Playing A Game Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don't Know! 3DS

Explore the Dungeon may be a totally different kind of game than Hey Ice King, but it ends up feeling extremely similar, because of how depressingly bad it is.

I should say up-front that I barely put any time into Explore the Dungeon; I only completed the introductory quest and went through about five levels of the titular dungeon. But the game I've played so far, and the apparent scope of what's left, has really just demolished my confidence in WayForward. Like their previous attempt at an Adventure Time game, this installment has some solid writing and voice acting that do the cartoon right, but is otherwise poorly designed and generally underdone. In fact, I would say that the primary difference between the two games is the balance between good writing and bad gameplay; Explore the Dungeon just has much less of the former, and much more of the latter.

So there's a dungeon, right? Each level has enemies, treasures, and some occasional maze-solving. It's ... well, it's very bare. Enemies aren't hard to fight, nor are they very frequent, such that they're barely even distractions during your journey through a given dungeon level. You have an attack and a special move (after a meter is charged up), and you can use sub-weapons that appear every once in a while. There are block and dodge moves, but the controls for these are pretty terrible. The "treasures" aren't, like, thematically-appropriate Adventure Time items; they're small piles of gold, that are just used as currency for stat upgrades.

You'll need to descend into the dungeon to collect treasures to improve your character, but in a fascinatingly poor twist, the game strips you of all your treasure every time you re-enter the dungeon. So you can't make incremental progress towards an upgrade; if you don't have enough treasure for it before you leave the dungeon, you'll lose everything. And since you can't see how much treasure an upgrade costs until you're outside the dungeon, ... it's just really stupid.

There are eight playable characters, four of which are unlocked from the start. Each character has a slightly different permutation of maximum health and strength, different special moves, and a unique trait, although none of this is adequately explained by the game itself. All that I got out of the tutorial was that Marceline (the vampire queen) can float over holes in the floor. For that matter, the tutorial didn't even go over button mappings, assuming that I would randomly guess which button is the "attack button," et cetera.

Princess Bubblegum gives you quests that involve exploring around in the dungeon, and allegedly she gives you side quests as well, although I didn't get to see any of these. Otherwise, you just crawl the dungeon and kill things. I guess the dungeon atmosphere changes after certain numbers of levels, in the style of Diablo, Torchlight, Spelunky, et al, but I really had no interest in progressing far enough to bear witness to these. (I guess there are supposed to be bosses, too. So if you can stomach enough of the tedium in the regular dungeon levels to get that far, then, there's that.)

I hate to bitch about the graphics, but man, Explore the Dungeon just has a really bad sense of style. The introductory cutscene is drawn to look like an NES game, with thick, blocky lines that simply look uncharacteristic of the cartoon. (Even DS art could look much better than this.) The gameplay itself suffers from being so far zoomed-out that all on-screen elements, including characters, just look like mushy piles of pixels. And the 3D effect is misused, with floating, semi-transparent dialog boxes sometimes seeming to float inbetween other in-game objects.

And lest you think, hey, maybe the purpose of this game is to have some multiplayer fun, -- it's local only. Meaning that, with no online functionality, the 3DS version isn't multiplayer at all. Yup.

Pretty much everything about Explore the Dungeon is either incomplete, or simply insufficient. It isn't mechanically deep. It isn't narratively interesting. It isn't funny, except for a few seconds in the character introductions. And it isn't fun to play.

Better than: getting punched in the face. Because unlike getting punched, you can stop playing this game whenever you want.
Not as good as: Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!, if you can believe that.
At least I have: the cool-looking BMO tin that came with the collector's edition.

Rating: Awful