Demon Lord Reincarnation is the massively upgraded version of a dungeon crawler that was entered into a game jam with the theme of duality. For that, it mixes together Wizardry 1 and 4, adds some sprinkles of SaGa inspiration (skills grow by usage), and a lot of moody atmosphere to make it all come together. As is the forte of the bigger inspiration here, you have to collect a group of heroes, go down a dungeon and vanquish some big evil. The twist is that once you have done that, you come back as said evil, have to track back to the surface of the dungeon, and escape.
This makes for a game of two distinct halves. In the first half of the game, you basically have to grow your party and map the 5-level dungeon to have even an iota of a chance to survive. One thing that works well in the early stages very much works against the game in the late stages (of the heroes’ half) and there’s no easy way around it. This is a game built around selecting characters without going through any character creation process, diving into the dungeon, and then losing them fast in any of the various encounters with the various wildlife. If somebody in your party dies or if you get a TPK, then you just build a new party or chose a new character. The game remembers progress and the new character(s) will be equally as strong as those you have lost. This works splendidly in the early game.
But it works less and less the deeper you go in the dungeon. While you have little control over character progression, each of your characters can acquire 8 skills and upgrade them from 0 to 3 as long as they survive. Those skills are pretty essential to survive in the long run, but if your chars die then you have to start over all over again. Sure, the new characters will be strong but lack the skills you got used to. And the game can be pretty lethal. There’s a good reason you can escape 100% from almost any fight and it’s an option you should use copiously. So as fun as it is to forge ahead early on since dying party members aren’t all that big of a loss at some point you realize you have to commit to a party.
And that’s the point the game changes and becomes fiendishly difficult since permadeath is always around the corner. It’s the point where it feels the most like the early Wizardry games but with the caveat that you have far less control over your character progression because the skills they acquire are randomly chosen. If you get lucky and they got a good set of skills with both buffs, debuffs, and attacks, you’re fine. But that isn’t always a given.
There’s also the issue of having no automap. I can’t see this game having as much leg with such a feature as without one. This is a dungeon crawler for those among us who like exploration, even more than any of the other aspects of dungeon crawlers like character and party development or combat. While it sadly has no spinners or teleporter mazes, it has four really well-designed levels that are just fun to map (the fifth basement, less so). Mapping really is a core aspect of the game and if you happen to dislike mapping by hand, I have bad news for you. Only if you slowly map the game you will have grown your party strong enough to beat Leinad in the end. If you rush through with maps at the ready, this won’t be as much fun and likely kill you pretty fast.
So far, I have only talked about the first half of the game where you play as the heroes. Once you’ve beaten the big bad demon lord, you take over his role and have to try to escape the dungeon. The pentagrams you’ve seen on your way down are now places to conjure monsters to aid in your escape. Together with Leinad as the party leader and some monster followers, the gameplay loop is similar but not the same as it was on the way down. First of all, you can only control Leinad and not one of the monsters which makes this part of the game feel like you’re running a bit on auto-pilot.
And since you’re likely already mapped the dungeon on the way down you likely rush back to the surface. On the way down without knowing the layout you had to be more deliberate in your actions, hence you likely fought more enemies and thus were eventually strong enough to beat Leinad. With the map at hand, you don’t have that element of slowly going through the dungeon, and likely the first time you reach the final boss encounter your party will be utterly demolished.
This makes the second half of the game feel a bit undercooked and not as strong as the first half. If the game had given you more control and slightly changed the map layout on your way up this would have both increased the overall game time and made that part more fun.
Still, in general, I really enjoyed the game. DLR looks deceptively like Wizardry but the gameplay loop differs a lot so if you go into it with the wrong assumptions you’re bound to be disappointed. But if you go into the game accepting it for doing its own thing, it has a lot to offer for the dungeon crawler aficionado.
The mapping, the slowly growing your party to crush your enemies into oblivion, and the idea of the twist coming back as the demon himself (even if the execution in that part wasn’t as strong). There’s little story here but the few pieces of written text that are there are well done and really go hand in hand with the decrepit dungeon depiction. While only a stylistic element, I found how the lighting made some dungeon walls easy to see while others were almost completely shrouded in mystery a rather effective touch.
It’s a unique interpretation of the dungeon-crawler formula that has real no peers but still manages to be a lot of fun along the way. If you crave character generation and a lot of control over how your characters grow this won’t be for you. But if you like mapping dungeons a lot and don’t mind permadeath and a dungeon with high lethality, this just might be your thing.
The Entropy Pump 