Din’s Curse is the latest game from the small independent developer Soldak Entertainment, Inc. It is an old school style dungeon crawler with 141 possible class combinations and tons of loot. The player is on a quest for redemption after being cursed by the god Din for living a selfish and wasteful life. Din tells the player the only way he’ll lift the curse is if they save towns and their citizens until he feels they have redeemed themselves. A big part of the game is how every town and dungeon is different and the player will never encounter the same one.

The first thing the player will do after starting a new game is create their character. Here they’ll have an opportunity to choose or create their class. All of the fantasy class-type staples such as warrior, mage, rogue, priest and a few others. Each of these premade classes have 3 skill trees to use which create diversity within each class and then you have the ability to create a class using 2 skill trees giving the player a possible 141 class combinations. It is actually pretty fun trying out different class combinations and seeing what worked and what didn’t. Also on the character creation screen a name can be chosen as well as the options for hardcore, which makes death in the game permanent, and cursed, which means the player can only equip cursed items, modes. One thing that’s missing is character appearance customization and would be nice to have but in the long run isn’t so important since armor would cover the character up. After finishing character creation the screen comes up to choose difficulty, which actually has quite a few options. In this screen you can choose what level the enemies faced will be, can choose 4 harder difficulties which you can unlock as you progress in level and choose the game speed. Slow pace will make monsters respawn and quests progress slower but the player will suffer a -15% experience penalty and the Fast pace option will make monsters respawn and quests progress faster but this time the player gets a 15% experience boost. All of these options actually make a big difference and give the game a lot of re-playability and customization to playstyles.

Once the game starts the player is placed in a randomly generated town with one skill point to buy a beginning skill. My favorite part of the skill system is that when points are spent on a skill it isn’t permanent and can be undone for a small fee encouraging experimentation without the fear of having to start a new character if something is screwed up. More skill points are acquired as the player levels up along with attribute points which levels up stats like strength, dexterity and intelligence. Once in the town the player goes and picks up quests to complete and enters the dungeon.

Dungeons in Din’s Curse are more varied than the towns and like the towns a player wont experience the same dungeon twice. These dungeons have a lot of traps in them, they’re easy to spot but at times are not so easy to avoid. Some of the traps just cause minor annoyances like slowing the player down by 33% or big pains like teleporting a player into a dark room full of monsters and possibly even more traps. Doors and chests in dungeons can also be trapped or locked so sometimes a player may need to break them. A unique part of the dungeon system that I haven’t seen in any other game is how the monsters will evolve while exploring the dungeon. While exploring a dungeon the player will get updates such as whether a certain faction of monsters are developing ways to be stronger, declaring war on other monsters or starting uprisings. So that gives the player an extra incentive to stop the monsters before they can get stronger or multiply more or let them kill each other. An interesting mechanic is when a monster kills an NPC in a dungeon it will level up and become much stronger. One danger to be aware of in the dungeon that can be hard to see coming is cave-ins. Cave-ins can cause a lot of damage and happen randomly or when a player uses too many explosive abilities and I have died many times due to a cave-in and it can be annoying. While exploring dungeons the town can come under attack and the player will have to rush back to town to stop the monster or it will kill NPCs and can really screw things up.

Quests in Din’s Curse range from typical fetch and kill quests to escort and delivery quests. A big thing in this game is that failing quests is a common occurrence and sometimes is very unfair. There have been times where I get a quest and I’ll enter the dungeon and less than a minute later I’d fail and there was no way I could travel down 2 levels in that time. Failing a quest isn’t the end of the world though, you can still save a town even if you fail half the quests which is a good thing. Sometimes even failing a quest doesn’t mean it’s over, if it’s a quest where you were supposed to interact with a NPC and he/she gets killed by a monster you can get a quest from their ghost to get revenge and kill the monster that killed them. NPCs that a player is supposed to meet in a quest can even turn on the player and try to kill them. Each quest completed gives the player more reputation and once it gets high enough then Din will lift the curse from the player. This game is one of the games that can almost never end and the player can keep going and leveling up their character or choose to start a new one.

Items in Din’s Curse are very important just like most dungeon crawler RPGs. While exploring dungeons and turning in quests players come across a lot items, whether it’s armor, weapons, accessories, bags, potions or food and drink. Sometimes the amount of useless armor and weapons can be annoying and clog up the limited bag space and players will find themselves making multiple runs back to town to sell the useless junk. Armor and weapons in the game have different rarity values identified by color and items can also either be Cursed or Ego items. Cursed items decrease a player’s stats while Ego items boost them, this makes the huge amount of items even more diverse.

Din’s Curse is a fun game that is very addictive with a lot of re-playability and will have players creating multiple characters and playing for hours on end. While reviewing the game I attempted to play some of the online multiplayer but I was never able to find an online game and even after hours of waiting no one ever joined my games. Hopefully as the Din’s Curse community grows online matches are easier to join.

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