Mar 22, 2023

Labyrinth of Legendary Loot - Game Review

Hail, Adventurer! Are you looking for a good ol' fashioned dungeon dive in search of an Artifact of Incredible Power that's inconveniently located on the bottom floor?

If so, then The Labyrinth of Legendary Loot (henceforth known as LLL) is for you!
And the best part is...it's FREE! Read on (or just skip to the bottom).


Let's get this out before starting our journey: this is, in fact, a dungeon with twisty corridors and is not an actual labyrinth. You will not be bumping into a tight-panted David Bowie here. Although I haven't reached the bottom floor yet, so I can't say that with 100% accuracy.

LLL is a turn-based dungeon exploring, monster smashing, loot finding adventure. Your goal is to get to the bottom of the dungeon and recover the Thing. You start your quest as a generic hero with a basic weapon for killing, some Health for living, and some Mana for abilities. Unlike other Rogue-like games, there are no mystery potions or scrolls that you have to aid you. Nor does your hero level up.

How do you keep your hero alive while the monsters get stronger every level? 
Loot!


As you meander though the place, you'll find someone (or something?) has left various arms and armor laying around for you to pick up. You have 5 active slots (weapon, glove, head, armor, boots) and 2 passive slots (ring, amulet). Most items will give you a bump to your Health and/or Mana and will also grant you an ability. 

There's a good mix of offensive and defensive abilities and finding the ones that work for you are key to surviving. One of my favorite things is the Thief Amulet which allows you to instantly kill an enemy if they are at or below X Health after you hit them. Sine you'll live or die by your gear, it's in your best interest to explore every floor before heading down to the next one.

Also laying around, and carried by elite monsters, is scrap that you use to upgrade your gear. Upgrading will give it a +1 in the name and improve an aspect like lowering the cooldown or Mana cost of the ability or increasing its damage. Find a piece of gear that works better than what you have? Recycle the old one and use the scrap to bring the new item up to the same level. If you're lucky, you'll also find anvils which can bestow an enchantment on one piece of your gear to further improve it with a special ability and tack on an "of ___" to the name to make it sound really cool. Check the green name items in the above screengrab.


Speaking of monsters, there's plenty to discover! You'll start out facing off against rats and small slimes but in no time you'll be up against giant spiders that spit webs and dark wizards that toss lightning bolts! Most monsters have a unique attack that you'll have to discover to know how to handle them. You can either give em a good whack with your weapon or use an offensive ability on them.

Using abilities consumes Mana and they also have a cooldown timer to keep you from spamming magic missiles like you're attacking a gazebo (bonus points if you got that). Mana regenerates as you move around but Health does not. 

Some monsters drop Health orbs when killed and there are shrines that can top up your Mana or Health. Both of them are fully restored, and cooldowns reset, when you take the stairs down to the next level. So even if you haven't scouted out a whole level, the stairs can save you...if you can get to them.


I'd say at least 95% of my adventurers have met their end because I was trying to run from one fight and bumped into more monsters cutting off my escape route. (Did I mention wandering monsters? They rarely travel alone) You can see an entire room when you're in them thanks to torches on the walls. However, your vision is limited to a few squares in every direction when you're in the halls which makes it easy to bump into some new friends if you're not careful. The halls are usually only 2 squares wide which makes getting boxed in a lot easier in them. So far, I've only made it down to floor 21 and I have no idea where the bottom is.

I found this game thanks to a YouTube game streamer and it's sucked in a whole lot more of my time than I thought possible since then! It's a lot of fun and definitely has that "just one more" thing going for it. Like I said way back at the top, this game is currently 100% free and you can get it on Itch.io.

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