Dungeon Clicker

Every Early Access storefront has games like this one, and most of them never get talked about directly, because "we're still waiting" doesn't make for much of an article on its own. Dungeon Clicker is worth the exception, because its own history makes the case better than any review could: a game that launched with real presentation and a spark of genuine promise, wrote patch notes for about four months, and then simply stopped. Nearly five years later, it's still listed as Early Access, still priced as a work in progress, and — per its own community — is exactly that in the least charitable sense of the phrase.

What worked, briefly

At launch, Dungeon Clicker had a real angle: an incremental Action RPG rendered in 3D, in a genre where almost everything else settles for flat sprites standing in front of resource menus. Early reviewers noticed. Several specifically called out how the game "felt" different from its 2D peers, and at least one player pushed through to wave counts in the four figures during the game's brief window of active development, reporting a smooth, largely bug-free run. That's not nothing — the underlying idea of a genuinely dimensional incremental had real appeal, and a handful of the game's positive reviews describe exactly the kind of early-access optimism that makes buying into an unfinished game feel like a reasonable bet: rough now, but headed somewhere.

Where it stopped going anywhere

The developer's public patch history tells the rest of the story bluntly. Hotfixes came through August and September 2021, a patch preview post followed in December 2021, and then nothing. No update, no roadmap post, no explanation, for what is now approaching five years. One of the game's own Steam reviews, posted in 2023, states it as plainly as a review can: "abandonware." It's a harsh word, but it's also simply an accurate description of a game whose last confirmed sign of active development predates most of the technology and games this review has covered.

The technical and design complaints that were present even during the active period never got the chance to be addressed. Reviewers report save file corruption, crashes that erased hours of progress, and graphics glitches surviving a full reinstall — the kind of foundational stability problems Early Access is specifically supposed to exist to shake out before a wider release. Performance is a separate, specific concern: at least one review describes the game placing unusually heavy, sustained strain on the GPU relative to what's actually on screen, closer to the kind of load a much more visually ambitious title would justify. And the genre framing itself drew criticism from day one — several early reviewers point out that the initial build had no real auto-idle functionality at all, requiring continuous manual clicking to make progress, which sits awkwardly against a title marketed squarely as an incremental clicker.

What buying it today actually gets you

There's no responsible way to recommend a purchase here. Whatever the game might have become with continued development is a hypothetical that's had nearly five years to resolve itself and hasn't. At NZ$11.39 the financial risk of a purchase is modest in absolute terms, but "modest risk" isn't the same as "worth it," and there is no realistic version of buying Dungeon Clicker today that gets a player more game than they would have gotten buying it in its first week.

The honest use of this review, if it has one, is as a data point rather than a recommendation: Early Access is a bet on a developer's follow-through as much as it is a bet on a game's current state, and Dungeon Clicker is a clean example of what it looks like when that bet doesn't pay off. The presentation idea was sound. The execution needed real, sustained work that never came.