Dragons Never Cry (PC)

There’s a certain beautiful drama to a name like Dragons Never Cry that might stoke the imagination for something like an artsy RPG or narrative indie game, but seeing the cocky dragon and his odd spirit panda this game puts front and center likely diminished the range of your wandering imagination. Dragons Never Cry does not ever touch on its title because the dragon never really finds anything that tests his emotional resolve, this game about treasure-hunting instead being a child-friendly casual experience at heart.

Dragons Never Cry wastes no time setting up its adventure. The dragon wants treasure because that’s what dragons do, so he sets off in search of some. However, he is accompanied by a spirit panda whose existence is never really explained, the panda being there mostly to just talk to the dragon. It appears in the game world while playing too but doesn’t really contribute anything as it flies about, its main personality trait seeming to be that it’s incredibly nervous about you falling into water as it will pop up most any time you come across some to warn you about such a danger. Keeping things uncomplicated isn’t a poor choice for a game meant to be played casually, although giving the characters names could help with there being some sort of emotional attachment. The only real plot outside of the basic hunt for gold appears when the two nameless protagonists encounter zombie rabbits and want to figure out what’s causing them, but even uncovering the source feels weak of any weight or meaning since the world is barely established and the characters only really have general personality traits to work with.

Clearly the appeal of Dragons Never Cry is meant to be its exploration gameplay. Each level has a certain amount of treasures to find in it, the game providing a helpful treasure tracker in the top right that will show how many you have found and which ones still need to be collected by way of blacked out and colored in symbols. The treasure tracker is actually not as straightforward as it appears while still remaining incredibly helpful. For the most part, you can expect a level’s treasures to appear in order in the box, making it fairly clear if you managed to miss one so you can scour around for hidden paths or secrets before moving on. However, the secrets often have their treasures scattered around the tracker to try and throw you off, and even treasures in the regular path might not go in the order you’d expect. It’s definitely a helpful tool for making sure you grab all you can in a level while not being so straightforward that it takes the fun out of the hunt, but technically beating a level doesn’t require treasure finding, so you don’t have to actually hunt down a coin you missed or restart if its unreachable to move on with the game.

Areas in Dragons Never Cry really only come in two flavors. The game begins with Forest levels that do have some nice areas like a sunflower field but mostly stick to a woods theme, and near the end of the game you find the Ruins levels where they’re still using the forest look but begin adding more and more ancient ruins to the mix, some levels even taking place mostly inside wrecked castles. None of the levels truly involve much puzzle solving or careful action though. At most you might have to move some rocks or logs around, but really most of the stages are decently sized top-down scavenger hunts, the player using the treasure tracker to determine when to move on and when to look for gaps between the trees that might lead to special areas. Treasures are spaced well so there’s rarely a dry spell as you explore, but besides the small enjoyment you can get from wandering around and finding things, there isn’t too much substance to the hunt to make it particularly fun.

There are, thankfully, a few interruptions and dangerous obstacles that try to make things more interesting. Poison patches are added to certain areas to encourage careful maneuvering but it’s never really too hard to get around them. Instead, most of the danger comes from the monsters you find, enemies popping out of the ground from time to time to either block the way onward or ambush you after entering an area. The only real concern when fighting them though is making sure you have the room to back away as you launch fireballs towards them. Being in close will make the fireballs deal more damage, but too close and you’ll execute a physical strike that, while more damaging, will leave you incredibly vulnerable to damage yourself, although you do heal gradually over time. Backing away and launching fireballs will remain your strategy even as giant bunnies with a lot of health appear, and when you go to the Ruins, the only change in enemies is you now face skeletons who are fast and rats who jump at you that can still be handled with the same tactic. Two foes do exist that require unique approaches, although the evil trees only blow you away so they’re not much to worry about. The cannon packing rabbits actually stand their ground and fire from afar, meaning you need to move in and dodge their blasts to hurt them. They’re essentially the only hard enemy in the game to deal with, with even the only boss in the game not really packing anything you have to worry about much.

To try and make the small set of 12 levels and a boss fight seem longer, the game features a five star rating system that is a bit hard to decipher. Collecting all the treasures is a fairly obvious criteria for a high rating, but from there, figuring out what the game expects of you is a guessing game. Time spent in a level is tracked and the damage you take seems to be important as well, but the importance of these can vary from stage to stage. Some levels you can’t afford to take any damage if you want five stars, others you can take tons of hits and still achieve top scores. Time is even harder to figure out since there was never a clear division between what the game considered a slow or fast gathering of the levels treasures. Being quick and careful are your best hopes for success and even with its obscured rating criteria, earning five stars isn’t really hard to achieve by accident, making an attempt to actually earn them in the levels where it didn’t work out on your first go less exciting to pursue.

Ultimately, the amount of content in Dragons Never Cry make it feel more like a student project, or at most the first world in a much larger game. In fact, during play I started seeing messages about the game’s code appear in the bottom left, but there does not seem to be any major glitches that hurt the experience. While it would still be an underwhelming first world if it was part of a larger finished product, the simple final boss and small amount of enemy and environmental variety feels like a better fit for something that was an adventure that was only just getting started. The barely present story, simple challenges, and very small difficulty curve make it feel like its working towards a more expansive journey but then the game stops and plays the credits, leaving questions like why your panda seems to be a ghost unanswered. It will only take two or three hours to do everything including shooting for the five star ratings, and since it doesn’t really use that time well, it ends up feeling shallow despite its lack of glaring flaws.

THE VERDICT: Dragons Never Cry is a simple experience, exploring around for treasures making for a casual scavenger hunt style of play with a bit of monster fighting action thrown in to make it slightly more exciting. Other than the search for secrets though, Dragons Never Cry doesn’t really have much to make the short experience interesting. It doesn’t introduce its characters, almost all its enemies are fought in a similar manner including the final boss, and there are no major puzzles or other navigational challenges that really push the level designs to be more than just woods or woods with some ruined buildings scattered around. Dragons Never Cry wraps up too quickly, making it feel like it was meant to be part of something larger or it was only made to learn the ropes of game development. For what it does include, there’s only the small thrill of finding hidden treasure to guide a game that is otherwise too plain and simple to enjoy.

And so, I give Dragons Never Cry for PC…

A BAD rating. While most of its problems are small things like the rating system being unclear or the game’s code popping up on screen, Dragons Never Cry mostly just fails to be interesting rather than doing anything incredibly poorly. The area maps hide the treasures decently well, but the monsters are bit dull to fight since they all involve the same basic tactic save for the cannon enemies. It’s so short that its easy to keep moving and engaging with the small joys like noticing a little hidden area, but at the same time there’s not much to fill the space between those moments save for some repetition and progress barriers that don’t really deserve to be called puzzles. It really does just feel like the kind of game a developer would make to learn the ropes, and while it shows a basic understanding of certain aspects of gameplay like the appeal of collecting things, there’s just not enough going on to make the process particularly interesting.

Dragons Never Cry’s problem is it just fails to be engaging. The level design isn’t inspired, the mechanics are too simple, and the story elements barely address anything. It’s just kind of dull, the little satisfying moments too basic to make up for how everything else feels plain and unexciting.