Evil’s Den: Forsaken Dungeon (PC – Early Access) Review

Developed by Overbuilt SA and published in collaboration with FreeMinds SA, Evil’s Den: Forsaken Dungeon is an up-and-coming dungeon crawler that will take cunning, skill and an array of weaponry to survive.

Evil’s Den: Forsaken Dungeon – Storyline

It’s 1266 in the fictional kingdom of Pomerania, in the small village of Redlovo. A priest, devoid of faith, commits an unthinkable act of sacrilege and sacrifices a fellow human being at God’s altar. While his intentions remain unknown, it’s clear that the result wasn’t the one expected as a portal to Hell opens, flooding the village with mobs of bloodthirsty demons.

Struggling to keep the evil hordes at bay, the mages call upon a legendary hero. A hero that can fight, die – and with their help – revive again to conquer the invading evil and protect the innocent inhabitants of the kingdom.

This hero is you.

Evil’s Den: Forsaken Dungeon – Gameplay

Evil’s Den: Forsaken Dungeon is played out through procedurally generated dungeons. Starting in the doomed village, you find a handful of NPCs that mostly help with training and ferrying scavenged equipment from the abyss for you. You will also find the mages here that teach you spellcraft and blacksmiths that will turn any looted blueprints into weapons. This is your safe zone and home base.

Entering the portal will transport you into the abyss, where you will be met with hordes of undead and demonic creatures, each vying for your blood. Fighting through the throngs of evil will reward you with loot you can pass to the villager to take back to the village. In this respect, Evil’s Den is very much a case of rinse and repeat. However, the game does open up once you discover your first weapon blueprint and learn your first spell. It does take a little patience to get to this point, but your tenacity will be rewarded.

Evil’s Den: Foesaken Dungeon – Controls and Movement

Navigating this rougue-lite dungeon crawler can feel pretty awkward and cumbersome. Your character moves in a almost robotic manner that automatically carries through to the controls. With a little tweaking, however, this could be easily fixed and, as this is an early access release, we are more than confident that the movement issues will be ironed out come the day of release.

Try, Die, Revive and Repeat Your Way Through Evil’s Den

Following the likes of the infamous Dark Souls, dying in Evil’s Den isn’t the end of the world. When things prove all too much for our would-be champion, you don’t leave this mortal coil for good. Instead, mages back at the village will use their arcane powers to quickly bring you back to the land of the living and fighting strong.

We found this to be a particularly helpful aspect of the game as the levels got harder and the hordes grew in both number and strength.

Evil’s Den is Home to Some Epic Weaponry

Finding blueprints on your perilous travels will allow you to unlock weapons by crossing the blacksmiths palms with currency. During our run-through we found some kickass weapons of war and were delighted with the vast array. It would have been nice to have started with a weapon as punching sword-weilding skeletons just felt lacklustre, at best.

Evil’s Den – Summary

While we were often pleasantly surprised by Evil’s Den: Forsaken Dungeon, we do feel that there still exists certain elements that should be looked at before it’s release in just two days time (at the time of writing). A little tweaking to the animations and movement would eliminate frustrating moments where the character doesn’t move as intended.