Deep Dish Dungeon: a dungeon where food is the progression system

There is a four-word line on Deep Dish Dungeon's store page worth an entire design presentation.

Food is progress.

Not a side statistic, not a hunger bar to top up to avoid a penalty. The central mechanism for getting stronger.

Who made this

Behold Studios, and that name deserves a pause.

It is a small studio founded in 2009 in Brasilia, now based in Toronto, who made Knights of Pen & Paper and Chroma Squad. Two games that stuck with people precisely because they took a daft idea and pushed it all the way: playing a tabletop roleplaying session viewed from the outside for the first, directing a team of Japanese superhero show stunt performers for the second.

These are people with wit, and a habit of finding angles nobody occupies.

The game is published by Raw Fury, and it is also on Game Pass.

What you do

A dungeon to explore, solo or with up to three friends. Corridors, rooms, passageways, in an atmospheric environment.

You search, you gather, you bring things back.

And between expeditions, you return to camp to plan your next steps by the fire. There you use what you found to craft new tools and cook a hearty meal.

Over time, you unlock recipes with different effects on your stats.

Why that is clever

Because it moves the reward.

In a conventional exploration game, what you bring back is judged on rarity. A legendary item beats a common one, full stop. You search hoping for a roll.

Here, what you bring back is judged on what you can cook with it. Three mediocre ingredients that make a good recipe beat a rare ingredient you cannot do anything with. And since recipes unlock over time, the value of what you pick up changes as you learn.

That is the kind of loop that rewards curiosity rather than luck, and the store page says so explicitly: fortune favours the bold, take your time to investigate every shadow, solve every puzzle, open every door. The dungeon will reveal its secrets only to the patient.

In a genre where everyone chases bars, a game that asks you to be patient and pays you in recipes is refreshing.

The camp, and what it says

The camp is the other half of the game, and it sets the rhythm.

You go down, you take risks, you come back up, and you sit. You improve your camping site with what you found. You craft new tools. You eat.

That alternation between the dungeon's tension and the fire's calm is as old as the genre, and it still works for the same reason: it gives you somewhere to return to. A dungeon without a camp is a corridor. A dungeon with a camp is a journey.

The reservations, which are mostly statistical

One review. A single one as I write, and it is negative.

I am not going to build anything on that, which would be absurd in either direction. One negative review does not condemn a game, and I am not going to ignore it because it is inconvenient either.

What I can note, on the other hand, is that over a thousand people are playing at once when the game came out less than an hour ago. For a title this size, that is the Game Pass effect, and it means a broad audience is discovering it right now.

The enemies are announced with diverse behaviours, which is the sort of promise you cannot verify in an hour.

And length is the unknown. A game whose progression runs through unlocking recipes needs enough of them to hold. Behold Studios has a record of short, dense games rather than long ones, which is not a flaw but is worth knowing before buying.

What stays with me is the intention. Making cooking the heart of progression is very consistent with this studio: taking an activity usually treated as a side chore, and deciding it is the subject.

That is exactly what they did with the roleplaying table and with filming a superhero show.

At 12.74 euros, or included in your subscription if you have one, this is the sort of game you launch for an evening thinking you will stay an hour.

Unlocked a recipe that breaks the game? Come and share it on the InsertCoins Discord, we are keeping the cookbook.