The Puzzles Of Return to Monkey Island Meets The Silliness Of Disenchanted In The Dungeon Experience

Comedy games can be a tricky beast. Leaning too hard into the jokes at the expense of the gameplay can result in an experience that can quickly become forgettable and frustrating. If the dialogue, characters, and worldbuilding are treated like an afterthought, though, then the humor can become basic and boring. Finding the right balance between the two isn’t impossible, though, with plenty of great games over the years delivering plenty of big laughs without losing sight of the underlying gameplay.

A new entry to the genre that’s aiming for that sweet spot is The Dungeon Experience, a first-person puzzle game that sees the player trapped in a fantasy-themed amusement park attraction. To escape, players must solve bizarre puzzles and deal with strange characters, with the absurdist tone carrying throughout the NPC interactions and gameplay challenges. Luckily, the game developers may have struck gold with their mix of oddly earnest and darkly weird, setting up The Dungeon Experience as one of the year’s most pleasant surprises.

The Dungeon Experience Is Non-Stop Silliness For The Sake Of Being Silly

The demo for The Dungeon Experience made available at the LVLUP Expo gave players a good taste of the game’s blend of environmental puzzles, bizarre gameplay, and ridiculous humor. The Dungeon Experience sees players enter an amusement park and take part in a “fantasy” adventure where the objective is to gain “financial independence.” The problem is that the challenges aren’t exactly what most players would expect from a fantasy adventure, with the first obvious sign of the game’s off-kilter sense of humor being the task of pushing in the extended nipples of a barbarian mascot. The game only gets weirder from there, with the player forced to hide another wounded guest underneath a pile of random garbage, converse with the talking crab running the entire show, and ultimately play a saxophone solo. It’s all very goofy, with a cartoonish art design that’s befitting the sense of comedy baked into it.

The puzzles themselves carry a certain strange and silly quality that makes it feel like a creative descendant of something like Return to Monkey Island, where the fantasy/adventure tropes are transformed by goofy challenges and weird puzzles into a colorful comedy. Both examples require a level of craft in their comedy to be as effective as they are — it’s what makes games like the Monkey Island series so enjoyable, as it can be uniquely bizarre without breaking the internal rules it sets up for itself. The characters introduced in the demo are fully taken in by the fantasy world, with the host trying his best to convince the player that he is a genuine dungeon master instead of just being a crab. These interactions are wacky without feeling weightless; the character interactions prove to be the source of a lot of the consistent comedy and clues for solving challenges. Players looking to make it through The Dungeon Experience will have to fully embrace that weirdness if they want to win, which makes it ideal for comedy fans.

Comedy Games Live And Die On Laughs

One of the things that makes The Dungeon Experience effective is the way it leans fully into an almost surreal sense of comedy while still retaining a few grounded elements. There’s an underlying sense of strange optimism to the game and your efforts to make it through the dungeon, even as the game pokes fun at fantasy elements from a realistic approach. Beyond what was featured in the demo, the game trailer also teases goblin encounters in a therapist’s office, fishing minigames where you can pull up scuba divers, and conversations with a character only known as the Table Man.

Similar to other games like High on Life, there’s something straightforward about how The Dungeon Experience tackles the absurdist comedy genre head-on, with fantasy riffs that don’t feel all that out of place next to shows like Disenchantment. Like High on Life, though, part of the appeal is adapting to the bizarre touches and finding your way through them. It’s all about figuring out the weird rules of the world and how that impacts character interaction and puzzle layouts. It takes the established gameplay formula that’s been perfected by other developers and refines it with a unique comical sensibility.

The result is something that feels wholly original and perfectly odd. The Dungeon Experience‘s colorful elements and non-stop silly nature help make the worldbuilding more effective, luring players more into a world where covering a wounded parkgoer in garbage to avoid an HR catastrophe makes perfect sense. While players who want something grounded in real-world stakes and seek a genuine dungeon-crawling game might not see the appeal in something this purposefully wacky, any comedy fans with an eye for games should be on the lookout for The Dungeon Experience.