Dungeon Encounters - First Impressions

VG247 give their first impressions of Dungeons Encounters.

Dungeon Encounters is interesting, deep, and probably the most mechanically rich Square Enix game in years

What are the most important aspects of a role-playing game? Is it the characters, the story? The artistic vision of a believable yet fantastical world? Or is it the mechanics? Hiroyuki Ito definitely thinks it’s the latter.

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It’s brilliant. My worry, though, is that the stripped-back nature of this game might put some off. Certainly I don’t exactly get an air of confidence from Square Enix about the game - a skim of my inbox reveals a grand total of two press releases about it. In fairness, it was announced and released just two weeks apart - but I also got four Guardians of the Galaxy press alerts in the same period. VG247 received no offer of review code, even on release day. This made me worried it might be a bit crap - you know how publishers will sometimes hide games - but in fact, the hype machine is just dormant for what might be Square Enix’s best game of the year, probably because it isn’t loud and brash with sexy graphics and lavish cutscenes. That makes me a bit sad. This is the sort of game that, were it indie, an indie specialist publisher would make a huge deal of; they’d know it was something special.

What doesn’t make me sad is the fact that after all these years, Square Enix’s most talented designer still hasn’t lost it. This is as low budget and as simple as games from a mega publisher such as this can come - but eight years after I last asked a Square Enix executive where exactly Ito was hiding, and after some fans were left disappointed that he wasn’t on FF16, he’s sent this out into the world: a sublime bit of game design that quite possibly could be adapted for a much bigger game in the future.

Dungeon Encounters is something special. I’m only halfway into the game (at least, based on the advertised number of floors), but it’s already quietly one of my favourite games of 2021. Don’t sleep on it just because it isn’t flashy. It’s out now on PS4, Switch, and PC.