Remaking a game is such a tricky thing because, in doing so, you risk losing some of what made it special in the first place. Games are a collection of things, elements, and if you pull even a small part of that stuff apart, the whole thing can change into something else.
Desktop Dungeon is a case in point, a 10-year-old Roguelike known for looking a bit like Minesweeper, and with a cult following. It’s won awards, it’s well regarded, and now it’s been remade as Desktop Dungeon: Rewind, and it’s out this week.
But it’s not top-down and flat any more: it’s 3D. And in changing that perspective, it’s lost some of its inherent charm of the original – some of app-ness and puzzle game immediacy of it, and some of the hand-drawn charm on the world maps. Now it looks like many other 3D dungeon games, and quite murky, unremarkable ones at that, and because of it, it’s much harder to forgive the rougher edges and clunks.
