Dungeon Scroll Review

While Dungeon Scroll seemed at first like it would be too simple to be really enjoyable, it simplicity actually allows you to get into playing it - at which point, it's more fun than you might have surmised. Straightforward enough for kids, engaging enough for adults, fans of retro gaming will find the graphics pleasantly nostalgic and reminiscent of a time when games didn't have to be comprised of startlingly 3-D, ridiculously chunky polygons to be considered worthwhile - concept was king.

Bonuses carry over from battle to battle, which is nice, although not from dungeon to dungeon, which is odd. Bonuses would seem to be roughly analogous to dropped treasure, and if so the analogy might be better if modeled more after that - taking them from one dungeon to the next, and perhaps making them more item-like. As it is, after going through a dungeon you'll find treasures like "a human skull", or "a laughing spoon", which is nicely amusing... but going through a dungeon with a mere one-time text description of a treasure, with no gameplay value, isn't. In that, Dungeon Scroll might do much better to forward the dungeon RPG model it borrows on to make the educational aspect more fulfilling and enjoyable. It certainly has potential - defeating a tough monster will allow you a small permanent buff, and just try spelling "RATS" a few times in the course of a game and see what you get.

One of the frustrating limitations, once you get absorbed in the game and start actually finding yourself caring about what happens in it, is that Dungeon Scroll not only has a somewhat limited dictionary - some of the normal words I used, it didn't recognize as valid - it also keeps track of what words you've used so far to keep you from re-using them over and over. Ordinarily this would be fine, but unlike a game of Scrabble you're stuck with the same letters throughout a dungeon (not counting extras you may find here and there) and so you're limited to the same word-set... but can't use them more than once. Getting new letters more often would improve the situation, as well as making sure you got more than, say, two vowels with which to make words.