Before Minecraft there was Minesweeper. Released the same year I was born, the game just barely made it into my childhood. Though it was always present in the games menu of Windows 95, ME, etc., I never understood the rules behind the game. I just clicked around until I hit a mine, then switched back to playing Solitaire where I spent 5 minutes deciding if I wanted to play with the spooky castle deck, or the robot deck. I never bothered learning how to properly play Minesweeper because it is, for a child, a boring game.
Now, three decades after the release of Minesweeper (whoops, I just dated myself), Therefore Games released DemonCrawl (also availble for Android devices), a game that took Minesweeper and dressed it up in a suit of armor, built it a talent tree, handed it a sword and a bag full of mysterious items and said, “Now, you are a fun and exciting game.”
DemonCrawl is fun. It’s exciting. But it’s also frustrating.
The foundation of DemonCrawl is the core mechanic of Minesweeper: clear the board of all the tiles that are not monsters (formerly, mines). Vacant tiles are revealed and any revealed tile that it touching a monster will feature a number that designates how many monster tiles it is touching (counting the tile’s corners). So, if a revealed tile has a “3” on it, that means that the revealed tile is touching 3 monster tiles.
With a bit of logic, and a healthy dose of good luck, it’s possible to clear a full board without revealing a single monster tile.
DemonCrawl goes beyond the original Minesweeper formula by giving the player the freedom to augment their experience with items and abilities. The game features hundreds of items that affect how the player experiences the game. Items are found in treasure chests that are hidden behind tiles and found at random. Treasure chests can also contain gold, which can be spent in items shops that appear during a gameplay run, offering players multiple items for purchase.
Dying in DemonCrawl resets the run, and players must start at the first level. Over time the game can be made easier by purchasing passive upgrades using silver tokens that are gradually rewarded to players for completing achievements and generally progressing through the game.
DemonCrawl gives players a bit of a break in the form of a health point system. Enemies don’t one-shot kill if they’re revealed, so the player can afford to make a few mistakes. Some items increase the health points available or refill them. However, the Classic gameplay mode (separate from the adventure mode) is a one-hit kill, so players looking for a less forgiving experience can torture their nerves if they so desire.
Beyond the frustration of having a slight bad luck streak that resets all the progress I’d make, some of the items were a bit clunky and frustrating to use. For example, there was one item that would reveal tiles I had yet to reveal. So it would show that a tile I hadn’t clicked was a “2” tile, presumably touching 2 monster tiles. When I’d click it to reveal it, sometimes it’d be a monster tile. It didn’t make sense to me and I never figured out what went wrong.
The frustration of revealing a monster tile is expected, I’d just wish some of the items were a bit more obvious or impactful. There were times where I’d find an item in a chest, activate it, and nothing perceivable would happen. Seemed like a waste.
DemonCrawl is going to really appeal to players who don’t mind repetition and especially to players who enjoyed classic Minesweeper. Therefore Games improved on the original Minesweeper formula in every way.
A retail copy of DemonCrawl was provided to Epic Brew by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
3 comments
If a tile is unopened but you can see its number, you still don’t know whether the tile itself is a monster tile or an empty tile. The number only tells you how many monster tiles are touching it. It’s a bit of a shock because usually you only see numbers on opened empty tiles — opened monster tiles have monsters on them, so of course you can’t see a number! — but it’s logically consistent.
As someone for whom Minesweeper has been a go-to brain-fidget game for years, it definitely took a bit of mental readjustment, just because I’d developed really deeply ingrained heuristics about numbers that required assuming they were empty!
Thanks for clearing that up!
[…] Some games catch me completely off guard. I tend to plan about three weeks ahead of time, so I always know what’s ahead in case a week gets a bit too hectic. That planning helps me avoid scrambling to find something to play and ensures consistency. Sometimes, a game doesn’t take me as long to beat as I expected it would, or I end up experiencing enough of a game that I feel comfortable with making a recommendation — as was the case with DemonCrawl. […]