Unexplored

Every procedurally generated dungeon gives itself away sooner or later. Walk one long enough and you can feel the dice. Corridors dead-end for no reason, rooms are bolted together like shipping containers, and a key sits three steps from the door it opens. Unexplored, from the small Dutch studio Ludomotion, was built to fix that. Its big new idea isn’t its combat, its art or its unlock tree. It’s the level generator.

The premise comes, openly and affectionately, from Rogue. You go down into the Dungeon of Doom and steal the Amulet of Yendor from a dragon. Then comes the part most modern roguelites skip: you have to climb back to the surface alive. Death is permanent. Your character resets, but your gold and unlocked equipment carry over. A failed run pays a small dividend, and the game never turns into a stat grind.

Unexplored breaks from its ancestors on pace. It plays in real time. You can hold a weapon in each hand, block, throw items and sneak. It also keeps the classic roguelike’s pause-and-think inventory, unidentified potions and mystery scrolls. The target audience is clear: players who love NetHack’s depth but want their hands busy.

Critics noticed. PC Gamer called its worldbuilding “quietly revolutionary.” VICE’s Waypoint praised levels full of “dense meaning, memory, and connection,” and both outlets named it one of the best games of 2017. Rock Paper Shotgun put it in its top three for the year. Steam users rate it Very Positive.

The console story is less rosy. On Nintendo Switch it’s sold as the Unlocked Edition, ported by Nephilim Game Studios and published by Digerati. It includes the Mithril Run, Ripley Run and The Dark Ritual expansions, yet the critical reception there was lukewarm, and the PS4 version fared no better. That gap between praise on PC and a cooler reception on consoles is the most interesting part of Unexplored’s reputation. It says a lot about where the game’s strengths really are.

• Cyclic Level Generation: The generator doesn’t scatter rooms at random. It builds each floor from connected loops, which creates locks and keys, shortcuts and early hints at what’s coming. The result looks deliberately designed.
• Real-Time Combat With Both Hands: You can hold a weapon in each hand, block and throw items. The melee rewards positioning and timing over button-mashing.
• Stealth That Works: You can sneak past or ambush enemies, so skipping a fight is a real strategy, not a failure.
• Pause-to-Manage Inventory: Time stops when you open your pack. That leaves room for crafting, mixing unknown potions and reading unidentified scrolls without dying in a menu.
• A Long Roster of Bosses and Environmental Puzzles: There’s enough variety late in a run to keep it from turning into routine.
• Adaptive Music: The score changes with the action and tightens when danger shows up.
• Light Meta-Progression: Gold and unlocked equipment carry over between runs. Character progress doesn’t.
• Achievements and Expansions: The PC version has a full achievements list, and the Switch Unlocked Edition includes all three expansions.

The Generator Is the Game

Most roguelites use procedural generation to make more content. Unexplored uses it to make levels that feel designed by a person. The system, built by designer Joris Dormans around what’s known as cyclic generation, starts from loops rather than rooms. A cycle is two routes between two points, and each route can have its own rules. One path might be blocked by a locked gate while the other hides the key. One might be long and dangerous, with a shortcut that only opens from the far side.

Put several of those loops inside each other and each floor feels connected to itself. You see the locked door before you find the key. You spot a ledge you can’t reach, then return to it later from the other side. The dungeon points forward and rewards you for paying attention.

That changes how you treat the map. In a typical roguelite, the map is just a hallway between fights. Here it’s a puzzle you’re reading, and that is what Waypoint meant by “memory and connection.” It also makes backtracking, usually one of the dullest things in games, feel like a reward.

It pays off most on the way out. Once you have the Amulet, the dungeon you learned on the way down becomes the route you have to survive on the way up. Shortcuts you opened out of curiosity turn into escape routes. The generator makes every loop two-way, and the escape is where that finally matters.

The trick isn’t perfect. Nintendo World Report specifically criticized the dungeon generation, and the structural patterns do start to show once learned. Once you know how the locks and keys are laid out, some floors look like variations on a template rather than new designs. That’s still a much better problem than pure randomness, but the sense that a person built each floor fades eventually.

Combat: Smart Hands, Loose Grip

A weapon in each hand gives real-time melee a surprising range of options. You can use a sword and shield, two blades, or a weapon plus something to throw. Blocking and throwing turn fights into small positioning puzzles, and stealth lets you decide whether a fight happens at all. At its best, the combat feels like part of the level design: you pick the doorway and you pick the approach.

At its worst, combat is the weakest part of the game. It doesn’t have the sharp feedback of action roguelites like Dead Cells, and the console reviews reflected that. Nintendo World Report was blunt about it. Nintendo Life liked how the combat and the map generation balance each other, and that’s the fairer take. On its own the combat is serviceable; in context it’s good. It works because the dungeon gives it stakes and space to maneuver, not because swinging a sword feels great.

Inventory, Identification and a Steep Start

The pause-to-manage inventory is the smartest concession Unexplored makes to real time. It keeps the old roguelike decisions intact. Do you drink the unknown potion now or save it? What does this scroll do? Those calls happen with the clock stopped, not while something is chewing on your ankle. Crafting happens in the same paused screen, which keeps the pace clear: explore and fight in real time, plan with time stopped.

The cost is a hard start for new players. Unidentified items are a genre tradition, and Unexplored keeps the tradition’s cruelty. New players will drink the wrong thing, read the wrong scroll and die for reasons that make no sense until they’ve learned the system. Veterans call that discovery; newcomers will call it a wall. The game cares more about honoring the tradition than easing anyone into it.

Permadeath and What Carries Over

Very little carries over between runs, and that’s deliberate. Your character resets, but gold and unlocked equipment stay. For this design, that’s the right call. A big unlock tree would dilute the point. The dungeon is the progression, and understanding how it’s built is the real upgrade. Players used to the steady power growth of Hades or Rogue Legacy may find runs stingy. Purists will find them honest.

Bosses, Puzzles and Pacing

The long roster of unique bosses is a lot for a game this size, and it keeps late-run fights from feeling copy-pasted. Environmental puzzles between fights change the rhythm. The adaptive music signals when things are getting dangerous without an on-screen warning. The achievements give completionists plenty to chase. Pacing has the usual roguelite problem. Losing a run deep in the dungeon costs real time, and since so little carries over, that time mostly buys knowledge, not power.

Unexplored looks like a design document that shipped. The top-down art is clean, flat and minimal, and it puts readability first. The layout, the threats and the usable objects are all legible at a glance. For a game whose main pleasure is reading a map, that’s a defensible choice.

It’s also plain. Nintendo Life called the art style too simple, and that’s hard to argue with. The characters and enemies lack personality, and the visuals don’t always show off the structural variety the generator creates. A cleverly built dungeon that looks uniform will sell itself short in screenshots, and on a crowded store page that matters.

The interface does its job. Because the inventory pauses the game, menus never become a danger, but the number of item decisions means the pack screen gets heavy use compared with most action games. The audio does more work than the visuals: the adaptive music signals tension that the sparse art can’t always convey alone.

The simple visuals keep the hardware demands low. A 2D game of this scope is light on any modern machine. The published criticism of the Switch port is about combat, level generation and art, not technical problems.

Steam (PC): This is the version with the best reputation: a Very Positive user rating and places on several best-of-2017 lists. Mouse and keyboard suit the two-handed combat well. A cursor gives you precise aim for throws and positioning, and a two-button mouse fits a system built around two hands. The achievements give long-term players plenty of goals.

Nintendo Switch: The Unlocked Edition is the complete package, with Mithril Run, Ripley Run and The Dark Ritual included. That’s a real plus for new players. Controller play has trade-offs. Aiming with an analog stick is less precise than with a mouse, and that matters in a game built around throws and positioning. The paused inventory helps a lot on a controller, since menu-heavy decisions never happen under pressure. In handheld mode, the clean art helps readability, though the small sprites and item icons are a lot to ask of the small screen. Being able to put the Switch to sleep mid-run suits a genre where one run can take a while.

Critics were split on this version, and its reception sits well below the game’s reception on PC. Nintendo World Report criticized the combat and dungeon generation. Nintendo Life disliked the art but praised the balance between combat and level design.

Unexplored is a clever game in a genre full of merely competent ones. Its cyclic generator delivers what procedural design has promised for decades: floors that feel designed, with hints, shortcuts and consequences that connect. PC critics called that “quietly revolutionary,” and they were right.

The rest of the game is thinner. The combat works because the dungeon gives it context, not because it impresses on its own. The art is so focused on readability that it’s plain. It’s old-school and doesn’t apologize for how hard it is to learn. And the Switch port, despite including three expansions, got a noticeably cooler reception.

We recommend it on PC first. The Switch version makes sense for the complete package in handheld form, with the caveat of less precise aiming. Either way, come for the dungeon: it’s a strong case that a randomly generated level can feel like someone designed it.