Blood Dungeon, from Nidhogg developer Messhof, enters the increasingly crowded 'bullet heaven' or Survivors-like subgenre with a distinctively sideways approach. Unlike the typical top-down autoshooters, this title adopts a sidescrolling platformer perspective, drawing comparisons to Spelunky rather than Brotato or Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. The game is set to release on August 26, 2026, and was reviewed on an RTX 3060 laptop with a Ryzen 5 5600H and 16GB of RAM.
At its core, Blood Dungeon adheres to the familiar autoshooter formula. Players navigate scrolling arenas, automatically firing projectiles that decimate ever-growing hordes of enemies. Each level up presents a choice of randomized perks and improvements, rapidly transforming the player into a destructive force. These rounds are typically brief, concluding in under ten minutes. The game boasts an appealing visual style, characterized by Messhof's signature globular 2D art, which is well-suited to its precision-oriented action. Animations are often striking, and the accompanying soundtrack, described by creator Matthew Hoey as 'dungeon drum 'n' bass,' is both madcap and hypnotic.
Gameplay begins with a player character, initially equipped with a weak machinegun, progressively upgrading their arsenal through enemy drops. Within minutes, basic upgrades like increased firing speed and the acquisition of rotating swords become available. By the time of defeat, players might find themselves surrounded by multiple enhanced weapons and a near-constant barrage of bullets. Across five hours of play, a handful of characters and all six maps were unlocked, with significant upgrades to health, jump height, damage output, and weapon capacity. A favored weapon is the bouncing ball, capable of quickly defeating early bosses when sufficiently upgraded, alongside turrets, lasers, and a shotgun whose spread can be drastically increased.
The game features a cast of distinct characters, each with unique panic-inducing attributes. Skinja, for example, cartwheels rapidly while firing shotguns, and the Baby character, despite low health, wields a revolver that can one-shot many early-round enemies. Hypnomancer utilizes gas-based attacks. The sidescrolling perspective is a significant draw, even as the maps adhere to common survivor archetypes like X-axis corridors and pit-style layouts. While each map possesses a fixed layout, the placement of items and keys is largely randomized. Many maps loop, adding a layer of strategic depth to the genre's characteristic forward momentum. Understanding reliable locations for health and explosives becomes crucial for overcoming the game's final bosses, and unlocking doors early can provide a significant advantage in the chaotic later stages.
However, Blood Dungeon eventually succumbs to a sense of grind. The initial hours are a compelling rush of rewards and unlocks, but by the ten-hour mark, the game's reliance on its reward loop becomes apparent. The reviewer found that the game's core mechanics, while feeling superb to play, struggled to sustain engagement once the dopamine rush of constant unlocks subsided. The genre inherently relies on RNG for its unpredictability, but Blood Dungeon's lottery-like randomness felt less like emergent storytelling and more like a compulsion generator. The sense of improvement felt less tied to player skill and more to the wider array of weapons and upgrades acquired over time. Despite the developer's flair and a thin layer of skill-based reward, the experience ultimately left the reviewer with little desire to revisit it once completed.