There’s something charming about an idea that’s fully baked but still so very, very small. Dungeon Antiqua is a cupcake of an RPG. It’s got all the components that you’d expect from a massively retro experience: heroes, monsters, dungeons and loot. The whole thing is seven levels, you get in, you kill the baddies, you discover the meaning of friendship (seriously) and then call it a day. Were you hoping to bang out a game in under five hours and then have the option for more? Were you itching for the original Final Fantasy to be less in depth? Do you miss the days where praying over a dead friend (and paying the priest) was the key to resurrection? Great news, Dungeon Antiqua is for you!

If you also thought you accidentally clicked on a Final Fantasy II review, you’re not alone!

You’re a party of adventurers, there’s a dungeon with ancient relics, now go get them. What, did you need a reason or justification? How about “that loot isn’t currently in your hands, get moving?” Choose some classes, figure out which doors lead where, and get moving. The dungeons are static but the monsters and loot inside aren’t, which means you can and should keep checking the same rooms dive after dive to see if there’s stuff worth looting inside. Make sure to have a thief on hand for trap checking but otherwise go nuts. Grab everything you can, head back to the surface (on foot) and sell stuff to buy better stuff, and then steel yourself and go back down.

The developers of Dungeon Antiqua have made it very clear: they want to celebrate oldschool dungeon crawlers like Wizardry in the best way possible, and that comes through with some important changes. Nothing about Dungeon Antiqua feels unfair or unbalanced: if you descend into a deeper level before you’re ready, the monsters are tougher, but not “instantly kill everyone in your party” hard. Inventory is limited, but it’s a fairly robust storage (fifty slots) which gives plenty of room for consumables and picked up treasure. Autotargeting exists: if a party member is trying to attack a monster that’s already fallen, you’ll move onto the next beast instead of swinging at empty air like a crazy person. And the more technical stuff is strictly behind the scenes and, in many cases, inconsequential.

And yes, buying like eight Books of Death is a great Plan B because it works every time.

If your big focus is to get into some oldschool digital dungeon crawling without any of the bells or whistles of modern RPGs, then Dungeon Antiqua has you covered. Your party is one to four members, they can change classes based on certain criteria regarding base stat points, and you can swap them out as interchangeably as if they were different utensils in your silverware drawer. Changing a character’s class doesn’t affect their overall personality or anything silly like that: move from fighter to samurai to lord and anything else your heart desires based purely on how you’d like to see combat play out. As a result, you only really get attached to characters based on your own projection upon them, so you really need to dig deep if you want a reason to care about these sprites for any reason other than “they’re my dudes.”

Thankfully, combat is balanced out to try and prevent you from cheesing your way through with only fighters. The mob density can get thicker the deeper you get, sometimes putting six enemies against you at once. The use of magic goes both ways: enemies develop multi-target spells as your mages do, but, spoiler, yours are way stronger. There’s no mana, this is truly OG “limited number of spells per run” slotting, so decide when you’ll drop Godhand carefully. Oh, and you will hit enemies like assassins or shogun who have one-hit decapitation crits, which was a fun discovery. The thought of hauling the headless corpse of your friend back to a church and the deacon being like “give me eighty bucks and we can fix this” never stopped being funny, and the Bushido Blade fear actually kept me on my toes when going deep.

Ironically, we then sold Jean to a blind kid.

The dungeon is relatively well constructed, with a focus on finding out the hard way about what works and what doesn’t. There are hidden doorways that will only present themselves if you run straight into them, traps and hazards that appear when you’re about to be on top of them, and rooms that will randomly spawn enemy encounters or treasure chests (with treasure chests always being preceded by monster encounters). There’s also this undercurrent about legendary loot that drives the party forward, with items that can only be found after a certain key is discovered and then taken to each floor to find the matching room with a baddie boss to fight in order to claim the treasure. Succeeding nets you a piece of the best gear in the game, and Dungeon Antiqua will force you, eventually, to equip it all to the same person for maximum effect.

There were a couple of pitfalls in terms of execution. The first is the alignment system, which didn’t really make an impact on the entirety of my gameplay. If you want to be evil for whatever reason, it’s simple: murder every other NPC team you find in the dungeon without cause. Evil characters cannot group up with “good” characters, so someone who turns in the midst of a dungeon battle will get booted back to the surface. At this point, now evil players can access some different classes and gear that they couldn’t before, and…that’s really about it. If you’re deadset on completionism, getting an evil party together to discover all the “evil” loot is important, but, if you’re just trying to finish the game, it’s just an arbitrary metric that’s simple to avoid.

Wait, it wasn’t Alvin? My whole world view is shattered!

Additionally, the dungeon is an absolute slog after a certain point due to the lack of the modern amenities of instant dungeon escape. I know, we’re harkening back to the days when you looked to wireframe to imagine a dungeon ideal, but I still like the new style of not having to slowly, arduously make my way out of the dungeon. There’s a skill that can allow you to set up automatic directionality so you can more easily escape, but you still need to mash the A button to propel your party forward each step. When it seems like all combat has a 100% escape rate (or at least I never once encountered a failed flee), then this is just another step to pad out the run time.

Which is such a shame, because Dungeon Antiqua does what it needs to do in an encapsulated way very well. The enemies, as you get deeper, are color variations of the same mobs you’ve already fought, a straight move lifted from the oldschool dungeon crawl handbook. The sprites, even with class changes, could easily be from a fan edit of one of the NES Final Fantasy titles. Hell, the soundtrack kept tricking me into thinking I was playing Dragon Quest or another 8bit JRPG because it matched the tonality of the encounters, the town and even the big, scary boss battles. The scoring is so well done it’s almost expected. When you look at the landscape, the sprites and the quest, this is basically the music you already have running in your head. A double edged sword of being so well crafted to match the motif that it doesn’t stand out.

I mean, I appreciate you asking, but there isn’t anything else to do otherwise.

Still, Dungeon Antiqua never pretends to be something it isn’t, and the result is a short, pleasant and ultimately presentable piece. It’s got plenty of love for the era it seeks to capture, along with some novel takes on additional elements to make the replay at least somewhat enticing. If you just want to really indulge in some simple, nostalgic dungeon crawling like you did back on the NES days, then Dungeon Antiqua will fit nicely into your collection.

Dungeon Antiqua is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox Series One X|S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Dungeon Antiqua was provided by the publisher.