If you are reading this review, you’re probably already aware of Adventure Time; the surreal show that follows the adventures of Jake the Dog and Finn the human, in the weird and wonderful land of Ooo. If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should give it a whirl, as it’s one of the strangest and most original shows currently on TV.
I
n Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know. Jake and Finn are tasked by Princess Bubblegum to explore the Secret Royal Dungeon beneath the candy kingdom where she locks all her enemies away, because prisoners have started escaping and citizens from the kingdom have started to go missing as well, apparently being dragged into the dungeon. She exclaims, “Explore the Dungeon, because I don’t know!” (Why the stuff I just mentioned is happening)
Jake and Finn, along with Marceline the Vampire Queen and Cinnamon Bun, set out to literally get to the bottom of the mystery by descending down 100 floors of perilous dungeon to find out how and why the prisoners are escaping and maybe rescue a few recurring characters from the show along the way.
It’s a rather simple set up, for a very simple dungeon crawler, as up to four players fight through a hundred randomly generated levels, every tenth floor is a boss and you can escape back up to the surface after every fifth. Aaand that’s about it
Sound like a recipe for repetitiveness? That’s because it is. Fighting is incredibly simple and every character despite having a different special ability is pretty much the same. The only thing of note is that some characters, like Marceline, can float and others like Jake and Finn can’t. They may have different weapons but they don’t make any difference in combat.
What makes the game particularly tiresome though is that the loot and leveling mechanics are all but broken. For a start you don’t gain experience via combat, instead everything is tied to loot. All upgrades to your character such as Rowdiness (Strength), Imagination (Magic) and Health have to be bought from various vendors when you’re inevitably kicked out of the dungeon after a boss fight. This would be fine, if every monster you killed dropped loot, but they rarely do which makes every enemy encounter pretty pointless. You may as well just attempt to find the occasional bits of loot scattered throughout each level whilst avoiding attack.
Then there are the boss battles, which, despite having some nice cameos from various characters from the show like Tree Trunks, the Ice King and many others, are exercises in tedium and frustration. Every attack they throw at you is un-blockable or ranged, so it only takes a couple of unlucky hits for you to be out of the fight. This isn’t such a problem when you’re playing with others but by yourself, say good bye to half your loot. At least you get another chance to kill the boss. Only problem is that by losing half your loot you probably won’t have enough at the end of the fight to upgrade anything and then you’ll have to face the next set of tougher levels with an underpowered character.
This again wouldn’t be a problem if Princess Bubblegum didn’t take all your unspent loot from you in taxes when you re-enter the dungeon. So you’ll probably have to replay the entire previous section to get enough loot to upgrade any of your stats before moving onto the next ten levels and repeating the process all over again.
Because of this trifecta of bastardry, the game, in single player at least, swiftly descends from a fun Adventure Time themed dungeon crawler into a monotonous grinding chore. Made worse by the fact that the dungeons theme only changes once every twenty levels so you feel as though you’re wandering through the same boring locales forever.
It’s a shame too because the actual presentation is quite charming, presented in a faux retro sixteen bit shell, complete with SNES era styled cut scenes and the series original cast all in attendance with some great voice work which, although at times a little repetitive, is never grating.
Luckily, the game fares a little better when played with others over local coop, letting the inherent charm of the source material a little more apparent, although not by much. There’s a line in the theme tune for Adventure Time which asks viewers to “C’mon grab your friends!” this is a must when playing Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know as it alleviates most of the tedium found in single player. There are more of you, so boss battles are more manageable and if you die there’s another player there to revive you, so you don’t get your loot cut in half. Also, because there are more of you, you can retrieve more loot easier, so you have a better chance of succeeding, and being able to afford upgrades, which in turn makes the game less of a chore.
I think the biggest tragedy of Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know, is that it spends so much time attempting to take the piss out of dungeon crawlers, by ironically creating a game that exemplifies everything that can make the genre tedious, that it completely forgets to be an Adventure Time game. Sure, it’s set in the right place and apparently had the show’s creators on board, but it fails to capture the essence of the series in any meaningful way. As such, it feels like a licensed game from the 16bit era the game tries to imitate. The trappings of the source material are there, but little of what makes it so compelling in the first place remain. As such, not only is Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know not a great Dungeon crawler, it is also not a particularly good Adventure Time game either.
If you are a fan of the series and you have not played it yet I would recommend picking up last year’s portable adventure – Hey Ice King Why’d You Steal Our Garbage? It managed to capture the shows warmth, humour and wrap it in an entertaining retro RPG in the style of Zelda II.
As for this year’s effort, I Don’t Know why you’d want to explore this particular dungeon.
