Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret review for PC, Nintendo Switch

I went into Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret with pretty high expectations. After all, I was a huge fan of the first Dungeons of Dreadrock, and even if this new game didn’t seem like it innovated substantially from the first one, I was still eager to return to the game’s world for another round of dungeon crawling and puzzles.

What I didn’t anticipate, as it turns out, is how ridiculously challenging Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 would prove to be. While the first game definitely featured some tough puzzles, I don’t recall it ever feeling impossible. In Dungeons of Dreadrock 2, by contrast, I was reading (and frequently re-reading) the hints the game generously provides just a few levels in.

What was frustrating about that – beyond, of course, feeling a little disappointed that I had to resort to hints so early on – is that I often still found myself absolutely confounded by what I’d read. Take the example of a puzzle about a quarter of the way in: you find a piece of paper with symbols on it in one level, and then a level or two later you’re confronted with a series of concentric circles. The game tells you to match the circles so that they match the way the symbols appear…except it’s not at all clear how you do that, since there are multiple solutions that match that description, and only one of them works. What’s more, the hints were no help at all, since even though the game appeared to be trying to tell me what to do, none of it made any sense. I eventually figured it out, but spending ten or fifteen minutes trying to decipher a puzzle that made no sense and then getting it with a random guess really put a damper on my enthusiasm.

At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that when Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 isn’t being needlessly complicated, it’s got some great puzzles. Much like the first game treated its dungeons not as a bunch of discrete rooms but, rather, as a whole, where what you did in one dungeon could have an impact on what you did in another room, Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 also features plenty of multi-stage puzzles that will make you think: you can drop a rock through a trap door in one level, and use the rock to open a gate in the next. It’s a fun approach to puzzles that – when it’s all working well – makes you feel rewarded for paying attention, which is always a nice feeling.

But that feeling, which came about so frequently in the first game, occurs with much less frequency here. There are too many moments of frustration in Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 that prevent the game from rising to the level of its predecessor. I still look forward to playing the promised third game in the trilogy, but after this one, it’s no longer the must-play that it once was for me.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier provided us with a Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret PC code for review purposes.