Recent reviews by The Punchmaster

The only other mystery dungeon game I've played has been the bonus mode of Ergheiz, and let me tell you...

This was a blast. At first the veneer of resident evil mystery dungeon was what pulled me in, but as I played the game quickly moved, and grew past needing that to keep me engaged.
(to purple hair? why if you insist!)

You go into the dungeon, and can find spells, and pouches to increase your progress run by run, and coins to buy items, or reroll the stats on what you find.

Each time you go back in you start at level one, but keep the spells, equipment you made it out with, and inventory upgrades.

As far as story goes it's pretty light, mostly just the framework to give you a reason to explore with a few bits here, and there, or via one of the rare other npcs in this game to fill in a few mysteries, and leave you with a few questions you still want to know the answer to.

There's a good mix of enemies, and while some of them are the same type (zombies in the first area in the garden area are moss zombies that can poison you for example) just when you're about to get tired of them a new set is introduced from dogs to tricky trapsters to mad scientist and their experiments, or even ghastly ghosts of the dead you never quite know what you're going to get, or face next, or what they can do.

Bosses are pretty decent all told, and there's lots of fun cheeky reference to find. If you're expecting dark souls bosses I mean you know, don't, but I think for most people they'll be pretty decent, and cause a few resets until you learn the best way to deal with them.

There's reasons to grind and upgrade your gear, spellbooks, and the like for as long as you want. A speedrun to 101% completion (and yes the game has more content than just 100%) took about 9 hours even knowing what I needed to do. I expect a player new to mystery dungeons can expect 15-30 depending on what they consider the end of their game.

If you try to just spam space then you'll get replaced. Traps, good, and bad litter the floor and need to be worked around (or used cleverly to injure enemies). There's a lot of unique item modifiers such as letting you steal items from enemies, poison them, level them up (better loot but more powerful) and so on.

There's a normal dungeon, and several post game dungeons, and secrets that unlock yet more secrets, and yet more secrets beyond that.

As far as Voice acting goes they speak in the same style as simlish so you know A+ on that.

Sounds are pretty basic, and fulfill the role you expect without any real negatives. Music is decent, there's a few tracks, including the secret areas that have their own music.

The bonus dungeons I won't spoil save to say that they're both a step up from base game with various floors that test your mastery of the game and each floor comes with unique gimmicks like one hit kills you or the enemy, the minimap is disabled, all enemies become traps on death, and so on.

And that's just one of the dungeons.

Of course the graphics are very charming in that retro pixel style, and I have no real complaints as it seems to be exactly what the dev is going for.

The real draw is of course the love story of the main character, and purple hair that exists entirely in my mind. She's the only other npc that bothers to leave the safety of the main room, and will tell you exactly how little she thinks of you, and helps guide you late, and post game to more secrets.

Clearly it's true love, and I won't rest until our characters are at the altar.

All that to say I was unexpectedly sucked into the game, and despite having no real desire to play them before I'm now thinking I might just start...at least if this dev makes any more.

For the asking price I really don't think you can go wrong with HoN if any aspect appeals to you.

Soft yes. The art style is nice, and what music there is fits well enough. The biggest issue is with the leader combat. If any leader runs out of health they enter a down/prone state and can be revived by any allied unit. This can be fun when it's your units but when you spend an entire turn to down an enemy leader only to have some random minion revive it and give it a free turn where it casts the ultimate it gets for being beaten up and then 1 shots your entire team it turns your sure win into a loss seemingly based entirely on luck. It's probably the worst thing about the game.