There is quite interesting discussion (with game's creator - manutoo) about The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians in another thread and drowning there, so I want to move some interesting facts to the separate thread - this one :)

# The game is unavailable on GOG, due to "refused as being to niche". If you want to convince GOG to change their mind, do not hesitate to jump and vote here.

# As a game is quite complex and players may have troubles to find support, here is the full walthrough. For further issues, manutoo, game's author, declared his support here :)

# Regarding system requirements of the game, author declares that: "Dungeon Guardians isn't much demanding, about same than LoG1, so a lot less than Vaporum"

# Here is Post Mortem article for the game - sharing some interesting facts about game development (it's one-man's work!), economical aspects of the project and further dev's plans.

# There will be sequel! I hope that it may cause GOG to reconsider their decision. I'm not quite sure if it's really such a niche. There seems to be no dungeon crawler since Legend of Grimrock 2 selling that good, according to Steamspy...

# Very bad news and sad opinion for Linux users - shame on you! Author says: "Doing a Linux port is heroic nowadays : nearly no extra income, very painful bugs to track down, and extra negative reviews on Steam (just got 1 this morning) are the rewards... :-( So I'm not sure I'll keep doing the ports on Steam for my next games (I think I'll still do them for the managames.com version, though)

I hope the post will be valuable for people interested in dungeon crawler as a genre and may be a good place to ask some further questions. Thanks, manutoo, for all your answers provided here!

It's currently available (2 days left) in Fanatical Nemesis Bundle 5 in the 2nd tier ($4.99).

steamgifts.com/discussion/Vst5j/fanatical-nemesis-bundle-5

Indeed, that may be the most important information here ;)

And here's also bler144's opinion about the game:

Yeah, what that smurf said!

Your comment got me thinking - I think the challenge for this genre is finding the sweet spot between challenging enough/pure enough for hard core fans, and yet accessible enough for players attracted to the game for other reasons that don't involve getting lost, or who want a more casual experience.

I don't know enough about the economics and how many units GoG would need to sell to break even, but I think the genre as a whole appeals to a lot of people (like me) who came here for the 'Good old" part of the original name.

While I haven't really had time to play it much the past few days, my personal opinion is that the game plays much better than the marketing, and should be something any fan of the genre at least checks out.

I suppose I could start over with a different party (was tempted to try a roge/duelist tank in any case over the warrior) and auto-map on to get a gauge of how the game might be experienced by casual players.

how is it with twitch / timed puzzles? LoG killed if for me with those, my fingers are just not fast enough, and in the trailer for this game noticed some running on tiles with fireballs and trapdoors...

Yeah, that's well said! Exactly! Especially that many of the most engaged users with significant amounts spent here have already bought all that must-have classics, often refuse current direction of games' evolution and it'd be quite reasonable to offer them such a natural continuation for their interests and preferences. We have Eschalon here (thanks God, it's worth it!) and I think we should also have games such as Fall of Dungeon Guardians.

I'm only on level 5 (out of 15?) but the game seems less reliant on that sort of quick twitch movement all around. For example, there is one puzzle that does involve hitting 3 switches while dodging fireballs, but there's pretty sizable margin for error on the physical execution - once you figure out how the puzzle works the timing is ample. But the first time while you're learning you probably will have the gate close before you get there. Still, it's not dropping you to your death, you just have to drop back down off a low ledge and do it again.

Compare that to the LOG1 puzzle that sticks out for me where you have to press a button then strafe sideways 6-8 squares and press another button with essentially 0 margin for error, and this is really much more focused on figuring it out. There's also a room where you dodge fireballs, but taking a hit or two won't kill you depending on difficulty level (though it seems to be tied to an achievement) and if you have good pattern recognition, esp. getting in to the center is quite straightforward.

I got out taking a single hit on the first or second attempt, but kept reloading to try and get the achievement for not getting hit at all, and that did take some practice / trial and error, but again it was mostly about mental execution not quick-twitch.

Combat, relatedly, is really designed for going head to head rather than how LoG really forced you towards trying to beat up enemies dancing around without letting them get in range to hit you back. FoDG is "real time" but with spacebar full pause and ability queueing, and a number of enemies are just as effective at ranged combat as you anyway - plus enemies aren't bound to only shooting straight ahead.

There are a few fights where retreating around a corner tactically to get healed up and let cooldowns recharge (interrupt esp if using a 1-tank party) may be called for, but most fights will be won/lost face to face. I think my favorite fight so far is the dragon on L4/5, where you're in a large room, with resist buffs at opposite ends. The dragon has 2 long cast spells, and during that cast you have to run over and pick up the buff, but again, the margin for physical execution of the movement and to return back to melee range before cast finishes is ample, at least on normal difficulty.

This is a game that wants you to figure things out, and make the correct choices, but the movement is not particularly demanding, and in combat you can use the spacebar/pause and queueing of specials as much or as little as you like. When you're selecting a difficulty setting at the beginning, it will actually advise you how much you probably need to use the pause to succeed, as well as how dependent you will be on exhausting all available resources (I want to say there are 7-8 settings). The highest setting cautions that, even playing perfectly, you'll still need some luck.

For example, there's a "Let's Play" video of the game on youtube, and that player went at least multiple levels up in the dungeon not having learned how to play his tank correctly - trying to spam the 'thunderclap' aoe threat spell on its 10 second CD, rather than properly using all available skills. That may be why he's taking forever to get through each level, IDK. I'm assuming that person was playing on low difficulty, as even playing correctly on normal it is possible for DPS or heals to pull threat if you aren't paying attention and using skills properly, and at least at early levels in tougher fights, while they aren't raw dps races, it is possible for healers to OOM or just not keep up with incoming dmg.

But mousing over your tank will tell you the percent threat they have on all targets, and mousing over enemies will tell you the relative threat of each party member. You can select whole party to focus/attack (and there is auto-attack as well as specials), or you can set targets individually.

It's really quite slick, imo. The default cap on ability queue is 3 actions, but the settings are so customizable you can change that too.

sounds like 90% of all WoW warrior tanks...

Thanks for the review, I think I will get it. More cerebral than twitch is my kind of thing. I like figuring things out.

Yeah, a number of the class designs hew pretty closely to WoW in ability design (the developer is up front about that, and it's apparent anyway) - the warrior tank is pretty much exactly a Prot Warrior with a high threat bleed and so-so aoe. Likewise, the druid healer runs pretty similar (roll HoTs with a few actual casts), and the priest is very similar to a disc priest. But I don't think that's a bad thing, on the whole.

A few are more divergent, and you can multi-class.

As noted if I were starting over I would probably try the rogue tank.

Basically you have 4 core templates (fighter, rogue, healer, caster dps), each of whom have 3 sub-classes.

Healer choices, for example, are druid, priest, or necromancer (mixed heal/dps)
Rogue is duelist (tank), assassin (melee dps) or ranger (ranged dps)
Caster is warlock / arcane / elemental
Warrior is prot / man at arms / paladin

Certain spells do ignore the queue and are immediate, such as tank interrupt or druid has an "oh sh*t" heal spell you learn around lvl 5. But beyond that you will have to strategize a bit. Thunder clap does ok threat, but it's not instant cast (about 1.5 sec?) so against tougher groups you have to balance between nuking them with a fireball before engaging for a headstart, with the possibility that if it crits your tank is going to have a harder time picking them all up, at least until you level enough to get threat reduction talents.

I've played two levels of the game so far. I don't really like the storytelling parts in it, I think the game would have been better without them, and I'm not much in favor of the combat system either; on default monsters are HP sponges, particularly the bosses, and the WoW-style mechanics with cooldown abilities get old and tedious pretty quickly, IMO. That being said, the combat in most other grid-based dungeon crawlers isn't necessarily better, just a different kind of boring to me. And to manutoo's credit I have to mention that the game is extremely customizable. You can adjust the HPs of regular mobs and bosses to whatever you think most acceptable, for example, freely defined by percentages, and there are many other options as well. And I thought the level design and puzzles very nice so far. I think this game deserves to be on GOG, I can't see why it would be considered "too niche"; the "good old games" crowd seems exactly like its target audience.

I would say it has the same flaw WoW developed, which is that at early levels you just don't have enough spells to keep things interesting. Once you get to lvl 4-5 each class unlocks 1-2 more, and again around lvl 7-9, and just those few extra options help quite a bit.

Note the bar for each character ultimately has space for 10 or so skills to fill it out, you just start with a pretty limited toolkit.

I would suggest turning on the "auto-attack next when target dies" feature just to smooth it out a bit. There is also an option to reduce enemy density (XP scales up accordingly so total available/lvl remains the same).

Thanks for the advice!

Im very surprised this got classed as niche -- its an rpg at its core no matter how you look at it, and GOG has plenty of them. The only downside imho (and its the only turn off for me) is the LoG visual style (not the biggest fan of it...)....I know there is plenty more to the game judging from a lot of the comments but it is a big detractor for me...

Might have something to do with the fact that the game apparently uses a lot of Unity store assets (rather than uniquely created stuff), so the real reason might be "it's too cheap looking". But then again theres plenty of cheap looking games on GOG anyway.