Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Master, by Goblinz Studio, is a dungeon manager/roguelite hybrid game with a twist – you lead monsters desperately trying to stop groups of plucky heroes from stealing treasures hidden in various dungeons. This means choosing and managing your crew, buying and deploying dastardly traps, casting powerful hexes at advantageous moments and, if all else fails, getting your hands bloody yourself. More specifically, you are offered a range of contracts to defend various dungeons when remorseless champions show up to rob graves and engage in some casual killing on the side.
The Woes of Middle Management
At the start of the game, the player chooses a Dungeon Manager, each with their own set of starting monsters and an artifact. Campaigns take place over a number of weeks and always end with an epic fight against the strongest of heroes. Each week you choose from a small randomised set of activities to help or hinder your efforts. Some allow you to buy, sell, train, and upgrade your troops, others diminish your health or let you send your forces to rob remote farms or castles for various rewards at the risk of serious injury. Due to the randomisation, you almost never get to reliably plan more than a couple of weeks ahead.
Not that there is a lot of planning to be done in the management phase of the game: with three resources – blood for killing heroes, tears for making them panic, and gold for saving the treasures – you buy, train and upgrade your troops, traps and yourself. You never have enough to do everything so prioritising troops who synergise with each other is a must. All monsters and traps have a peak level of 4 and have a linear upgrade tree. Heroes can reach up to level 10, so you can expect to be outgunned in most dungeons no matter what actions you take. But you will never be outnumbered.
The randomization of events and monsters you get each week definitely works in the game’s favor. It lends the game some replayability and allows the game to retain some suspense as you eagerly await a chance to train your troops before the next groups of heroes arrive. Alas, too few of the events add meaningful variety to the game and in just a few hours you will know almost everything there is to know about the effects they can have. This results in recycling the same few useful events in every single run without any reason to deviate from repetition. In fact, the strategy part feels so shallow you yearn for the battles.
Defending Someone Else’s Treasure
A dungeon comprises multiple sequential rooms, each defining what happens to the heroes in that room. Among them are two rooms for your monsters, two for your traps, one for you, and one for an extra spell you can use against the heroes. Additionally, you may get an extra room for a sub-boss, a bigger trap or an extra spell, a disaster like a cave-in, or a room for the heroes to rest and recover in. The order of the rooms is semi-random so you do not always know what you have to work with when you choose which dungeon to defend. Battle takes place in turns, with the turn order defined by the Speed property of each unit.
The heroes are also randomized by class and abilities. The higher the dungeon rating and later in the campaign, the dungeon is, the higher levels and more abilities the heroes have. Every unit has a set of attacks using specific damage channels targeting units in specific positions. Each unit also has a set of resistances, and one might assume that you will want to use a variety of damage channels for offense as you do not know what resistances the heroes you face might have. This assumption would be invalidated by lingering status effects, caused by attacks that either weaken or damage your enemies or buff your allies. Most damage status effects stack with a geometric rate of damage increase and most units apply multiple stacks of status effects per each attack. This makes them incredibly powerful against heroes who are not immune to them.
Some attacks can also inflict morale damage instead of, or in addition to, health damage. If a hero runs out of health, they die. If a hero runs out of morale, they flee the dungeon. The lower the morale of a hero is, the more damage they receive from each attack. In the easier dungeons getting heroes to flee is not too difficult, but in later dungeons they are generally too brave for their own good. As such, it is very simple to forget that morale even exists as a game mechanic after spending a few weeks in a campaign.
Planning For Failure
Heroes often manage to kill off the monsters you have assigned to a dungeon and you will have to fight the surviving champions yourself. If you lose, you lose the entire campaign and have to start over with some passive boosts. Save-scumming exists, but only for any entire unfinished dungeon. If you win, the monsters come back to life with some weariness. Accumulate too much weariness and the monster has to be given forced leave for a long period of time. The main way to balance the normal wear and tear is to let them rest in the garrison while other monsters are called to fight. It is a basic mechanic to force you to cycle through all the monsters.
Every once in a while, you may also find artefacts that give passive bonuses to all fights that you or your monsters partake in. These can boost specific attacks, bring dead monsters back to life, cause heroes to spontaneously combust upon killing demons or a myriad array of other possible boosts. It adds a tiny bit of flavour to the world without becoming too much of a focal point. You are also limited to five different active artefacts at any point, which is more than plenty in an average dungeon.
Since you are always leading the underdogs, finding synergies among your monsters is crucial. It should feel satisfying to use complementary attacks and completely “party wipe” the heroes before they do the same to you. However, this is where the game balance feels completely broken. With some sets of monsters, you can reliably annihilate all of the highest-level heroes in the first room with barely a scratch. Certain effects working together are overpowered against a randomized group of mismatched heroes. Complementary artifacts only add to this issue. Manually increasing campaign difficulty does little to remedy this, mainly making it more difficult to survive until you get the specific monster combinations you want. Once you find a combination that simply works, the battles become a small chore in a game where they should be the focus. Fortunately, the campaigns are not overly long by default and you can soon start over in a new campaign.
Conclusion
Legend of Keepers has an interesting premise that actively works against it. You play as the monsters – expendable, reusable, replaceable. There is no greater goal, no special quest, no sense of achievement. You do not even get an emotional connection like in Darkest Dungeon where you slowly train and develop specific heroes over a long period of time, only to feel distraught when they inevitably catch the sharp end of a halberd and pass on to the great beyond. With the death of your minions being the expected result, there is no emotional impact to it. It makes the game feel hollow.
A lack of emotions or story is not necessarily a bad thing if the gameplay mechanics offer enough creative problem-solving. This is where games like Into The Breach shine. Unfortunately, Legend of Keepers falls short of expectations in this regard, as unit combinations are so overpowered that you hardly ever get to experience stretched-out battles or need to cycle your monsters out of the primary use pool for rest. The strategic and tactical depths are shallow, which is a shame given the effort put into the unit design. All in all, this is a decent game, but compared to other roguelite already on the scene, decent is just not enough.
One of our newest authors here at eXplorminate! Did we mention that we’re always looking for more people that can contribute around these parts? If you’re interested, be sure to email us at eXplorminate@gmail.com