A month or so ago I had never heard of Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold, but it was easy to convince me to check it out for review. A game made by Level-5, the brilliant studio behind Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom which is one of my favourite JRPGs, and series like Professor Layton, had me sold immediately. So, I was keen to see this game that kicked off a small multimedia franchise in Japan.
The Doritos of storytelling
Snack World has you wake up as a character made in its limited character builder. This protagonist has woken at the Muff Inn in the kingdom of Tutti-Frutti, and becomes a hero who fights baddies in dungeons. That’s the extent of the story, or at least what I remembered or cared about.
The one thing the game does well is the silly puns. They hit you with them a lot from phrases referencing food, to place names, to everything. Mixed in with some self aware humour such as talking about RPG tropes, but then the RPG means something else. I laughed a fair bit but I cringed more.
Ultimately it’s enjoyable, but there is no nutritional value and you become aware of that.
The meat and three veg of dungeon crawling.
What Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold does reasonably well is the dungeons. Missions have you going to specific areas to beat lots of enemies, find lots of treasure, and beat lots of bosses.
As with most dungeon crawlers, you can use loot to upgrade your weapons, to smash easy dungeons easier, and make your way onto the next ones. It ticks all of the dungeon crawling boxes, but it never excels in any of these areas. A little more creativity in the kitchen could make the game stand out, but in the end it does a good enough job in all of the required fields, which ultimately leaves it to become a bit repetitive and boring near the end.
The Steak cooked on a frying pan … of style.
Snack World has a reasonably distinct style with the strangely portioned heads, curious armour designs that use lots of shapes but little detail, and bizarre facial expressions that fit perfectly with what you would picture of something coming from Japan.
Again, there is nothing overly special about it which is frustrating as you play the game. It is trying to be cute but takes all the cuteness out of things like chibi designs and winds up with something that is kinda unique in how bland it is. It’s not an ugly game, but with how much it tries to play up it’s cuteness, the character designs needs a lot of work.
The afternoon snack of Nintendo Switch games
Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold can be tasty at times, but for the most part it’s only going to satiate you when you’re in the mood for something that’s simple and fun but not overly creative. A few good laughs don’t make up for the groan worthy puns, and the story isn’t enough to justify long stretches of the repetitive gameplay.
- Score
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