor and has designed many of his own games as well.
