Quickadvice: IAmDungeon- A New Take On Minesweeper

The storyline is that of your typical dungeon crawl. There are skeletons and orcs, fire traps and lightening snares, enhancement spells and enchanted helms. Your hero’s job is to find the loot and get to the next level before it is too late. The game itself is a grid with unmarked squares. A question mark appears in squares that are adjacent to your player. You have to guess what is in the square in order to move into it. There are five options. It is either loot, like an enchanted helm, a trap, gold, an enemy, or nothing at all. If you choose correctly, you receive your treasure, avoid a battle or disarm a trap. There are two goals. The first is to get out of the dungeon in as few square reveals as possible. The other is to get the loot before you exit the level. In order to help make educated guesses or calculated moves, depending on how good your logic skills are, there is a proximity chart that shows how many of the adjacent squares have what number of items. For example, the chart will show that, of the 4 adjacent squares, one will have gold, two will have traps and one will have nothing at all. There are also spells you can buy with your gold that give additional health. If you are as bad as me at this game, you will appreciate the leg up. Being that I am not one of the bazillion people that already understands the Minesweeper concept I was impress by how easily I was able to learn the game.

I have never played a game like this before and, although I messed up a lot, I was able to easily pick up the concept and learn from trial and error. The game can be very engaging and, at times, suspenseful. One problem I see with IAmDungeon is that you cannot exit to the main menu for any reason. If you want to go to the main menu, you have to close the app and restart. Your game is saved, you don’t have to start over, but there is no other way to see how many special items you’ve already uncovered or what your statistics are. Another problem is that, once completed, you can’t replay a level. If you want to get a better score, you have to reset the entire game.

And, in case you didn’t read the paragraph above, you have to close the app and reopen it in order to get to the main menu to reset the entire game. Overall, IAmDungeon is a fun twist on a tried-and-true, addictive game of logic puzzles. It is easy to learn if you have never played a game like this before and it has fun, fantasy-style graphics and well-placed audio. It is available for the iPhone, or iPad for $1.99. At such a reasonable price it is definitely recommended.