I Played a Video Game About a Dungeon in Purgatory Filled With Nihilistic Adventurers and Then I Wrote This Article
For the last nine years or so, Damien Crawford has been making games they don’t think people would want to play.
Crawford is the sole developer and head of Cannibal Interactive. They’ve made over 20 games through the label, most of which have been released primarily on itch.io. They came to game development after several years of struggling to fit into other jobs such as fast food and mundane government work. A relationship falling through and a need to cut loose from parental support eventually pushed them to try something new.
“I thought if I failed the safe path, then what do I want to do? And so I started making games.”
Their first project, Legend of Moros, took two and a half years, and did not do well – not even $100 in release day sales. So, on another contrarian whim, Crawford spent a month making a game they thought no one would want to play; an “atrocious” (their words) RPG where 99 characters band together in a single fight, all piled in on one side against the enemy. In addition to the absurd gameplay, Mighty 99 had a “horrible memory leak issue” that made it impossible to get through three full turns.
Even if you’re not familiar with every specific combination you see, you should still be able to make it through Purgatory Dungeoneer if you have some basic knowledge of how to build an average RPG party. You want someone to tank damage (like a Guardian), a healer of some sort, and some damage dealers, perhaps ideally a mix of melee and ranged damage. It only took a few runs through the dungeons for me to become intimately familiar with Purgatory Dungeoneer’s stat pool.
For those who love good crunchy numbers, Purgatory Dungeoneer delivers. While most characters have some basic skills and spells to do damage with, they almost all sport the ability to buff allies or debuff enemies, and playing around with stats and systems in this way can turn your party into an unstoppable freight train. Alternatively, you can build the worst party you can think of for a personal challenge mode. You’ll inevitably spend lots of time building and rebuilding your party for each subsequent run, and there’s plenty of room to get very nitty-gritty with how you assemble your heroes.
If party building and obsessing over stats seems tedious, Purgatory Dungeoneer may not be for you. But for the many of us who love that sort of thing, the actual dungeon helpfully eschews trappings like treasure or complex dungeon mazes or puzzles in order to better put the spotlight on the complexities of combat.
“I don’t want to cut away from the game by having people do busywork,” Crawford says. “The guild is enough busywork as it stands trying to figure out who you’re going to recruit and then resetting your party and trying to remember who was in your party and who you wanted to change out…It’s kept minimalist partly because I don’t want people to worry about not getting anything that they wanted to [get]. But also because the thing about the adventures [is that] they’re dealing with their trauma. They’re very used to just being tools, weapons. They know how to go in, how to take care of business and how to get out. And doing these sorts of repetitive things reminds them of who they are and why they started and stopped in the first place.”
So each dungeon is made up of a handful of rooms, and each room features a single battle, followed by a choice between two doors to move forward, each of which will give your party an unremovable debuff for the remainder of the dungeon. By the time you reach the final fight each time, you’ve accumulated multiple stacking debuffs. In that way, Purgatory Dungeoneer is almost a reverse roguelike. The further you delve, the weaker you become, forcing you to make calculated sacrifices to survive to the end.
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“I do enjoy roguelikes where you scale up and you’re eventually just absolutely unstoppable,” Crawford says. “But this is again a game about adventurers and trauma, and the thing about adventuring is that when you start out, you are the best that you’re going to be. It’s as you continue on the quest that you start running low on supplies. You start taking some extra injuries. And as you keep fighting in the dungeon, sometimes you’ll get offered a deal, but most of the time [you’re asking], ‘How bad do I want this and what is my party best set up to deal with?’”
Though initially overwhelmed by the sheer number of adventurers and complexities of stats, spells, and skills, I may have inadvertently fallen in love with Purgatory Dungeoneer. I keep reopening the game, thinking, “Oh, just one more dungeon,” or to see if one of my favorite party members has a Remembrance mission available for me to get to know them better. Its boppin’ soundtrack (courtesy of RJ Lake), especially the Guild Hall theme, keeps playing on loop in my brain. So intentionally or not, nine years of trying to make things no one would want to play appears to have taught Crawford a lot of tricks for making games people (or me, at least) really do want to play.
Crawford, at any rate, is staying humble about it.
“I’ve worked on this for a year, so if I could make a year’s salary off of this, that would be great,” they say. “Especially because most of my games, I can’t say they’ve recouped their cost…I’ve had a couple people email me or message me on Twitter telling me they enjoy the game and that’s been pretty good. So if this does at least reach some sort of cult classic status, the fabled seven out of 10 that some people like and some people don’t, but you can tell looking at [reviews] that they’re all saying the same thing. Everybody likes it or doesn’t like it for the same reasons, then that’s good enough.”
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.