Dungeon crawlers are a common sight with VR releases, which makes the fact that Pixel Dungeon stands out from the crowd all the more impressive.
Some of the best VR games are the ones you can sink either a few minutes into, or a couple of hours, and it never feels like your time is wasted. Pixel Dungeon is one such case; a dungeon crawler with a decidedly retro-inspired aesthetic. Player models, environments, and enemies utilize voxel-like graphics across three different dungeons – with more coming in later updates.
At its core, it’s a simple dungeon crawler. Players spend 15–20 minutes crawling through one of three randomly generated dungeons, based on a classical dungeon, a mystical library, and interconnected floating islands all available at launch, with more coming in later updates. You can use weapons attached to both hips and your shoulders, also stowing resources gathered in the dungeon – namely, healing apples and hand grenades – in a pack strapped to your chest.
Along the way, players deal with puzzles, fight off enemies, and gather items and equipment. Finding keys lets you unlock Loot Chests that will drop randomly rolled weapons that will be added to your inventory after leaving the dungeon (deaths allow you to keep earned weapons).
Even accounting for the limited number of tiles that dungeons can be made from, different rooms can have any number of secrets. False walls that can be bashed down, ropes that can be climbed to bring the player up to the rafters. Pits players can drop down, filled with enemies and treasures both. Each of the three dungeons comes with its own occasional unique gimmicks, exclusive monsters, and entirely different final boss encounters, too.
Visually, Pixel Dungeon looks stunning, and it runs great on a Quest 3. When things get hectic in multiplayer on higher difficulties, the performance holds up without any noticeable dips, even when you might be surrounded by a veritable horde of spiders. While the game’s visuals might not be technically impressive, it nails that aspect where it counts, with both a pleasing art style that makes it easy to read what’s going on at any given time and rock-solid performance.
Combat is simple, but feels responsive in practice – especially with ranged weapons. Crossbows force you to manually reload by pulling back the string, and feel incredible to use by smoothly reloading quickly in the heat of battle. Bows and Magic Wands feel similarly great, too. If anything, melee feels a bit undertuned compared to ranged weapons at higher difficulties; though this is balanced out a bit with the ability to throw melee weapons straight at enemies alongside the standard hack-and-slash. I haven’t encountered any noticeable issues with controls, tracking, or the like – even the bag at the front of my chest isn’t an issue, despite some initial concerns I harbored due to some recent VR experiences.
In between runs, players can spend gold to upgrade their unlocked weapons – either increasing their base damage, or to reroll their randomized perks. Maybe a crossbow will deal extra damage when hitting a weak point, or have a 50% chance to fire 3 arrows at once. Perhaps your axe will deal 50% extra damage to bosses across two combined perks. Every run will grant you XP, and with each level up you can invest into a skill tree over time. Potentially, dodging an attack at just the right moment will give you invincibility, or when revived you’ll have more health available before healing.
You won’t find too much depth in terms of “builds” – everyone will eventually max out the same skill tree. That’s good considering, as far as I could tell, there’s no option to reset your allocated skill points. It’s still enough to make the game have a real sense of progression, beyond an oblique sense of getting “stronger”. It also means that even if other players you queue up with may have similar setups, depending on what has dropped for them, there’s still individuality in how players treat the game in their unique ways.
Speaking of multiplayer, we spent a few hours checking out multiplayer online with some randoms, and found a pleasantly smooth experience. Personally, I can’t report noticing any lag spikes, and overall connectivity has been great. Voice chat is also clear once the in-game music gets turned down – the default setting is slightly too loud to parse other players, which would be my one main issue with the experience. Even then, it feels like a nitpick.
Comfort
As of launch, Pixel Dungeon’s comfort options are rather spartan; players can adjust between snap turning, smooth turning or no turning whatsoever without actively turning your body.
Pixel Dungeon can require some verticality; ropes and ladders require you to manually climb them, and sometimes pitfall traps might drop you one or more stories below yourself without much warning. Because of this, we would caution VR players to only play the game if they’re confident in their VR legs, at least with the options available at launch.
We also tackled a few higher difficulty dungeons and it’s a blast, especially in a group setting. Presently, the gameplay loop revolves around tackling harder and harder difficulty dungeons, gathering 3-star equipment with special perks as you go; while there are only 3 dungeons to do it with currently. Even if you only do each dungeon a handful of times, chances are you won’t see everything they have to offer. Suplife doesn’t have a formal roadmap, though it claims that players can expect a fourth dungeon to be added sooner rather than later, with more updates to come. Even just accounting for the state of the game at launch, it’s hard to say the amount of content isn’t adequate, all considered.
Pixel Dungeon – Final Verdict
Put another way, Pixel Dungeon already feels like a complete package. It’s fun, polished, and packs a decent amount of content to play through at launch. Even if the promised post-launch updates never came, I’d still be likely to return to the game in the weeks and months to come.
Though it’s still early days, the fact that I can instantly queue into a lobby weeks after launch rather late at night bodes well for the game’s activity, too. Pixel Dungeon is exactly the type of game that’s easy to recommend to anyone looking for something to strap into, whether they’re only in it for a shorter session or if they plan to spend a Saturday night getting sweaty with some friends.
UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.
