Dungeon Clawler

Thanks to claw machines, you can now get frustrated on small screens.

There’s a good chance that at least once in your life you’ve lost money on a claw machine and convinced yourself that you would win on the next try. Dungeon Clawler takes that feeling of frustration and turns it into one of the most fun painful roguelites I’ve played so far.

The gameplay is very easy to understand. You move through the dungeon, choose which path you want to take, enter battles, shops, and events, and then each combat turns into a claw machine mini-game. With the claw, you collect items that automatically activate attacks, shields, poison effects, summons, and various other skills.

The game becomes addictive from the very beginning.

One moment the claw grabs exactly the item you need and you deal hundreds of damage, and the next moment, just before the drop zone, it drops literally everything. Sometimes you feel like the game is actively trolling you.

Dungeon Clawler perfectly recreates the frustration of real claw machines, and that’s why it works so well.

My favorite part of the gameplay is build crafting. This isn’t a classic roguelite where you just collect stronger items. Here, you also have to think about the size of the items, because the claw can only grab a certain amount of things at once. If you fill your build with huge items, you’ll quickly realize that you’re wasting half your rounds because the claw can’t grab anything normally anymore.

That system gives the game much more strategy than you would expect.

Build variety is absurdly fun. You can create a magnet build that turns almost all items into metal, so the claw practically sucks up half the screen at once. Or a harpoon build where you constantly use the same item over and over again. There are also summon builds where cats and small companions practically play the game for you.

Runs remain interesting because the game constantly introduces new gimmicks and events. One moment you’re playing the claw machine, the next moment you’re gambling items through pachinko, and a few rounds later you’re trying to collect as much gold as possible while avoiding mines that deal damage.

The art style is simple, colorful, and immediately feels like something made specifically for mobile devices. Dungeon Clawler is also one of the few PC-to-mobile games that actually feels more natural on mobile than on larger platforms. The touch controls make sense, and the gameplay loop is perfect for short sessions. My rounds lasted from 20 to 40 minutes depending on how far I got.

Some mechanics aren’t the best explained, especially the alchemy system and item transformations. The game often introduces a new system without much tutorial, so you have to experiment and discover a lot on your own. For some, this will be part of the fun, while others will quickly end up on Reddit and YouTube looking for build guides.

There’s also a certain balance problem with status effects. Frost builds seem too universally useful compared to some other setups, so part of the build variety loses importance when you find something that obviously dominates and then keep repeating it.

Fortunately, most of these issues don’t ruin the fun.

The biggest downside of the game is that there’s a good chance you’ll find the nearest claw machine and spend money after playing.

The game costs €6.99, and a copy of the mobile version for review purposes was provided by the publisher Stray Fawn