Relevant links: complete version, enhanced edition


First off: do not confuse this with Dungeon Defenders, with an s. That is a 3D multiplayer game with some vaguely tower defense styled trappings, and which has gotten a lot of press. This is a straight tower defense game, done in flash, which never got any press.

dungeon defenderThe shtick is that you’re a villain in your lair with a bunch of pesky “heroes” coming to get you, so you set up defenses and traps to stop them. You lair is underground, so you can also dig tunnels and find treasure and precious ore.

It’s not the most polished game, and graphically it’s a little simple, but there are a few things I still like about this one: the digging mechanic is great. It allows for pathing manipulation and a means of earning bonus resources and a way to diversify the level design, all in a single mechanic.

This is also the first tower defense game that I know of which implemented melee units for stalling enemies in a particular spot. I’d never claim that it was the first, I play a lot of tower defense games but my knowledge is by no means complete. Never the less, I give this one credit for implementing that mechanic three years before Kingdom Rush popularized it.

Finally, there’s the protagonist unit which functions much like a hero unit in, again, Kingdom Rush. That’s fine and all, but what I really like here is the fact that the protagonist gets equipment (i.e.: loot) over the course of a level. This can really add something when you’re focused on defense but also running a side campaign to reach that tantalizing treasure chest juuust a little out of reach.

There are two versions of this. The original version is here, and is complete and fun. There’s also a Dungeon Defender Enhanced Edition with some extra features, along with some paywalled content. Which you decide to play is mostly about how tolerant you are of microtransactions, though it’s worth pointing out that the Enhanced Edition also has online saving. I find that to be pretty valuable with flash games.

1Quest is a short roguelike that seems to have gone unappreciated. It’s one of my favorite examples of this style done well, but player reviews in the places I’ve checked seem to be really harsh. I can’t understand it. The game really delivers the roguelike experience to a greater degree than I expect in something of this scope, with an involved skills and magic system, a good variety of loot, and the facilitation of the kind of environmental survival techniques that I expect in every roguelike but don’t always see – by that I mean the ability, and often necessity, to use traps and water and other environmental features to your advantage.

It’s difficult, but difficulty is a necessary part of the roguelike experience. In fact, 1Quest has a clever innovation in this respect: the princess and eight other children have been captured and your quest is to rescue them. Ideally all of them, but some is better than none. Unlike most rogulikes, failure doesn’t mean death for you but rather death for one of the children. How’s that for motivation? It allows you to keep going, it means you don’t lose everything when you make a mistake, but there’s a pretty strong incentive to try again until you get it right. There are also multiple paths to take on your journey, changing it up a little to keep things interesting, multiple spell schools which are (sort of) mutually exclusive and multiple weapons skills, all to ensure there’s some variety from game to game.

1questAs you’d anticipate from a flash game, it’s short compared to the big names of the genre, Nethack, ADOM, etc., though roguelikes are unusual in that it’s free games which are the big headliner titles. Commercial roguelikes are always smaller in scope. Compared to its peers though, 1Quest really delivers a lot which will be familiar to roguelike veterans – managing to fit just about everything that you’d expect from a roguelike into its small package. (Seriously, a lot of these games don’t even let you move diagonally. It’s annoying.)

There’s several versions of this available: a free online version, another commercial version available from several sources (that’s three links), and a commercial Android version. As near as I can tell there aren’t any differences between the free version and the commercial one, though I will point out two things: flash cookies are an awful way to store data, so if you find yourself playing this a lot you might consider paying some money just to ensure that your records and saves don’t disappear. Second, it’s not a lot of money and this person hasn’t gotten either the praise or the livelihood that they deserved from this game.

Finally, I’m going to link to the dev’s blog, just because it seems polite. Maybe you all love the game so much that you want to keep abreast of anything new that the dev might be up to.