Blood Dungeon – Guest Review By Duncan Voice (Indie Choices)

(Quick Note From CX Dave)

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some truly fantastic people throughout my time writing for CX and beyond. People who genuinely love this industry and have a real passion not only for gaming, but for content creation and the community that surrounds it.

But I’ve never quite met anyone like Duncan Voice from Indie Choices.

I have an enormous amount of time for Duncan. He’s a genuinely great person, with a wonderful perspective not just on gaming, but on life itself. He’s someone who is always willing to lend a hand, always ready to support others, and never afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve.

On top of that, he produces some fantastic content, driven by a genuine passion for what he does and the people around him.

Quite simply, Duncan is one of those people who reminds you why the gaming community can be such a brilliant place to be a part of.

You Can find Duncan at duncs (@duncsvoice) • Instagram photos and videos & indie choices (@indiechoices) | TikTok

Blood Dungeon is another game in that indie sub-genre of lo-fi graphics, tiny install size but objectively impossible to put down. Vampire Survivors and Ball x Pit spring to mind as genuine classics, and Blood Dungeon does it’s bloody best to stand alongside them.

Briefly, Blood Dungeon is a side-scrolling, bullet heaven platformer. Each run begins with you slowly auto-shooting (à la Vampire Survivors) until you soak up enough blood spilled from slaughtered monsters to level up. Each level gets you an RNG selected choice of upgrades, such as faster reloading, extra projectiles, or enemies exploding in a hail of bullets. My current tactic (when the upgrades go my way) is swinging five massive swords around my head, whilst flinging off the same number of basketballs until my run descends into complete chaos.

Blood Dungeon is ostensibly a platformer, and traps you in tight areas so much of the challenge comes from jumping in between platforms, whilst dodging the growing number of monsters. Different characters offer different ways of approaching the runs, Skinja cartwheels around quickly with her bits and pieces flopping about, whilst Leggy moves slowly and can barely jump, but fires webs that can be clambered up. The controls feel mostly tight, although I did on occasion overshoot a platform that I didn’t necessarily feel was my fault, but the ability to course-correct mid jump keeps the movement feeling snappy.

Considering the enemy-dodging is a core component of the gameplay, especially during later waves I did find the visual clutter quite tricky when the enemy numbers grew in density. I’m a huge fan of the lo-fi art style, especially complimented by the “dungeon dnb” soundtrack, but
when the action ramps up it can be difficult to keep track of your character leading to a frustrating early death.

As with these Survivors-likes, there is the typical meta-progression chasing so you slowly feel more powerful and able to take on the harder dungeons. In the hub area you trade off bones for permanent ability increases like more health, damage and so on, and the Bunker
holds the unlockable cast of characters. Despite the low detail, Newgrounds-esque, somewhat globular art style, the characters are all distinctive.

The default Gunman wears a permanently worried look. The Barbarian is determined, and naked. The Baby has a massive face, crawls on all fours, and goos during action. Bit weird that one.Blood Dungeon is absurd both in it’s presentation, and in its addictiveness.

Although it might not be everyone’s style, I could say the same for Vampire Survivors. I didn’t ‘get’ it until I played it for five minutes and then another 30 hours after that. It’s fast, has a dangerously addictive gameplay loop, and is bloody fun.