These days my launch PSP is held together by masking tape, spit, and prayer. But it does work (for now), and I’m trying to get to know it a little bit better before it inevitably decomposes into its constituent parts. The game of the hour is Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War, a title from last Christmas that was roundly ignored by all humans.
To be fair, it’s a bit of a minor effort. It’s low budget, free of any and all flashiness, and doesn’t have a lick of polish. But it’s also curiously addictive, so it provides a nice contrast to the modern AAA titles that hide their mechanics deep under pixel shaders and mocap animation. Dungeon Maker II is a throwback: like the low-tech games of yore, its mechanics sit exposed and naked under the nose of the player, and so have to be compelling on their own.
A dungeon crawler at heart, you can probably glean the twist that makes the game worth playing from its title. Dungeon Maker II’s conceit is that you are a warrior-architect. Your goal is to build a luxurious dungeon that will attract monsters to its depths, because when monsters are in dungeons they’re not annoying people in the streets. It’s more or less Diablo, except instead of a randomly generated dungeon you’re traversing a constantly repopulating lair of your own design. It’s a trade-off of a sense of exploration for a sense of ownership (though there are still some computer-generated spaces for when your own space makes you stir-crazy), and gives the game a charm all its own.
It’s also a simply implemented twist—dungeons are graph paper dungeons, two-dimensional and all right angles, but that makes them intuitive to set up. The graphics are plain as is technically possible, but are iconic so it’s easy to get on with the building/slaying/loot gathering aspects that will keep you playing. Combat is…clunky and mechanical, but it gets the job done. There’s no excuse for the music, though, so you should mute that.
So the game has lots of edges, and none of them were smoothed off. It gives a lot in return, though. In just a few hours, you’ll have a cavernous self-built play space that you feel a strong connection to. The game drops loot frequently and with significant variety, which you can bring to town (again, a work of minimalism—it’s a single, hand-painted screen) to trade for a constantly growing array of spells, cooking ingredients, and exotic dungeon rooms.
Dungeon Maker II is not shy about its grind cycle. This is a game where every gear is exposed, a game so plain and unpretentious that its closest technical relative might be NetHack. And yet after a game like Star Ocean: The Last Hope, little, obsolete Dungeon Maker II feels refreshingly straightforward.
Related Links:
How Sony Can Save the PSP in 2009
Persona Comes to PSP
Where Is the PSP?