When you’re a freelance games writer you get to sample a vast array of games, more often than not in very quick succession. In the Christmas season rush this issue is compounded by the sheer quantity of titles released. As a result, the feeling of changing quickly between racers, platformers and any other number of genres can be quite jarring.
When you’re forced into leaving behind games you’re enjoying for ones you’ve never even heard of the temptation to make a snap judgement becomes irresistible. I have to hold my hands up to making such a judgement of Dungeon Maker upon the first half an hour of playtime I spent with it. As time went by though I found something most bizarre happening, I began to forget about the likes of Mirror’s Edge and became enthralled by the charm of this wonderfully quirky DS title.
In Dungeon Maker you play the role of the imaginatively named protagonist ‘Hero’, a young boy at the age of 12 who is forced to graduate from school and begin work. Finding a regular job hard to come by in his tiny little hamlet Hero stumbles upon a talking spade and is thrust into the role of Dungeon Maker.
As a dungeon maker you are tasked with delving into caverns and using your new found shovel friend to create dungeons with the aim of luring exotic monsters into them. As your home village has fallen into a sorry state, ignored by the outside world the mayor tasks you with creating a dungeon to help attract visitors. This act of dungeon making is the main gameplay mechanic through which all later tasks are associated. In one instance Hero will be asked to attract a special type of monster to his dungeon so he can kill it and give its meat to the mayor.
These quests are fulfilled in a variety of ways, all of which require some form of assistance from the village’s inhabitants. Acting as a kind of menu, you can scroll Hero through the village shops, including an armoury and furniture store, to purchase goods from their owners. Take these wares down into your dungeon and they will have a variety of affects on what type of monster will appear.
Once you’ve grasped this basic concept of expanding and decorating your dungeon to lure in creatures the act of fighting them can begin. Every fight is a case of turn based combat as you face you’re enemy in pleasantly rendered 3D and deal out the damage. There’s not a lot of depth in the battles but finding and encountering each creature proves to have a similar addictive quality to the Pokemon games.
The real draw of Dungeon Maker is that it’s a delightfully packaged miniature RPG. It has a simple stat progression system to allow players to customize Hero to their liking, the weapons and armour offer a further dash of character alteration and add some small depth to the combat. In addition to this, the process of crafting your very own dungeon and completing the quests tasked to you by your friends is a delightfully casual way of progressing through the games story and never overloads the player with too much to do.
The only real drawback to Dungeon Maker is an integral part of its main attraction, the fact that it is rather simple. The variety in what you can do to your Hero and dungeon is nice but it’s always for the same end so ultimately all player alterations to the game are aesthetic and have no real impact on the gameplay. To chastise Dungeon Maker for its simplicity though is to completely miss the point of the game. It’s a gateway RPG for young’uns to get into the genre and in that purpose it entirely succeeds.
Nometet.com says: 
+ Lovely little RPG for those new to the genre
+ Nice graphical style
- Basic combat
- You’re choices have little impact on the gameplay
