I should have known straight away that Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart was from the same team behind Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. Ridiculous name? Check. Deeply brainrotted humour? Double check. Ridiculously fun to play despite its relatively simple premise? Check, check, and check.
Rizz Dungeon (eurgh, I’m still getting used to the name) is chronically online girlypop deluxe—unironically using “chat” to address the room despite not being anywhere near a Twitch stream, silly little sleepovers, and constantly flirting with all the other girlies you cross paths with. It’s as if a nightclub bathroom was actually a series of dungeons filled with cute monsters. I mean, sometimes it is like that, but you get my point.
Instead of being put in the shoes of some battle-hardened dungeon crawler, I’m instead piloting Taffy—a ditzy flirt who’s much better at hitting on monsters than she is at fighting them. She can “rizz” her way through encounters, using pick-up lines and honing in on what each monster girl likes in order to recruit them and have them fight on her behalf. Make love not war, and all that.
Girldom is forever finicky, though, and I love Rizz Dungeon’s little systems that all play off each other. Certain monster girls will sulk if they’re not placed where they like to be in the party—lowering their stats—while some will either become jealous or empowered if they witness you hugging another monster girl in front of them.
Figuring out what each monster girl likes and how that directly interacts with and influences the others seems like it’s going to be a ton of fun when it comes to maximising party synergy. I only got to play with it a teeny bit during the demo, but finding ways to give everyone a stat boost right from the get-go with choice placements and interactions was ridiculously satisfying.
And at the end of a long day dungeon crawling, you can initiate sleepovers with your recruited monster girls. Gossip away to build friendship or romance—you know, as all the girlies do. I did find some of these dialogue choices frustratingly obtuse in both the sleepovers and battle encounters—I fumbled the baddies on multiple occasions because the context clues weren’t quite loud enough for me to pick up on, with the text “L rizz bozo” flashing across the screen, taunting me.
Although Rizz Dungeon’s demo is just a small snippet of what’s to come, I’m already obsessed with its take on what is usually a brutal and occasionally unforgiving genre. With its colourful pixel art and cutesy decorations, it’s very much the opposite of what I’ve come to expect from dank and dark dungeon crawlers.
Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart is currently slated to release on September 17.
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