Dungeon Vending Machines

Introduction

Most fantasy idle games put the player in charge of a hero, a party or a kingdom. Dungeon Vending Machines does something smaller and stranger: it puts you in charge of the vending machines. Stock them with potions, gear and supplies, place them where dungeon-diving adventurers will actually walk past, and watch the coins come in as your inventory gets picked through. It's a genuinely odd angle on a familiar genre, and it's the single thing every reviewer in this game's small sample agrees on — this is a fresh idea, executed by a solo developer, Oz33 Lab, who spent roughly two months running a public demo before releasing the finished game on 12 January 2025. This review reads all twelve of its English-language reviews, the complete sample the game has ever received in that language, which is worth stating plainly for a release this small.

A premise worth the price of admission on its own

The positive reviews here aren't generic praise — they're specific about what's working. One 102-hour review, later edited to note the developer's responsiveness to feedback, opens by warning new buyers "IT'S NOT A FULL IDLE GAME" before going on to recommend it anyway once that's understood. Another calls it "a pretty cute idle game" that rewards patience once better, longer-lasting stock items are unlocked. A particularly telling data point: one reviewer switched an originally critical write-up to a thumbs-up specifically because they didn't want their notes to hurt sales for what they called "clearly a labor of love" from a solo indie developer — a generosity that says more about the goodwill this small game generates than any star rating could.

Number-tuning that even its fans flag

Set against that goodwill is a specific, repeated complaint about how the game's numbers are tuned, and it comes from positive and negative reviewers alike. One notes that some items in the collection tab pay out "0.01 income per sec, which is useless" — a value so small it reads as an oversight rather than a design choice. Another describes reaching level 6 and being handed 3 million coins in one go, enough to "unlock a significant amount of mechanics" and level up twice immediately afterward, which breaks the game's own sense of pacing even though the reviewer scored it positively overall. A third specifically criticises the crafting system's success-rate upgrades as "abysmal," describing players "throwing away millions of coins to get negligible returns." These are concrete, checkable complaints about specific systems rather than vague dissatisfaction, and they line up with a shorter, thinner critique running through the sample: several reviewers say they'd exhausted the game's meaningful content within a handful of hours and specifically missed a rebirth or prestige mechanic to give the loop somewhere to go.

The developer fixed the big complaint fast — then went quiet

The most common launch-week complaint was that the game demanded far more active attention than its idle-genre framing implied — restocking machines by hand, with no automation to lean on. The developer's own patch notes show a direct response: Update 1.1.0, on 19 January 2025, just a week after release, added an "auto-restocking function... making it easier to replenish products without the hassle of manual placement." That's a fast, specific answer to a specific complaint, and one reviewer credits exactly that update with making "idle gameplay" actually possible for the first time. Patches continued at a reasonable clip through 23 February 2025. Since then, the game's official update feed has been silent for over seventeen months. Nothing in that feed or in this game's small review sample points to a studio closure the way some other small releases this library has covered do — this reads more like ordinary solo-developer bandwidth running out than a confirmed shutdown — but new buyers should understand the game they're getting today is very likely close to its final form.

Value and monetisation

At NZ$8.99, with no DLC and nothing resembling an in-app purchase, Dungeon Vending Machines carries no monetisation complaints at all. The value question is really a content-depth question: several reviewers who otherwise liked the game specifically flagged it as short for the price, and without a rebirth loop or the density of a genre heavyweight, that's a fair characterisation to weigh against the low asking price rather than a serious mark against it.

Final Verdict

Dungeon Vending Machines earns real credit for a premise this library hasn't seen before, and for a solo developer who answered the loudest early complaint about it within a week of launch. What keeps the score modest is that the content underneath the premise doesn't go very deep, and the game's own most engaged reviewers are the ones pointing out specific numbers that don't add up — rewards too small to matter, rewards too large to matter, and upgrade costs that outpace their benefit. Seventeen months without a further update means those rough edges are probably permanent for now. At its price, this is a fair, low-risk pickup for anyone charmed by the idea of running a dungeon's snack aisle rather than clearing it — just expect the novelty to carry the experience more than the systems underneath it.