Price: £3.99 / $4.99 on Steam
Reviewed on: PC / Laptop 1
Review
In The Dweller you play and eldritch style horror whose job is to protect the cave system of the ancient civilisation you were once part of from being disturbed by a bunch of archaeologists who have stumbled upon the site and come back in larger numbers to try and excavate the site that once belonged to your people.They way you go about protecting the caves is by spawning into a section of ground and eating the archaeologists, or possessing boulders to crush them; or making them run away or just making them run off ledges and fall to their deaths. The core of the game is a puzzle game mostly as you can't move through the air and so to get to different sections of the cave to kill all the archaeologists you have to manipulate the rocks and boulders about the level to allow you to traverse round and move between sections of ground. The puzzles start of quite easy but the complexity quickly ramps up requiring you to drop the rocks and boulders down in specific orders to create structures to reach other areas of the level.
As you progress through the game you get introduced to sort or warp portal things that let you move between them and later machines that let you choose where to place said portal things. By the time you can place the portals the game feels like the difficulty drops back down from where it has climbed up too with levels being once again fairly quick to complete without out much complex sequencing required.
As you progress in the game you uncover a series of notes from the archaeology team leaders talking about events going on as they get a sense of dread, see some of the things you've been doing and begin to become more fearful that something supernatural is out to get them thought this doesn't impact the actions of the archaeologists during gameplay for the most part. The plot only starts to impact gameplay when the paranormal research agency show up with the intend to capture you. This leads to the next gameplay change as you are introduced to the red statue / idols that give you the power to now move through the ground and air, no longer having to move boulders around to create paths. The power to move round freely changes the gameplay from a puzzle game to more of a puzzle stealth game as while you can kill the agents you can only attack them from behind and if they see you they will shoot and try to capture you.
Also if you kill some-one near enough they hear the persons death they'll turn to look that way meaning you have to manipulate where the agents are looking to be able to find an opening to kill them off. The final level of the game being a boss fight of a sort where you have to dodge the magical attempt by one of the agency team leaders to seal you away and try to reach said person to try and attack him
The story is OK up until the agency shows up, maybe a little light in some aspects of the lore and while the paranormal research agency is a nice idea it doesn't feel that well fleshed out in what little story you get.
Gameplay wise there are a few fairly tricky levels but once you reach about level 43 or so and get the portal gate things the game's difficulty falls off quickly, even more so once you get the ability to place the portals and then the red altar / statue where it becomes just attacking enemies from behind.
Verdict:
I beat all 59 levels, read all the documents and lore stuff and got all but 1 achievement in around about 2 hours and while it felt better than sitting twiddling my thumbs for the most part it felt fairly plain and only just engaging enough to barely hold my attention.
While conceptually it seems cool it just feels like it
doesn't evolve enough or do anything but settle into a comfortable rhythm with
its ideas and mostly just sit there. The plot is there but with little more
than names on a page and little extra fleshing out the characters I didn't feel
much of a connection to the characters or real desire to find out what happened
to them nor can I really say what did ultimately happen to some of them as the
story doesn't do a great job explaining the fates of some of the characters in
it.
These factors combine to influence my ultimate score.
Composite Score:
Overall Score:
