Gumballs & Dungeons

A note on the evidence before anything else, because it's unusually thin.

Gumballs & Dungeons has 1,840 reviews at 96.5% positive. 1,738 of them are Simplified Chinese. The entire English corpus is 49 reviews, of which seven are negative. I read all 49. That's total coverage, but of a very small sample, and readers should weigh what follows accordingly.

The claim that isn't true

One of those seven negatives, from 8 March 2025 with seven votes, says: "This is basically an ad for the mobile game. They stated they will not be updating this version."

That review was written four days after the Steam launch. Since then the developer has shipped roughly twenty updates — v0.0.12 through v1.0.1 in March 2026 — including three entirely new dungeons (Cosmic Knights in June 2025, Martial Art Island in September, Neon City for the first-anniversary update), new gumballs, a one-click purchase feature for the in-dungeon shop, and a steady run of bug fixes. There is a community poll from April 2025 asking players which legacy gumballs they want back.

Whatever was said or understood in launch week, the game has been supported for a year. That's the third time today the announcement feed has settled a claim the review page states as fact.

The claim I can't check, and what to do with it

The other five negatives agree on something I can't verify from outside: that the Steam version holds roughly half of the mobile game's content.

They're specific about it. A 21-vote reviewer: "it's about 1/3rd of the mobile game, which is also free." A 69-hour player with 11 votes goes further: "All references to Sky and Space have been removed or reworked into bland bonuses, most Sky dungeons and events have been turned into land events with tons of rewards removed." An 80-hour player just wants their eight-year-old mobile save to carry over, and it doesn't.

I have not played the mobile version and cannot confirm the proportions. But five independent accounts, two of them from players with 69 and 80 hours here, describing the same omissions in compatible detail, is about as strong as player testimony gets. Treat it as very likely true: this is a smaller product than the app it derives from.

The part that deserves more credit than it gets

Buried in that same complaint is something remarkable. The 16-vote reviewer lists what was cut and notes in parentheses: "iap too, the only positive."

The Steam version of a free-to-play mobile RPG has no in-app purchases at all. The only paid item attached to the game is a soundtrack. For a genre this library has repeatedly found to be predatory — and after a day of reviewing games where a season pass costs more than the game — a mobile free-to-play title arriving on Steam with the monetisation removed rather than ported is genuinely worth noting. Monetisation scores a 9.

There's an obvious commercial reading: without purchases, the Steam build works as advertising for the mobile one, which is what that reviewer meant by "an ad". That's fair. It also means a player can take hundreds of gumballs and a year of dungeons for nothing, with no mechanism to spend money even if they want to.

What it plays like

A roguelike team-builder. You assemble gumballs whose abilities interact, descend through procedurally generated dungeons, and unlock more of the collection. It's the standard shape of the genre executed with a lot of content behind it, and the deeper synergies are where the interest lives.

The complaints beyond content volume are the ones you'd predict from a mobile port: an unskippable tutorial (fixed for the intro, per one reviewer's own edit), an interface built for touch, and — from a 19-hour player in May 2026 — "repetitive unintuitive and hits a progress wall fairly quickly."

Of the 49 English reviews, 42 are positive, and they span March 2025 to June 2026 rather than clustering at launch.

The verdict

Gumballs & Dungeons earns a 7. It's a generous, content-rich roguelike RPG that costs nothing and asks for nothing, supported for a full year with real new dungeons — and its monetisation, or absence of it, is the best in any free-to-play game I've assessed today.

It doesn't score higher because it is, by consistent account, a reduced version of a game you can get free elsewhere; because the interface never stopped being a phone interface; and because with 49 English reviews I'd be overstating my confidence to place it any more precisely than this.

Install it if a free dungeon-crawling collection game appeals. You genuinely cannot spend money on it, which is a sentence this library does not get to write often.