Sunken Realms: no open world, no battle pass, just a sword and a question

There is a line on Sunken Realms' store page that ought to serve as a model for half the industry: no open world, no battle pass, just a sword, a dungeon, and a question that will not let you go.

A studio defining its game by what it refuses is worth noticing.

The question

Alric's father descended into the ruins beneath the city years ago. He never came back.

That is the whole premise, and it is enough. You go down looking for answers, you fight monsters, you collect materials, you craft your gear and you learn forgotten spells. You grow stronger, you go deeper.

And the studio's phrasing of the stake is the right one: find out what happened down there, and whether the truth is worth what it costs.

The structure

It is a repeated-dungeon game, but with a design choice I appreciate.

The rooms are hand-crafted, then procedurally re-arranged every time you enter the dungeon. So you will never meet the same layout twice, and you will never meet a randomly generated corridor that means nothing either.

That is the right compromise, and plenty of bigger games fail at it: the replayability of procedural generation with the legibility of handmade design.

Combat mixes melee and ranged, and you learn spells to round out the kit.

The camp, and the two friends

This is the part that gives the game its soul.

Between descents you return to camp to craft weapons, cook, brew potions, trade and upgrade your character.

And the story happens there, in conversations between two friends around the campfire, between expeditions.

It is a narrative structure I like a great deal because it solves the classic problem of the repeated-run game: usually the story is in the dungeon and repetition destroys it. Here the dungeon provides tension and the camp provides meaning, and every trip back up is worth something beyond your inventory.

What it is worth

The game launched yesterday at 15.29 euros, developed and published by Magic Puncher Games, and shows 25 positive reviews out of 28.

The sample is very small and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But near-unanimity, even across twenty-eight responses, on a game at this price, is worth a look.

My main reservation concerns density. A dungeon game lives on the variety of its rooms and enemies, and a studio this size cannot match the giants of the genre on volume. The question will be whether there are enough handmade rooms for the rearranging to keep surprising after fifteen hours.

It is single-player only, with full controller support. And if what you want is precisely a game that asks nothing of you beyond playing it, with no season, no shop and no map to fill, there are fewer and fewer of those, and this is one.

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