Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but what if we mix up the structure of a roguelike and a completely different genre? Look, Dungeon Clawler is entering a very crowded space right now. If your indie game isn’t focused on farming or deckbuilding, you’re probably working on a roguelike as I’m writing this. Thankfully its simple structure and gameplay loop make it more interactive than a Peglin or Loop Hero. Add to that a wide variety of characters and abilities and I stuck with Dungeon Clawler a lot longer than I expected.

When Sir Bunalot loses his paw in a gambling tournament, he sets out to retrieve it from the dungeon lord. The only way he can attack the many enemies guarding the dungeon is by retrieving weapons and armor from a claw machine. Each encounter, you control a giant claw and attempt to grab as many useful items from the pool. These are dropped down and immediately used by Sir Bunalot or the many other characters you can play as. Whether you grab shields to block incoming attacks or stack up a large amount of daggers to deal massive damage, your success depends on both skill and a little bit of luck. While I’m not one who particularly enjoys playing claw machines, it makes for a pretty entertaining and passive experience in Dungeon Clawler.

What keeps the game from becoming too repetitive is that after every encounter you get to enhance your pool of weapons and items. At first these tools are pretty overwhelming but they help to determine specific strategies, especially when you learn to combine them with specific character abilities. Scrappy for example has one claw that is magnetic and attracts any items made of metal. This is very handy for weapons like swords and daggers that latch onto the claw. But as you proceed through the dungeon you spend your hard earned coins on transmuting the properties of certain items. I turned my wooden shields into metal this way and it became much easier to advance. These mechanics help to keep every run in Dungeon Clawler fun even if you do not get to keep these changes in future attempts.

Even though the game has quite a lot of variety and strategic depth, I did run into quite a number of attempts where I simply had an unlucky run of items and side-effects. For instance, on one run I would get Items that kept dealing poison damage with no way of healing; during another, I failed at some of the optional minigames that cost so much HP that I had no chance of defeating the bosses. Dungeon Clawler also throws a lot your way without explaining what certain items or mechanics are. The first few runs truly feel like stumbling in the dark as you need to go through quite a bit of effort to understand what all the elemental effects can do and how they affect your character. The game plays with these expectations for sure, but that hurdle did take quite some time to pass.

In the larger context of the roguelike genre, Dungeon Clawler plays with a lot of familiar tropes. However, its claw machine mechanic is playful enough to make it stand out and outlast the trappings of other games in this niche. It is clear that the developers had a lot of fun designing the world and characters to keep players on their toes. While it does have a bit of a learning curve that could’ve been smoothed out and the luck factor can never be underestimated, Dungeon Clawler is a great time. If you’re looking for something to sink a lot of time into, but want to save your quarters on, this is a roguelike you shouldn’t miss.