PAX West 2026 - Dungeon Lurker: Retro Fantasy for the Modern Age

13AM Games’ new upcoming retro-action dungeon crawler, Dungeon Lurker, is exactly the kind of meta I thoroughly enjoy in the indie scene. Right off the bat, the visual style fascinated my team and me. It's retro-modern 2.5D pixelated perspective so accurately recalls that wonderful warm and fuzzy feeling of a long-past gaming era. Dungeon Lurker doesn't look like an old Nintendo game, nor does it look like an old PlayStation title. No, Dungeon Lurker invokes the nostalgia of an old Sega 3DO experience, when we weren't quite in the era of 3D everything, nor squarely in the realm of 2D pixelated art. It feels like a game you went to the store to rent, excitedly tearing through the manual on the drive home, eagerly awaiting the moment you could sit down, turn on your big tube TV, and get lost in a brutal fantasy adventure.

It seems like thousands of years ago now, but before memory cards became the default way to store game save files, progress was saved on the cartridges themselves. This resulted in an eerie, difficult-to-describe feeling of intruding on another person's life if you happened to be playing on a used or previously-owned game cartridge. It was a strange reminder that your gaming memories, everything you experience while playing something, could be shared with more people. Deleting one of these files felt sinful, especially if the progress on the file was far along, as it felt like erasing a bit of someone's life. Someone decided to spend hours of their limited existence on this game, and you were about to just... get rid of it. Ultimately, it is just stored data on a piece of hardware, and eventually time would do this for you anyway as cartridge batteries die and files get corrupted, but it always felt like a dirty act.

When playing Dungeon Lurker, you are experiencing a game within a game; the story centers on not only what's happening on screen, but also what's happening off-screen. You are playing a used version of Dungeon Lurker, complete with a mysterious and ominous save file next to your own progress. The save file is totaled out: max level, max currency, the works, but no matter what you do, you can't delete it, you can't alter it, and you can't access it.

If you open up the in-game menu, you are greeted with a rendition of the game's manual. As you flip through the pages, you see the previous owner's notes scribbled throughout. Notes give potential clues about the game's puzzles, how to defeat certain enemies, and tidbits on the mysterious save file's owner. As you play, you must not only beat Dungeon Lurker, the game, but also figure out what happened to the previous owner and why so many strange things are happening with your copy. 

I adore this concept, as I have so many vivid memories of hovering over old game saves in rented and pre-owned games, hesitating to delete them, but knowing they couldn't stay. Dungeon Lurker isn't the first to come up with something like this, but 13AM's take on it is absolutely my favorite. 

If the gripping narrative isn't enough, the game itself is a blast to play. Dungeon Lurker is a rogue-lite hack-and-slash beat-em-up, tasking you with delving deeper and deeper into the dungeon to progress. When you die, you are sent back to a town where you can purchase upgrades, new spells, talk to the locals, and get hints on how to progress before setting out again. Upon re-entering the dungeon, you can find your previous self where you perished, and duke it out with your ghost, Shadow Link-style. Defeat your ghost, and you're able to resupply with lost items and lost loot.

As much as I like running over my glowing lost runes in every Soulslike ever, this is a much more engaging risk/reward system, allowing you to strategize whether getting the old gear is even worth the danger of fighting your old self. The combat itself feels snappy, responsive, and easy-to-read. Every death I experienced felt earned and fair, and I learned a lesson going back in. It feels very easy to get into, but very difficult to master, with button-mashing only getting you so far. The pixel-art is phenomenal, the animations are gorgeous, the combat is engaging and fair, and the overarching narrative is gripping and interesting. I only got a short hands-on with Dungeon Lurker, but I came away with only good things to say about it.