Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 review: Dang good puzzling

Dungeons of Dreadrock is one of the best puzzle games of 2024

Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier

Puzzle games should make you feel dumb. It’s a key component of the genre, in my opinion, because you need to feel dumb just before you figure out a solution, otherwise that solution isn’t quite as satisfying. The dumber a puzzle game makes you feel, the more satisfying the solution is. And gosh, Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 makes me feel like the dumbest person on the planet. 

I wrote about my love of Dungeons of Dreadrock in my preview for the sequel, but now that it’s finally here, I’m over the moon. The first few levels of Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 were utterly fantastic, and I’m pleased to say that it only gets better from there. 

The game is ostensibly a dungeon crawler with puzzle elements. What that means in practice is that the gameplay is that of a top-down 2D dungeon crawler – think a dungeon in a 2D Zelda game – but the puzzle element is figuring out how to approach each level, and in what order your actions should be. 

A room might have an enemy, a rock you can throw, and a couple of pressure plates, and you’re left to figure out in what order you should throw the rock, step on the pressure plates, and kill the enemy. The positioning of all these elements matters, too, so you might need to kill the enemy on top of a pressure plate to weigh it down, or kite an enemy around a stone so you can hit it from behind. It’s all very clever, like the pieces of a puzzle all clicking together at once, and while it does make me feel very dumb, it’s extremely satisfying when I figure a level out. 

Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier

All of these aspects were present in the first game, but here they’ve been dialled up even more, with much more complex setups that require a bit of trial and error in addition to thinking it through. None of it is unfair, though — every single stage is expertly designed, and when you get killed by something it’s never “that was BS,” but instead “yeah that makes sense.” It’s a small distinction but it makes for a puzzle game that feels fantastic to play. 

There are also a few truly shocking moments spread throughout, and not just in the story. Sometimes, I’d enter a puzzle room and suddenly be faced with something I wasn’t expecting, like an enemy suddenly dashing toward me at a terrifying pace, and in my panic I never had the chance to think things through. Turning human reactions into a puzzle element is a really difficult thing to do, but Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 pulls it off better than most games. 

Speaking of the story, though, I was quite pleased with how it turned out in the end. Again, like my preview, I’m not going to spoil anything, but the connection to the first game, with the two stories intertwined and overlapping in places, was very satisfying. It managed to fill in a few blank moments in the original story without ever feeling like that was its sole purpose — this was a story that happened to fill in the gaps, not a story that was designed to do so, and I think that’s the right approach. I’d have been happy with either, honestly, but having Dreadrock 2 be totally playable standalone – and being able to play either of the games in whatever order and have each fill in the gaps of the other – is great. 

As much as I adored just about every aspect of the game, there were a few issues that popped up from time to time. The dialogue localization is a little bit rough in places, rarely to the point of being bad, but sometimes to the point of distraction. I encountered a couple of bugs, too, none of which were game breaking, but some required restarting a level. 

In one instance, I had finished a level and had it soft lock just before I’d moved on to the next, requiring a redo of the whole stage. It was a pretty mechanically complex level, too, so doing it all from scratch was a little bit frustrating. There is, at least, an option to skip forward a level (or as many as you like) in the menu, which is great if you’re just totally stuck — though the hints system also helps prevent getting stuck. 

Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier

I also ended up completing a level in an unintended way, which unfortunately had consequences later, since some amount of persistence exists between certain levels. That’s not entirely a knock against the game – I did something stupid and paid the price, and you can’t always plan for unintended player behaviour – but I did have to reload the earlier level and redo more than one stage because of it. A small frustration among a handful of similarly sized frustrations. 

But none of those issues take away from the fact that Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 is an incredible game. It’s packed with gorgeous pixel art, charming character design, great audio design, and some of the best puzzles in gaming. It’s a fantastic sequel, a wonderful standalone game, and everything I could have asked for. 

Score: 9/10 

Version tested: Nintendo Switch