Another one of those last-minute demos because I get discouraged by` the Steam demo section. Video games come out en mass but Steam decides that porn games are to be put front and center. I am not going to talk about it anymore, this week is not a porn game, it is, in fact, Portal Dungeon.

Portal Dungeon is a multiplayer rogue-lite adventure game from Duskdog Studios and IndieArk. The game has been released into early access in December of last year and the retail price is $13.

You are aiming to save the world or something. Who knows. All I know is that you are either a wizard, knight, or archer with the sole purpose of recruiting friends to explore dungeons with.

The game consists of a home base where the player can buy new abilities, switch characters and buy new shiny new things for your character. The currency that is needed to upgrade is found within each dungeon.

The dungeon selection is very basic. There are a few different types of dungeons, each with its own modifiers. Whether it be a boss dungeon, one with an elite chest, a mini-boss, or just a regular ‘ole dungeon; Portal Dungeon makes it easy to understand the modifiers. On another note, dungeon selection starts with one dungeon and then it cones outward to allow for multiple different routes that the player can choose from.

Inside each dungeon is your typical rogue-lite action. You got your bad guys: Mushrooms, spiders, rock monsters, and flying bad guys. Loot their corpse and take their coin, send that coin on upgrades via chests or an option to choose one of three. After a certain time limit an assassin shows up and can just end the run.

The characters that can be played within the demo are your typical warrior, archer, and wizard. The warrior is slow, swings slow but deals lots of damage, the archer is ranged with less damage and the wizard just does their own thing. Each character has five different attacks mapped to various keys on the keyboard plus the left and right mouse buttons. It may seem like the number of different keys that can be pressed may complicate things but it really never inconvenienced me even in the slightest. It all worked really well.

Another rogue-lit, another talk about abilities and how to make the game kneel to the player. you have your attack speed and damage boosts, critical hit chance and damage, percentage of a summons to spawn on kill, and the chance to attach bombs and bleed on hit. I immediately tried to max out my critical hit chance and attack speed, which worked until I got slammed by the boss. I then tried the knight with a summons on kill and that really didn’t work, but then I tried again with eh archer and it worked out really well, I was having fun. It looks like Portal Dungeon will allow the player to live their power fantasy, which I like ALOT.

Pixel graphics = good and this game is no exception. Portal Dungeon looks good for what it is trying to go for. I still can’t get over the really stiff animations, but I will live.

Portal Dungeon really emphasizes the multiplayer action, which I cannot comment on because I played this demo so late that I had no friends that were awake to play. The single-player version of the game, though, is something that I very much enjoyed. The demo characters were all so vastly different that it gave me a real sense that the development team thought about each character carefully in terms of the wider aspect of the game. Each character felt like it was possible to make a specific build for that character that would not work on a different character.

Everything just felt right.

Cool demo.