Dungeon Exiles

Introduction

Dungeon Exiles strips the autobattler roguelike down to a single character — Warrior, Rogue or Mage, each with their own subclasses — descending a branching dungeon path, fighting enemies and bosses, and stacking item and skill synergies toward increasingly difficult runs. Solo developer Gronkins built and self-published it, releasing on 8 August 2024. Reading the full available negative sample of 23 English-language reviews alongside the top positives, out of a Mostly Positive corpus (roughly 71.6% across 81 reviews), finds a genuinely likeable core loop sitting on top of a development story that ended sooner than almost anyone buying the game expected.

A loop reviewers genuinely enjoyed

Where Dungeon Exiles succeeds, it succeeds specifically. One reviewer described "a crack fiend dopamine loop where u constantly try and minmax your build to create the perfect run and watch number go up," while another drew a direct comparison to Path of Exile's approach to character building, praising "a lot of thinking and planning" in how synergies come together. A speed-up button added during development earned specific, appreciative mention from players who'd tested both the demo and the finished release, and art direction draws consistent, if modest, credit throughout the sample. For a solo developer's first release, several reviewers explicitly frame their recommendation around exactly that context, praising what's here rather than judging it against a bigger studio's output.

A development that stopped abruptly

Here is the fact that dominates this review's negative sample and reframes everything else about it. Multiple reviewers independently report that Gronkins announced, not long after launch, that they would stop updating the game because they no longer enjoyed working on it — one reviewer wrote plainly: "the designer just announced, with this is last patch, that he will no longer update/patch/add anything to the game." This review cannot independently verify the exact wording of that announcement, but the underlying claim lines up precisely with the game's own public patch history, which shows a dense run of updates and hotfixes through early September 2024 and nothing recorded since — nearly two years of silence at the time of this review. That's a meaningfully different situation from a studio that simply slows down; reviewers describe a specific, stated decision to stop, which several say they wish they'd known before buying.

Content that doesn't fill the gap

Independent of the abandonment, content volume draws its own consistent, specific criticism. Only five floors and three base classes exist, and multiple reviewers report exhausting most of what the game offers within four or five runs — one bluntly asked "how do some people have 100+ hours? You could easily see most of the game 2 hours in." Balance complaints run in both directions across the sample: some reviewers found early difficulty tiers winnable on a first attempt with little real resistance, while others describe the build variety as mostly illusory, with one or two dominant strategies and the rest amounting to traps. Quality-of-life gaps compound this — no in-game explanation of what individual stats actually do, and interface elements several reviewers wished they could rearrange.

Final Verdict

Dungeon Exiles is a genuinely enjoyable autobattler for the handful of hours its content actually supports, and reviewers who bought it for exactly that — a cheap, short-form build-crafting fix — largely got what they paid for. What keeps this review's score modest is the combination of thin content and a development story that, by multiple independent reviewer accounts, ended by the developer's own stated choice within a month of release, with the public patch record backing up that timeline. If the current five floors and three classes sound like enough on their own, this is a fair, cheap purchase; if you're hoping for the game to grow into something bigger, this review's sample says plainly not to expect it.