In mid-May, I boarded a cross-Atlantic flight from Paris to New York City. I put on my podcasts, opened up my phone, and proceeded to play Dungeon Clawler for about seven hours straight.
This is a recommendation.
Dungeon Clawler is basically Slay the Spire with a claw machine. In the roguelike/deckbuilder, you play as Sir Bunalot, an unfortunate gambling bunny who has lost a hand to a card shark — literally. The shark in question is the dungeon boss, and your hand (well, paw) is replaced with a mechanical claw.
As you progress through the dungeon, you fight baddies by pulling items from the claw machine. It starts simple, with daggers and shields, and rises in complexity as you can choose from a random selection of rewards to add to the machine after each battle. A run takes about 40 minutes to complete, but dying sends you right back to the start, your upgrades wiped and your claw machine reset.
The synergies don’t quite rise to the level of insanity you can achieve in Slay the Spire, but they’re often satisfying and tactile. For example, you can get a power-up that fills that claw machine with water. This causes wooden or plastic items to float, and metal ones to sink. You may randomly be rewarded with a bath bomb that changes the water to poison, or to lava that does fire damage. Or perhaps you stop by the transmutation room to turn your metal items into plastic — or your plastic items into metal, so that you can take advantage of a magnet that draws in metal items. And so on, and so forth.
You can also unlock additional characters with their own unique claws and abilities.
Having played, conservatively, a ton of Dungeon Clawler, I can say that the game’s opening levels can feel like a slog, depending on what character you’re playing, and what rewards you get. I particularly struggled with a character called Felina, who has a pet cat that essentially acts like spikes, doing return damage whenever Felina gets hurt. It felt like I wasn’t building up strength quickly enough to get through battles.
On the other hand, I thrived with the adorable Count Clawcula, who can’t use any items that block damage, but can heal himself by doing damage. I was able to make a wacky strength build with Clawcula that had me (I guess literally) chewing my way through enemies.
More often than not I enjoyed the process of filling my machine and finding the right balance of items so that I could reliably grab what I wanted without getting a claw-full of junk. I’ve continued playing it after escaping the airplane, despite the siren call of infinite games like Warframe or my beloved Sawayama Solitaire. I’m still unlocking characters and claws.
One thing I appreciate is that Dungeon Clawler lets you unlock new characters even if you haven’t completed your initial run as the starting character, Sir Bunalot. After a couple failed initial runs with Sir Bunalot, I was able to explore some of the weirder characters and continue to get a feel for the game. I got my first win and came back to Sir Bunalot later.
Also worth noting: Dungeon Clawler is a one-time purchase of $4.99 on Steam, iOS, or Google Play with no microtransactions or ads. The synergies are fun, the art style is delightful, and I think my playtime speaks for itself.
