The magnificent pitch of Super Dungeon Muncher is a sketch of future greatness
The nom of the game.
I'm not ashamed to say this: one of the easiest ways to make me excited about a game is still to chuck the word "super" into the title. This is Nintendo's fault, inevitably. Super Mario Bros, sure. But then when the Super Famicom came around, they threw Super into almost every game that came out. It remains the easiest upgrade pitch of all time, and the most intoxicating. Why do I need to buy these games again? Because now they're super.
Anyway. Super Dungeon Muncher had me at "Super". But it also had me at "Dungeon Muncher". A dungeon crawler where you have to move fast to keep ahead of the fact that a monster is eating the actual dungeon? Yes please. What an easy sell. Or rather, what a magnificent pitch.
The game is currently fun and moreish rather than truly magnificent in the playing of it, admittedly, but we'll get to that. First up: the monster. This guy is wonderful. An angry red horror waiting at the top of the screen, he has exactly the kind of huge furious eyes and sharp teeth you'd expect. But it's his arms that get me. So long and rubbery and tube-like. He reaches forward with surprising delicacy to grab the dungeon and drag more of it into his mouth.
He eats in stages, which is probably sensible from a digestion standpoint, and this means that as I run from him, I run in stages. I can see about a room's worth ahead of me at any time. This is both good and bad. Good because I can pick a direction to move in, but bad because the direction might be revealed as a dead end once the monster's eaten a bit more, and more of the fresh dungeon has been revealed.
Dead ends are only one of the problems. Alongside locked doors and trees and paving that falls away if you linger too long, there are monsters, all patrolling with perfect Roguelike fairness: they move when you do. You can always tell where they're headed next, and some rooms are essentially rhythm puzzles as you pick a path around them, managing tempo and distance and your remaining hearts.
Some rooms are absolutely not rhythm puzzles, though. Super Dungeon Muncher is pretty good at chucking you into scenarios you can't beat, or at least scenarios you can't beat with the basic materials. This is fine if those materials pop up first thing, but a pain if they pop up when you're deep into a promising run. One of the things that makes me think that Super Dungeon Muncher needs a bit of work is the pace: I've found that runs are either over in a second or they drag on for quite a bit. That binary outcome suggests that the rooms aren't properly balanced, or the way they're spat out at you could do with some tinkering.
It's hard to be too grumpy, though, when the game delivers on its glorious premise: there's a dungeon and someone's munching on it. And there are plenty of oddities to aim for on runs. I've yet to unlock a toilet. I've only chopped down a half dozen trees. It's still rare for me to reach the in-game shop, let alone another biome.
And then there's the super stuff to aim for. On my last run, I saw a glowing tree. A secret of some kind? I can't wait to find out. I'm sure it will be, well, super.
Eurogamer sourced its own copy of Super Dungeon Muncher for this article.