The Haunted Hoard: Dungeon Munchies (PS5)

In Dungeon Munchies, the monsters that you beat turn into the food that you eat, concocting recipes to increase your power feeling like the kind of mechanic that easily supports an action platformer. The real star of the experience ends up emerging elsewhere though, this idea for gameplay not quite as well realized as the game’s characters, world, and a remarkably effective dichotomy where comedy and bloody horror combine without feeling at odds.

 

In Dungeon Munchies you play as a freshly animated zombie with no name and no way to communicate, your purpose being to serve the spiritual necromancer Simmer as she seeks to escape an enormous dungeon. Early on, you’ll be fighting the dungeon wildlife and following Simmer’s instructions to turn meat and veggies into meals that will power you up, Simmer’s part in the plot mostly seeming to be a guide but one who certainly enjoys messing around. Simmer and her minions are presented as pretty ridiculous and prone to joking around and the dungeon feels more like a place just to house monsters to kill, but as you progress, the layers begin to peel back and you learn that this dungeon’s ecosystem is being directly cultivated after something went very wrong in the world outside. You start to meet characters with more personal relevance to Simmer who start to draw out her more serious side, but those early days of seeing her mess around don’t disappear either, the necromancer the sort who’d rather play and prefers to look away from problems until she has no choice. You meet an old friend of hers eventually who is almost the inverse, and as the two clash, you begin to get a deeper peek into their life before your revival and what exactly happened to the world of Dungeon Munchies, one that straddles an interesting line between goofy and dark.

 

Dungeon Munchies takes place in the kind of world where a cartoony action that would be brushed over in something overtly comedic can have dire consequences for all involved, and while the plot starts off with you working alongside typical horror creatures like skeletons and spirits, over time you come to encounter something that is meant to be truly gruesome, the game earning its M rating as body horror creatures and cosmic horror mingle in something first known as C-04. C-04 isn’t a late game surprise either, the dungeon exploration becoming more important as you start to understand there are much greater stakes in escaping it, and one interesting element is the game doesn’t entirely go for a tone shift after this new monstrous force enters the story. You will have areas with uncanny and grisly sights, and then you head to another part of the dungeon and check in on the ice cream cone with a face who is helping lead a revolution of sentient vegetables who don’t want to be eaten. Even his story seems to enjoy the mix of ridiculous and realistic, because while this veggie resistance leads to pineapple people launching themselves in catapults at you, it also starts to look at the burden or power and the costs of social unrest. The game’s lighthearted elements do feel like it keeps it from diving into making too strong a statement or overly indulging in what seems to be a deft hand for designing monstrosities, and it helps that a recurring cast of faces gives you some characters to root for whose fates you’ll be invested in as more and more you fear this story could go either way on its ending.

Some expressive character art with appealing designs helps things along even further, the moments where it all comes together for something emotional, triumphant, or terrifying being Dungeon Munchies’s true charm. However, the game does lead with its creature cooking mechanic, and developer maJAJa doesn’t have the same firm handle on how it wishes to realize this element of the experience. Playing as this unknown zombie takes a bit to get used to at first. You are able to wield a main weapon and sub-weapon, but while the controller does have two analog sticks, only one is used for movement and combat. This can lead to moments where you’re trying to finagle your own movement and where you’re pointing your weapons, diagonal angles sometimes slightly moving you out of position or enemy crowds might force you into little shuffles as you’re turning your whole body and walking towards foes slightly when trying to deal with them. The undead hero appropriately feels rather stiff at times, you can hold down the X button to stand in place and adjust your aim, but most fights are pretty energetic and require a good degree of movement, the bigger problem with the shared stick control likely being how often you’ll be pointing away just for survival’s sake. This could sound like a way to add some difficulty, the player needing to find moments to be aggressive safely, and it can work out that way against certain enemies. A tentacled beast that charges up an eye laser, a giant durian with a whip where it’s clear when he’ll strike, fairies who gather magic before unleashing it. Some foes are designed for that style, and even if sometimes your aim doesn’t adjust as fast as you’d like,  you will find enough foes in the dungeon who feel like they fit this form of fighting well enough.

 

However, over time, the game seems to lose confidence in its ability to oppose you. It gives you dodge rolls and dodge dashes that help to invalidate certain huge screen covering attacks, but Dungeon Munchies starts presenting boss battles fairly early where the screen is covered with lingering slow projectiles that aren’t so easily dodged and enemies start getting thrown together in pits rather than placed in more meaningful team arrangements. Many fights and enemies start to lose their special flair as battles can boil down to more panicked scrambles to wipe away enough of the danger to function normally, but this might actually be a result of the game’s cooking and weapon crafting elements. As you fight your way through the dungeon and explore its side paths, you can acquire new recipes and blueprints that go towards increasing your abilities and arsenal. Monsters drop cooking ingredients that surprisingly aren’t used up when you make a meal comprised of them, but if you’re being asked to have multiple Glowing Mushrooms or pieces of Snail Meat for a recipe, you will need to find more of it out in the dungeon than just a single helping. Drops can be somewhat random, and there’s also a resource called Inspiration that is spent on making meals or weapons that you earn for defeating monsters, finding materials, or even engaging in conversations. Inspiration at first feels overly abundant, but when you get the ability to upgrade recipes later on, you’ll instead be itching for more opportunities to earn it.

The meals you make in Dungeon Munchies can provide a wide range of boons, your zombie having a stomach that can store seven active benefits although quite helpfully you can swap them out and even reproduce recipes without wasting any materials. There is an incredibly wide range of possible benefits a meal can provide. One has you heal back some damage when you’re injured but another has you releasing an electric shock instead. You can make your dodge dash do damage and destroy projectiles, you can infect enemies with gradual damage dealing effects, you can build up temporary armor, and all of these powers can mix together so you can indulge in cooperative synergies to start building a custom style of play for yourself that is further influenced by the weapons you forge. Approached in a fairly similar manner to cooking, making new weapons will give you access to a different range of battle styles. Most have only a basic attack and maybe a special charge attack based on special elements, but you can use a spear if you want to fight from afar, wands and bows for even farther if slower, and weapons like the scythe will actually turn enemy souls into little helpers who follow you to battle. Secondary weapons give you protective shields that can be quite useful in the bullet hells, but you can also take another swinging weapon for high consistent damage output or keep a projectile launcher as your backup for a foe you don’t want to approach. Where things get really interesting is when recipes directly enhance the weapons, and with the power of the weapons you forge scaling over time, you are encouraged to experiment with new weapons while the recipes can be swapped in and some even remain relevant or useful up to the final boss. You can turn that spear into a perfect prodding tool as a recipe makes it reach further and even fire a water jet for extra damage, or you can start cultivating a little scythe army where your minions can sometimes kill the opposition before it’s even had time to appear on screen.

 

Dungeon Munchies’s flexible customization is also its curse though. Once the synergies became too potent, the game struggles to keep up with its enemies and boss fights. The right mix of weapons and recipes can lead to stretches of the game where you just hold down or mash the attack buttons as you carve through groups of foes, although at least the weapons needing to be swapped out for tougher stuff helps pulling you out of complacency at parts to save some sections of the adventure. This is likely the reason bosses shift from using interesting recognizable techniques to filling the screen with danger though, and at the same time, it feels like you must put together a competent meal and weapon mix to keep up. An attempt to compensate for players who get too creative does force you into finding those blends where you can become a powerhouse that fears little for their life, some dramatic battles or confrontations with the C-04 ending up feeling a bit automatic. By the time you’re essentially untouchable the story has at least fully got its hooks into you so you’re probably pressing forward to see its conclusion more than anything, but the days of needing to really work to handle the threat of a few monstrous fish in a swimming section are a bit far in the past, the action oddly enough being the piece that doesn’t gel well in a game that can lean so heavily into silliness or horror.

THE VERDICT: When it comes to fleshing out its setting and balancing its seemingly incongruous silliness with authentic horror, Dungeon Munchies is a top notch chef that gets you invested in the fate of a set of delightful but conflicted characters. At one moment you’re talking to a banana man, the next he’s being horrifically warped by dark forces, and yet the lighthearted and dark tonal elements play into each other well because of how they’re made to coexist, and it’s pretty easy to get invested in helping Simmer and her friends when you’d rather see them in a world as fun as they are. The only part of this recipe not quite as well conceived is the action platforming, it starting off well as you concoct interesting mixed effects involving the weapons and meals only for the game to fail to keep up, throwing too much at you at once and forcing you to compensate with builds that only make things easier. The action doesn’t become too automatic until near the end, so for a while you can see where the ideas work before the plentiful options become too much for the game to effectively counter.

 

And so, I give Dungeon Munchies for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. The story of Simmer and her allies could have shot this game to greatness if it wasn’t being weighed down by a battle system that loses its luster by giving you too much freedom. It’s not necessarily hard to identify the kind of special builds that will start to trivialize later battles in the game, and it’s even clear the game starts to expect it based on how packed rooms become with enemies and how fights become more about countering walls of energy bullets rather than dodging specific attacks. Before you reach that point though, there is still a thrill to be found in hunting down the materials you need for some new useful effect or weapon, and while it can seem like it would be easy to settle into an effective concept early on, Dungeon Munchies is smart in pacing some of its new additions at least. There are times you will need to try new weapons to ensure you’re strong enough to push forward and you then reevaluate the recipes you’ve kept in your gut until then, and that is one reason it’s sad that as you get deeper in and the options expand, they also technically shrink. You’ll likely find a way to hold down the button to easily damage foes near the game’s ending, and even before then many bosses have to trigger armored phases where you hardly deal damage since otherwise they’d likely die before they even showed off their more unique techniques. The experimental phase of your adventure is still long enough that Dungeon Munchies isn’t entirely leaning on its endearing characters and compelling mysteries behind things like C-04 to keep your interest, but it is much more precarious and the balance shifts a bit too often for the headlining element to be the true star.

 

You really shouldn’t come to Dungeon Munchies for its cooking and combat, but they’re a fine action component often enough and at least conceptualizing your builds remains a frequent motivator to pay attention to things beyond the plot. The art, both in character portraits and the pixelated but often effective monster designs, pairs well with a story that actually thrives because its horror and humor feel separate and yet are forced to interact. Some more time should have been spent cooking up more involved ways to counter player strength or perhaps the recipe effects should have been pared down to something more manageable, but the creativity and charm of Dungeon Munchies makes it easier to stomach the parts of this full course meal that weren’t as well made.