In Dungeon Settlers, you build a colony on top of a teeming RPG labyrinth in a trim take on Rimworld

Out this week in early access

The first time I lost my whole party in Dungeon Settlers, it was to a swarm of rats. I think we can all agree that getting killed by rats in anything remotely fantasy RPG-ish is an enormous faux pas. It's like spelling your own name wrong on your CV. It's like accidentally wearing your underpants on top of your trousers. It's like failing to become Thane of Whiterun.

In my defence, I was playing the game on Hard difficulty, and the rodents of Dungeon Settlers have a zoologically improbable habit of keeping company with stone golems. Ever tried to crack a stone golem with a wooden sword? I have found it inconvenient. In any case, while my party wipe was embarrassing, it was also excellently macabre in the fine traditions of Dwarf Fortress.

Minutes into our doomed expedition, three of my four adventurers got themselves absolutely golemed while gathering berries. I had the surviving party member, Luciana, scoop up one of her dying pals and gallop away looking for the exit portal.

In the process, we discovered and aggroed yet more rat swarms, rolling them all together like a sort of Pied Piper katamari. After a few laps of the layout, poor brave Luciana finally got herself cornered by the frenzied nibblers. And yet, death took its sweet time arriving, for Luciana was still carrying the body of her now thoroughly expired friend. The corpse formed a meatshield, absorbing the cheeseboi fury while Luciana cowered beneath its mutilated bulk, unable to move a hair, until eventually, she keeled over from hunger, fatigue and stress.

Imagine it: slowly wasting away while you watch a bunch of tutorial-ass chaos potatoes munch on the flesh of your shieldsister. Still, I take comfort in the knowledge that according to her mood modifier bar, Luciana considered "harsh treatment and poor conditions a natural part of the role". Happy to meet your expectations, Lucy!

Image credit: CanOpener / Rock Paper Shotgun

Dungeon Settlers isn't just about getting devoured by rats in caves. It's about building grubby hovels on a surface world of poison lakes and stunted trees. The colony building and dungeon delving aspects of the game are tragically symbiotic. In order to erect and supply your hovels, to say nothing of absurd froufrous like barrels to store arrows in, you'll need to send teams of colonists into the procgen realms beneath, which are treacherously verdant. Luciana did not die trying to defeat some resurrected arch-demon. She died because I didn't have enough twigs and grass to make standing torches.

Dungeon Settlers is, in other words, a balance of Rimworld-style colony sim and party combat game in the approximate vein of Baldur's Gate. You can give characters orders, but they'll also act independently according to a table of adjustable task priorities. It's all real-time, but you can pause to finesse your tactics, and you will do this often, alas, because Dungeon Settlers has a lot of menus, windows and hotbar icons to squint at and get extremely irritated about.

Going by the demo, at least, I do think the game's menus could use a proper rearrangement over the course of its early access career. I also found the highlighting and action feedback a bit slippery and ambiguous: often, I'd give a character an attack order, only to realise I was controlling another, or accidentally issue a waypoint instead.

Part of it, of course, is that the two genres undergoing alchemical combination here have competing interface design objectives. The hybridisation is rewarding in other respects. You can build in dungeons - barricading caverns, unrolling bedrolls, and boosting the party's spirits with the crackling glow of a cooking fire. I find this genuinely cosy, despite my increasing apathy for the word "cosy" in videogame contexts. I'm interested to see how long you could maintain an outpost down there: the monsters respawn, but the plants and treasures don't, and your characters get a negative mood modifier while underground.

The other fly in the ointment is that South Korean developers CanOpener have used generative AI for localisation, though "some languages were translated or reviewed by human translators". It reminds me that we should do a proper piece on how generative AI is affecting the translation and localisation business. Translation is a complex art, and a canny localiser can do wonders for even an already-wonderful game, so the chatbottification of these vocations deserves some proper scrutiny (including an acknowledgement that games journos often make use of machine translation when grabbing quotes from interviews).

Image credit: CanOpener / Rock Paper Shotgun

For the moment, I'll only add that Dungeon Settlers' English script could maybe use a tweak. There's a screen of some quest writing on the Steam page in which your party encounters an archer, who is "ready to loose an arrow at a moment's notice". I'm no hardened catacomb robber msyelf, but I would be pretty relaxed about facing an archer who took 60 seconds to get off a shot. The worst part is that I can't tell whether the subsequent line of dialogue, "we seek no quarrel", is a joke.

Dungeon Settlers is out in early access from 4th September. I guess I should tell you how my second party wipe happened. We were doing really well on that particular expedition, but then some asshole club-wielder called Edwin (genuinely, that's the name the system gave him) broke formation and roused the gobby wrath of some Medium Slimes. I feel like dying to an enemy explicitly labelled Mid is possibly worse than dying to a rat. How am I supposed to get a decent anecdote out of "we got our arses kicked by some fairly competent eukaryotic organisms"? Anyway, thanks to cpt_freakout for flagging this game in the latest Maw round-up.