Dverghold

Some genres never fully died, they just went quiet. First-person, grid-based dungeon crawling — the "blobber" format Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder defined in the late 80s and early 90s — has spent most of the last two decades as a niche kept alive by a handful of devoted revivals. Dverghold is the newest of those, and it doesn't try to disguise its ambitions: navigate hand-crafted dungeons tile by tile, in first person, with a party of up to four, fighting turn-based battles where formation and positioning decide fights as much as raw stats. A week after launching into Early Access, every single review it has is positive, and the reviewers writing them keep reaching for the same names — Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Might & Magic, Lands of Lore — not as a knock, but as the highest compliment this specific genre can offer.

Old rules, played straight

The pitch is unapologetically old-school: descend into the haunted halls beneath Rekestt, map them as you go, manage light, stamina and hunger, and treat every corridor as a potential trap. Combat plays out in turn-based exchanges with a front-row, back-row formation, and the store page describes the intent plainly — "instead of menu-driven combat, imagine a more FPS-like gameplay but turn-based." Reviewers who grew up on the genre's originators describe the effect exactly as intended. One writes that the game "feels like stepping through a doorway into the past," recalling "the same spark that lit up my childhood when I first crept through stone corridors with nothing but a torch, a map, and the th[reat of the dark]." Another, more simply: "It reminds me of Dungeon Master from like 1990. Fun game, I hope it goes far!" A German review calls it a genre gem with "enormous addictive potential," specifically naming Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master players as the audience who will "simply LOVE" it.

Between expeditions, a Darkest Dungeon-inflected basecamp near the mining town Gravhollow lets you recruit mercenaries with randomised skills, upgrade facilities, and talk to a cast the developer promises each have their own story. One reviewer compares it directly to "a bit of Darkest Dungeon mixed with a traditional grid based Dungeon Crawler," and calls everything they've seen so far something they like without reservation.

The soundtrack is doing real work

A detail worth calling out on its own: Dverghold ships with an original Dungeon Synth soundtrack, composed specifically for the game by genre artists Splendorius and Kurald Galain, with Splendorius contributing a full dedicated album. That's an unusually deep commitment to atmosphere for an Early Access indie release, and it shows up in reviewer reactions — the game's presentation as a whole, oppressive, melancholic, and purpose-built for the tone it's going for, reads as considerably more considered than the average dungeon crawler's stock ambient loop. Painted character portraits for your party sit alongside genuinely atmospheric first-person 3D dungeon rendering, and one reviewer's specific wish — that the game "should come with a paper manual with some illustrations, lore and vague mechanics explanations" — reads less like a complaint and more like a genre fan wanting the whole physical-box experience these games used to ship with.

What's actually here right now

It's worth being precise about scope. Dverghold's Early Access rollout is structured as three acts, each representing a section of Rekestt reclaimed from the dark: Act I, covering the abandoned Dwarven halls, is what's playable at launch; Act II, flooded caverns beneath the living quarters, is described as in development; Act III, the deepest and most corrupted section, is still only planned. A full release is promised to bring the complete story arc across all three acts, plus additional polish. Buyers today are purchasing a genuine opening chapter of that arc rather than the finished game the store page ultimately describes — a normal and clearly disclosed Early Access structure, but one worth understanding before buying based on the full pitch.

Within Act I, the developer's patch history shows real, active engagement rather than a launch left to run on its own: five separate fixes landed in the game's first four days, addressing a soft-lock bug, a stuck-spike issue, a day-progression bug, and a healer/disease interaction problem specifically. That's the kind of granular, fast bug-fixing that suggests a team paying close attention to what's breaking, even against a backdrop of uniformly positive reviews.

A couple of honest gaps

Even reviewers with no real complaints flag small, specific wants. A Japanese reviewer, having bought the game after enjoying the demo, asks specifically for controller support, describing keyboard-only movement as "面倒くさい" — a hassle. No achievements exist yet in Steam's system, consistent with a game still very early in its Early Access life. None of this reads as a serious problem in the current review sample — but a completely clean 56-review record is still a small sample against the scope of what Dverghold is trying to become across three full acts, and it's worth checking back in as the playerbase, and the game, both grow.

Final verdict

Dverghold is a genuinely well-executed revival of a genre that's had very few good entries in recent years, backed by a soundtrack and presentation considerably more considered than most Early Access dungeon crawlers manage, and received without a single dissenting review in its first week. That's a strong opening statement. The honest caveats are structural rather than a mark against execution: this is one act of a planned three, an Early Access build with a real ongoing bug-fix cadence, and a genre that's deliberately, proudly unforgiving in a way that won't suit every player even when it's working exactly as designed.

For dungeon crawler fans who've been waiting for a real Dungeon Master-style revival, this is close to an easy recommendation today, with the expectation that the fuller picture arrives across Acts II and III still to come.

Players who want that same feeling of descending into the unknown and building a roster to survive it, sustained across a persistent world rather than a single expedition, may also want to look at Wanderer.