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Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master GBAtemp review
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Name: Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master
Item: Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master
Rating: 6
Author: Scarlet

Product Information:

Release Date (NA): November 15, 2023
Release Date (EU): November 15, 2023
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Developer: Artefacts Studio
Genres: Dungeon Management, Simulation

Game Features:

Single player

Local Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

Co-operative

Review Approach:

Game code provided by the publisher for the purpose of review.

Prequel to The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk, we journey into the past to build the titular dungeon from the ground up!

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The setting of Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master may be a familiar one if you’ve played the game before it, the aptly titled Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. Setting itself up as a prequel, it tasks you with building the twice-titular dungeon as the steward to an incompetent dungeon master. With a comedic cast and a satirical take on the genre, how does Naheulbeuk stack up against the rest?

Welcome to the Dungeon

Serving as a tutorial on how to play as well as a brief storyline, the campaign is the natural way to jump into the game. With just a small tavern, a kitchen, and a dungeon master to please, you enter the tower as the unemployed half-goblin Reivax to get things moving. Your goal? To get this dungeon off the ground and on the map, and you’ve surely got a long way to go.

Unlike other dungeons, Naheulbeuk manages to get a stable stream of income not just from defeating adventurers that wander in, but from a slightly more healthy tavern that’s accessible to the general public. I do think this is a really neat concept as a means of dividing your attention and giving you a way to recover should the worst happen and your treasures be plundered. With its own set of costs and an amusingly-named Tripe Adviser rating to maintain, there are the makings of a really fun subset of the larger game here. And as a whole I did enjoy it. As time went on though, I noticed it to be my primary source of revenue, seeing me pivot to having almost the entirety of my dungeon’s first floor be a tavern to hold and serve as many customers as possible. With how big a part it ended up playing in the success of my dungeon, I really would’ve liked to see more depth in this area of the game.

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Ignore the floating minions, my tavern is huge!

While the Tripe Adviser score is a nice idea, it really does nothing more than the prestige system associated with other rooms in the tower, with it being increased by placing decorations down. I learned quite early on that you can just max these out quickly by placing wall decorations all the way around the room, and that was that. I have a fundamental feeling that there should be more to this and that I’m playing it wrong, but with the game constantly rewarding my actions I’m left with mixed messages.

When it comes to building the dungeon itself, it really feels like there’s a lot missing for what I would consider to be satisfying. To start, while your dungeon does have a set entrance point, there’s no actual guarantee adventurers will use it. Instead they can crop up at any number of doorways in your dungeon, and sometimes just appear out of nowhere. This entirely removes any idea of planning you could have put into an effective design. I want to build mazes, have rooms with set enemies, boss battles. I want to craft something fun and watch people come and get stomped down at varying points, letting me tweak and evolve. With raids on your tower targeting different rooms each time around, you can’t really put much thought into making a meaningful path for adventurers, and with your own staff walking the same corridors and susceptible to the same traps, you aren’t really encouraged to rig much up either. I do understand that this game is something of a parody of the genre, and I want to cut it some slack for letting me down on what I would consider the traditional aspects of the genre, but it just doesn’t pick it up elsewhere.

Staffing Nightmares

Despite this being a dungeon management game, you’ll likely find the majority of your time being spent on the staff more than the dungeon itself. To assist in running the place, you’ll have a selection of 11 occupations, each with an associated origin. Some of these are entirely set, with your domestic staff always being elves, and your bankers being dwarves. For others you might get a selection of origins, like how chefs can be either human, elf, or orc to cater to different needs. It’s all supposed to be a bit of a balancing act to get things running just right, with staff striking and quitting if you don’t meet their needs.

Within your staff you’ll have to overcome clashes in ideology, with some races preferring cleanliness, and others filth, among other things. On top of this, races like dwarves will need special beds to sleep in and tables to sit at due to their small stature. I like all of this on paper, even if it isn’t exactly what I thought the game would be. There’s a lot going on, and with up to 210 minions on the payroll at the end of the game, there really is a lot to be thinking about. The real issue with having this as your focus is that it shines such a light onto the balancing of all these needs, and I really don’t think the game is where it needs to be at for it to be satisfying.

After five or six hours of trying to meet everybody’s needs I just gave up, and what’s weirder is that I wasn’t really punished for it. You can think of minions really falling into one of three categories. You have guards who’s sole purpose is to stave off adventurers and raiders coming down on your grand dungeon. After that you have minions who produce something that’ll be useful. These are your artisans making tools and weapons, your spies collecting intelligence and the like. Finally you have what I’d describe as the meta staff, who don’t necessarily provide you with anything directly, but whose work in the dungeon keeps other staff happy. The domestic minions are the biggest part of this category, tasked with keeping things clean. You also have have cooks and medics here too though.

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Reinforcements are here!

Where all of this staffing falls somewhat into shambles is the fact that you really don’t care if they walk out on you, and this is true for all three of these major categories. Guards are summoned to the dungeon weekly based on a specific item being placed in the Guard’s Room. One Human Guard Locker equates to one, as you might have guessed it, human guard. An elf guard locker grants you an elf guard, and you can probably figure out the rest. The way these work is that if the guard that was assigned to the locker has died or, God forbid, quit, another will be hired as soon as the next week begins. You can probably see where I’m going with this. It feels like the game expects you to value your guards and train them for a strong fighting force, but there really isn’t any need if you just have a bunch of guards and are happy to throw them at a problem. Even if an incursion is particularly strong, if it happens to roll into the next in-game week, your defeated guards will be replaced all the same, and the new hires are more than happy to finish the job.

The production staff is where you would imagine more care is needed. They’re actively producing a resource that will be helpful to the larger running of the dungeon, and you should naturally want that continuous stream of resources. It just doesn’t work out that way though. You have so much space in the dungeon that it’s possible to setup massive workstations for each of these production types. You can worry about keeping them around if you really care about that passive income, but in reality you can keep your staff list light and just hire a hundred of the minion type you want as and when you need the resource. This is something I did quite heavily in my playthrough with Spies thanks to the intel they produce allowing me to go out on raids and get bonus rewards for my troubles. I ended up with a huge room that sat empty most of the time, but it really didn’t negatively affect anything.

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The tables are ready for my newly-employed spies!

The last of our staff type is probably the most laughable, because if we don’t care about maintaining our staff at all, they’re entirely useless out of the gate. Looking at the HR sheet in my game, my tower really just consists of a hundred or so guards, a handful of bankers… And that’s it. It remains profitable and it’s perfectly capable of keeping invaders at bay. To some extent I do have to commend the game for allowing such a degree of freedom as to enable this kind of playstyle, but it really does feel counterintuitive to what the game wants from you.

An Idle Dream

For all my issues with the game, I do actually think it does well as what I would call a second monitor game once you’re past the initial setup phase. That phase in itself isn’t necessarily short either, and getting it optimally does involve engaging with the staffing balance more than I felt encouraged to. If you do find that though, it’s something you can leave running and check back in on while doing other things. It’s the kind of game I really appreciate when working from home that can just provide me with a micro break to take my mind off a task to see how a raid went down. If you’re working on a separate PC to the game this does work well, but I do feel the need to highlight that it didn’t quite go that way for me.

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Week 127 was surely a rough one for the dungeon.

If you’re limited to a single PC, you’ll be exposed to more than a few quite nasty bugs. The most prevalent of these is a simple crash that seems to happen randomly when tabbing back into the game, even when it’s left running as a borderless window. The audio distorts slightly, and a few moments later it’s all just gone. Even when it does all work though, being left alone seems to cause the AI to randomly stop on occasion, with my 200k of savings also disappearing in an instant. Nothing happened in the game after that, it was quite odd. To give credit where due, the developers are actively looking into bugs, with the staff AI being under a particular microscope in terms of both bugs and balance. I would like to believe this will improve over time, but as it now it can be a tough sell.

Closing Thoughts

All in all Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master is a game that has the makings of something fun, but just falls short for me to be able to recommend it to most people. For a game about managing a dungeon, there’s really not much dungeon management at play, with the actual core of the gameplay being unbalanced to the point of being able to ignore it at the time of writing. I want to see this game do better, but even properly balanced I’d likely feel shortchanged.

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Verdict

What We Liked ...

Fun campaign to introduce the mechanics to you
Likeable cast that will be familiar to players returning from the previous game

What We Didn't Like ...

Very little dungeon management
Tavern systems feel underwhelming and overly simple
Staffing needs are unbalanced and can be largely ignored
Large assortment of bugs with varying impact on play

Gameplay

The lack of focus on dungeon management is to me the downfall of this game, but if balancing the needs of staff is something that interests you, there may yet be something here to enjoy.

Presentation

Visually-speaking, the game doesn't really break new ground. It has a cartoonish aesthetic that it pairs with cartoonish comedy well enough though. It's cohesive and manages to give you a good bit to look at, especially if you want to put the effort into decoration.

Lasting Appeal

As it is now I don't think there's much to come back to, but that could definitely change with a bit of attention from the developers. With better balancing, I do at least feel this game can thrive as something that sits on a second monitor once you've got things running as you'd like. If the general idea of the game does have some appeal, it could be worth wishlisting and checking out down the line.

out of 10

Overall

I went into Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master really ready to enjoy all the work that goes into making a dungeon great. Unfortunately there just wasn't all that much to do. Between an underbaked tavern, limited dungeon management, and an unbalanced staffing system, it feels like a game that just needed more time to decide what it wanted to be. If it does get updated down the line it may be worth revisiting. As it is now though, I can't say I feel it worth the price of admission.

Ritsuki
Nov 26, 2023

I did not know that they made games of Naheulbeuk's dungeon! I still remember young me downloading mp3 of this and skits made by a Canadian radio comedian named Francois Perusse, exchanging them at school with friends, listening to it on our mp3 players haha. Thanks for that little trip to memory lane, good times

Reactions: Flirkyn and Scarlet

Flirkyn
Nov 28, 2023

Ritsuki said:
I did not know that they made games of Naheulbeuk's dungeon! I still remember young me downloading mp3 of this and skits made by a Canadian radio comedian named Francois Perusse, exchanging them at school with friends, listening to it on our mp3 players haha. Thanks for that little trip to memory lane, good times

Aaah François Perusse. The "2 minutes du peuple" never get old. It's still really fun to listen to them

As for Naheulbeuk, ngl, as a french it really feel weird to see non French speaking persons talking about it ahah

Reactions: Ritsuki

Ritsuki
Nov 28, 2023

Flirkyn said:
Aaah François Perusse. The "2 minutes du peuple" never get old. It's still really fun to listen to them

As for Naheulbeuk, ngl, as a french it really feel weird to see non French speaking persons talking about it ahah

Yeah, my mother tongue is french (I live in the french speaking part of Switzerland), and I've always thought that Naheulbeuk's dungeon was a very nerdy niche french speaking mp3 saga, so I'm surprised they've made games out of it haha

Reactions: Flirkyn

Scarlet
Nov 28, 2023

Genuinely had no idea it was anything but a series of games, so thanks to you guys too for bringing it up lol

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Staffing Nightmares

An Idle Dream

Closing Thoughts

Verdict

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