My Infamous Dungeon revives Dungeon Keeper's soul with a roguelite layer, and the villain in us rejoices

Some games awaken buried memories, and My Infamous Dungeon is one of them. From the first minutes, a name resurfaces: Dungeon Keeper, that wacky classic where you played the villain, digging your dungeon to trap valiant heroes come to clear it out. That gleeful pleasure of being the story's bad guy, laying traps and savoring the misfortune of the good guys, My Infamous Dungeon brings it back to life, grafting on a modern roguelite layer. The result is a clever, wicked management game that speaks directly to the little tyrant slumbering in us.

The context

My Infamous Dungeon is a roguelite dungeon builder developed and published by BoxFox Studios, available on PC since 28 July 2026. You build your dungeon and grow your empire of evil by hiring monsters, setting traps, battling heroes and conquering the surface with an ever-expanding legion of evil creatures. The principle: plan your dungeon and its devilish traps, then test your work against waves of delightfully foolish heroes, before setting out to conquer towns on the overworld map to glean unique upgrades. The game claims a blend of strategy, base building, auto-battler, roguelite and tower defense, in the owned lineage of the great dungeon-management games.

The gameplay: the villain and the roguelite

The heart of My Infamous Dungeon is that timeless pleasure of the dungeon-management game, inherited from Dungeon Keeper. You plan your lair's layout, you hire monsters to populate it, you place devilish traps in the intruders' path, then you watch the heroes rush in and find an end as deserved as it is delightful. That role reversal, where you're the villain welcoming the good guys with a wicked smile, is a rare and tasty pleasure, and the game cultivates it with a real sense of dark humor. The tower defense dimension, where you test your dungeon's solidity against assaults, marries perfectly with this evil-genius fantasy.

The real novelty is the roguelite layer that modernizes the formula. Beyond simply defending your lair, you plan your route on the overworld map and conquer different towns to earn unique upgrades, in a logic of progression and variety specific to the roguelite. Each run thus renews the possibilities, and the combination of hired monsters, placed traps and gleaned upgrades offers a rich experimentation ground. That marriage between classic dungeon management and roguelite structure gives the game a tactical depth and replayability the genre didn't always have, while keeping intact the guilty pleasure of being someone else's final boss.

What sticks

You have to stay lucid about the limits of the genre and the exercise. The dungeon builder remains a niche proposition, blending management, strategy and a touch of auto-battler, that won't speak to everyone. Whoever doesn't take to this loop of planning, testing and restarting, nor to delegating part of the action to monsters and traps, won't necessarily get their money's worth. It's a tactician's and organizer's game, where the pleasure comes from optimizing your deadly trap more than from direct action, and you have to love this type of experience to dive in fully.

The other reservation is the shadow of the model. My Infamous Dungeon clearly claims Dungeon Keeper's heritage, and that kinship, while it seduces the nostalgic, also exposes it to comparison with a monument. Everything will depend on its ability to offer enough depth, variety of monsters, traps and upgrades to go the distance and justify its roguelite layer over time. The risk, with this type of game, is exhausting the possible combinations once the mechanics are mastered, and it'll take hindsight to know whether the promised replayability keeps its promises. It's an endearing, clever title, to approach as a curious genre fan, betting on its richness as much as its charm.

What we take away

My Infamous Dungeon is a success that revives a pleasure we thought forgotten, that of being the story's villain Dungeon Keeper style. Building your lair, hiring your monsters, laying your traps and savoring the downfall of the heroes come to clear it out delivers a rare glee, and the roguelite layer, with its surface conquest and upgrades to glean, cleverly modernizes the formula by giving it depth and replayability. For the dungeon-management fan, or simply for whoever has a score to settle with the good guys, it's a clever, wicked, delightful game.

You just have to love the genre and accept its limits. The dungeon builder remains a niche, where the pleasure comes from planning and delegation rather than direct action, and where replayability will depend on the real richness of the monsters, traps and upgrades over time. And the owned Dungeon Keeper heritage exposes it to a flattering but demanding comparison. But on the essential, the resurrection of that guilty pleasure of being the evil genius, served by a welcome roguelite structure, My Infamous Dungeon delivers exactly what we awaited. The little tyrant in us rejoices, and that's all that matters.

Verdict

A roguelite dungeon builder that resurrects Dungeon Keeper's gleeful pleasure, with a modern layer of conquest and upgrades: clever, wicked and delightful, to reserve for genre fans.

Strengths:

• The timeless pleasure of being the villain, inherited from Dungeon Keeper
• The roguelite layer that brings depth and replayability
• The surface conquest and unique upgrades to glean
• A real sense of dark humor and an evil-genius fantasy

Weaknesses:

• A niche dungeon builder, that won't speak to all
• Replayability hinging on the richness of the monsters and traps
• The demanding shadow of the Dungeon Keeper model

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Tested on PC.