The last human in the world stands in front of the lich, entranced. The dark entity stares deep into his soul, compelling him to walk forward into a pool of toxic waste that was created when a nuclear holocaust reshaped our world one thousand years in the past. However, our hero dons a magical raiment that protects him from the influence of the lich: a pink sweater, given to him by the eternal self proclaimed princess of a race of sentient candy she created, imbued with the power of l-l-liking someone a lot. This, more or less, shows the ingredients that make up Adventure Time. Clear love of fantasy and sci-fi games and narratives, youthful innocence and awkwardness, a quirky sense of humor and darker undertones make Adventure Time well suited to be adapted to video games. Last year’s Adventure Time: Hey Ice King Why’d You Steal our Garbage?! Was an excellent action RPG clearly based on Zelda 2. My only gripe with “Hey Ice King” was that it was too short, but that means that everything about it was well executed, and polished with considerable effort and respect to the source material. Unfortunately, the same is not the case with Adventure Time Let’s Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know.
Adventure Time Let’s Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know is a dungeon crawler closer to the NES versions of Gauntlet than Diablo. All the elements are there, loot, special timed levels, closed exits, and even the grim reaper following you if you take too long to clear a level. Every five levels you have the option of returning to a very limited hub world where you can purchase upgrades and items. You can also change between several characters, unlocking more characters as you proceed through the dungeon. There is a plot, written by the team of the series and acted by them as well, that actually adds to the lore of the Adventure Time world. All the enemies and items are callbacks to the cartoon. It is all topped off with an upgrade system that lets you choose which stat to focus on. On paper, all of this sounds like the recipe for a pretty good game. The problem is that these elements never seem to come together, and it’s due mostly to laziness.
Bosses are creative and could have been great with a little more polish
As the title suggests, Adventure Time Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know has you exploring a 100 level dungeon. As it is common with this genre, the levels are randomly generated, but all this results in samey levels that feel empty and often make no sense. Too many times I came across locked doors that required a key to open but were pointless because you could walk around the wall to reach the other side. All the levels and environments feel the same. While the game does change the name of the environments every 20 levels or so, it soon becomes clear that the change is cosmetic. The ice tunnels are the prison in a different art style, but there is nothing particularly different about them, they feel just as empty, and boring as the prison, and this does not change through the whole game. There are a few timed levels in between that are reminiscent of the bonus levels in Gauntlet, but here are only a handful of them, and they still feel empty. If you come across a locked gate, and you don’t have a key, a key guardian will appear and when you kill him you will get a key. The reason for this is that loot is rare, and its often just strung out around the map. You can go entire floors without any keys dropping, and without they key guardian, it’d be really easy to get stuck behind a door that blocks the exit of the floor. The key guardian is a just a lazy patch to cover for lazy design.
Oh look, the floors are red and the enemies purple now!
Loot is scarce, but not very interesting. The power ups are mostly one time immediate use items, or sub weapons. There isn’t much variety, and you won’t find yourself looking to explore to see what awesome piece of gear you will find. There is very little incentive to face the enemies, who like the levels are samey, and offer little variety beyond a few types and palette swaps. You will explore most of the levels because you will be looking for treasure you need to buy upgrades. The ratio of how much these upgrades cost to the amount of treasure that the game drops is completely off. To make matters worse, every time you go to the surface to buy upgrades, you will lose any treasure you did not spend. Are you one gold short of that upgrade? too bad, you will have to start from scratch as soon as you head back down. I get the feeling that at some point this game was supposed to have micro-transactions, and the idea was abandoned but they never altered the design. The result is that upgrading the characters is tedious as you move from boring level to boring level dodging boring enemies.
The grind means that the varieties of characters the game offers are wasted, because you will use Marceline. I don’t care how you feel about Marceline outside of the game, you will use her because she can float over traps and gaps, absorbs red projectiles, is available from the beginning, and while she starts off with lower stats it is really cheap to bring her up to the level of other characters. By the time you unlock other characters that can also float you won’t want to use them, because she will be stronger and you will have to upgrade them to stand a chance against the bosses, which are unbalanced as well. The design of most boss battles is actually interesting and creative, but like everything else about this game, they lack fine tuning, the difficulty spikes on them are inconsistent and I can’t think of a good reason for this other than a desire to release the game and be done with it.
You want to Slump upon LSP’s Lumps, but you won’t.
Adventure Time Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know is a child’s game when all is said and done, and perhaps most telling than any of the criticism in my review is that when I handed the game to a 7-year old Adventure Time fan he seemed to lose interest after only an hour or so. I am not sure I could recommend this to anyone. If you want to play an Adventure Time game, or have a child that wants one, Hey Ice King Why’d You Steal our Garbage!? is excellent, or you could just play some of the browser based games on cartoonnetwork.com. If you are looking to play it because you want to see the bit of added lore and the writing, I’d recommend watching it on youtube. The cut-scenes and story dialog come in during boss battles every 10 floors. If you just want to explore dungeons as Finn e-mail me, I know of a few Skyrim mods that will help.
