Dungeon Inn is a surprisingly hardcore game that’s masquerading as a casual-friendly “cozy life sim.” It initially looks like one of a thousand indies that’s trying to horn in on Animal Crossing’s turf, with colorful graphics and cheerful animal sidekicks, but you can’t get through the first in-game month without being an accessory to murder.
Dungeon Inn, now available in Steam Early Access, is a high fantasy pastiche as seen through the eyes of a small Korean dev team. It’s probably easiest to call it a tower defense game, where you have to keep two feuding groups of adventurers happy without ever letting them meet.
In its world, an entire industry has been built around exploring a dungeon that you never see. Two separate companies, Port City’s Sea Guild and Highland City’s Mountain Guild, regularly send adventurers to that dungeon in search of loot. The two guilds are in open conflict, and when their members see one another, they fight to the death.
Sara is a young entrepreneur who makes a living by selling adventuring supplies to the guilds, and goes to great pains to not let either guild know that she does business with them both. One night, she and her partners Butter and Bami are driven into a cave by a sudden thunderstorm, where they end up face to face with a dragon. Before it eats them, Sara negotiates a contract: if the dragon lets them go, and loans them the services of a few of its wisp employees, they’ll pay the dragon a regular monthly tribute.
Now that she’s got to make dragon money, Sara comes up with a dangerous plan. She, Butter, Bami, and the wisps renovate an old ruin into an inn, which is conveniently located halfway between both cities and the dungeon. It’s an irresistible place for adventurers to rest, drink, and resupply. Due to the guilds’ feud, however, Sara must find a way to serve both of them at once.
Dungeon Inn plays out over the course of several in-game months, with each session split into a 5-day, 20-turn week. Over the course of that week, a procession of adventurers journey from their respective cities to the dungeon, and may or may not stop at the inn. Your goal is to draw in as many adventurers as possible while never letting them meet.
If they do run into one another outside the inn, it’s on sight, in a mechanic borrowed from auto-battlers. In a perfect world, two evenly-matched adventurers fight to a DKO; otherwise, you have to decide whether or not to influence the battle. Any surviving guild members may get suspicious about your inn, and if they conclude it’s a trap set by the other guild, your game ends on the spot.
It’s easier, when possible, to simply keep the guilds from meeting one another at all. You can do that by setting up a series of distractions along the road to influence their movements, such as a gambling wheel or a food stall, which can keep adventurers occupied for a few crucial turns. You only have 4 wisps to work with, however, so you have to be careful to work within your capabilities.
As you get further into the game, you also gain a number of extra options that are based around your characters’ individual talents. Sara can visit the cities to advertise, Bami can play the “polite butler” card to distract an adventurer for a turn, and Butter is both a talented chef and a street fighter who can change the course of a fight by himself. All three of them can also step in to manage various random events that might pop up, like using Sara to fast-talk an angry customer.
Once you’re into the third week or so, Dungeon Inn is largely about keeping all these plates spinning at once. It takes it easy on you for the first hour, but rapidly introduces random events, new objectives, and other assorted complications. At the same time, you have to keep an eye on your bottom line to make sure you’re bringing in enough cash to keep the dragon happy at the end of the month.
If you perform well, you earn tokens you can use to upgrade the inn, which adds more facilities to bring in more customers. If you don’t, you either get eaten by a dragon or run out of town by angry adventurers. It’s turn-based, so it’s not a question of reflexes or timing, but you still end up with a lot on your plate in any given turn of Dungeon Inn.
Obvious disclaimer: this is an Early Access game, so much of what I’m about to say only applies to the version that I’ve played (0.5.241115). As such, this isn’t a full review, as Dungeon Inn isn’t finished yet.
As it is, it’s simpler to play Dungeon Inn than it is to explain it. Even with the relative complexity of managing your resources vs. your customers, it’s easy to pick up, and it doles out new tools and mechanics at a reasonable pace. You can play through a single in-game week in about 20 minutes, which makes it a great title to launch when you don’t have a lot of time to play.
If it’s got one real issue at time of writing, it’s that sometimes its math doesn’t work out. Dungeon Inn seems to be built around a pure random number generator, which determines the type, number, and quality of adventurers that show up in any given week. Your overall weekly/monthly goals don’t change between runs, but you might have to juggle wildly different groups of incoming customers.
On casual difficulty, your objectives are lenient enough that this isn’t a big deal, although you might still have a few close calls or fail a couple of optional goals. On the more challenging difficulty, you’re sometimes doomed to failure regardless of your decisions. Your only real option, which the game doesn’t tell you, is to back out to the main menu and hope for a better roll of the dice on a second attempt. It’s a surprisingly apt metaphor for late-stage capitalism, but a frustrating video game.
If it pays more attention to its game balance, Dungeon Inn has potential as the next big idle clicker game. I’m surprised it’s on PC at all, but it’s hard to imagine its UI working on a mobile device. If you want something to throw onto your Steam Deck to kill 20 minutes at a time, and you’re burned out on Vampire Survivors, this isn’t a bad option. It’s got a nice dark core underneath all its cozy vibes.
[Dungeon Inn, developed by Cat Society and published by Spiral Up Games, is now available for $12.99 in Steam Early Access. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a Spiral Up PR representative.]
