Minimal Dungeon RPG is a strange mix between an idle game and a more classic RPG. It’s certainly incremental in it’s nature, but you’re not waiting for incredibly long periods of time, waiting for something to happen. Instead you tap on tiles in the rooms you’re visiting and you perform actions like exploring or fighting monsters that way. Where you need to wait is for your action and hit points to recover and allow you to keep tapping away. It’s a neat concept, but it got too stale too quickly and it also felt like being a free-to-play game hindered it a little.
Each level of the game is a big map where you explore around, clearing tiles to figure out what’s under them. Exploring tiles gives you gold and experience, and you use these things to buy upgrades and items or to level up. The game works with stats points that you can place in various unexplained stats, so it suffers from the case where you’re not sure what you should do, which stat to prioritize and what’s optimal but that never seemed to be an issue during my time with it, which could also mean that the stats are more or less pointless. Each time you explore, you lose some AP and when you fight monsters, each hit takes a bit of your HP. You have to wait for these to recover and the monsters regenerate their health as well, so the crux of the game is knowing when to tap and when to wait.
Most maps are the same, you explore, buy stat upgrades and items, fish, cut trees and mine rocks - when you get the required tools - for experience and gold, and you collect fruit for a bizarre sacrifice system that seems to require you to buy premium fruit with premium currency if you want to get the best bonuses. Some tiles require you to watch an ad to continue, which is also plenty annoying. At some point you can also do miniature dungeons where you have a bunch of negative effects to make things more challenging, it’s an okay idea!
Minimal Dungeon RPG is true to its name. Everything is more or less abstracted to the minimum required to be functional, and it kinda works. I wish this had been a premium experience that didn’t rely that much on waiting for resources to replenish over time, but as it is, it can be an okay distraction if you don’t mind the somewhat required ad watching here and there.
