Prefacing this with two things:

1) The devs gave a free key to anyone who owned the original Desktop Dungeons, and that's mighty cool of them.
2) The amount of time I have in this is not representative compared to the amount of time I spent playing Desktop Dungeons in total, or the pre-release test build, and neither does my playtime in the original Desktop Dungeons, as Steam was not the primary platform on which I played it. I easily clocked in a thousand hours since 2011. I am not reviewing Rewind as a standalone game, but comparing it to what came before.

The presentation of Rewind is absolutely hideous. The original game used a wonderful, expressive hand-drawn tileset that was easy to tell apart at a glance. You could view the entire play field without problems, and you had a full overview over everything. In Rewind, that clarity goes out the window. While the user interface does technically provide you with more, and *more clear* information compared to Desktop Dungeons, it's also gigantic, hideous, lacks any charm, can't be scaled down, and worse yet, blocks the playing field. Despite Rewind being released for the PC, it looks and feels like a low-effort mobile game port. The playing field itself can't also all be viewed at once conveniently. Zooming out to be able to see the whole game field makes the 3D models of enemies difficult to distinguish from one another, and the user interface ends up blocking the upper-left corner of the field, so you need to scroll the map around to be able to see anyway. It is a pain to play, and the only environment on which I could possibly imagine wanting to play this version of the game is a phone.

I understand that a lot of the decisions made for this game were due to the problems the team created by choosing the resolution they did in 2011, and yes, the original game does have some problems relating to that. The original game is virtually unplayable on 4K monitors, etc etc. I get that. But this? This ain't it.

As it stands, there is not a single thing I like in Rewind over the original, and I cannot under any circumstance recommend it while the original is still around.

I'm sorry.

Prefacing this with two things: 1) The devs gave a free key to anyone who owned the original Desktop Dungeons, and that's mighty cool of them. 2) The amount of time I have in this is not representative compared to the amount of time I spent playing Desktop Dungeons in total, or the pre-release test build, and neither does my playtime in the original Desktop Dungeons, as Steam was not the primary platform on which I played it. I easily clocked in a thousand hours since 2011. I am not reviewing Rewind as a standalone game, but comparing it to what came before. The presentation of Rewind is absolutely hideous. The original game used a wonderful, expressive hand-drawn tileset that was easy to tell apart at a glance. You could view the entire play field without problems, and you had a full overview over everything. In Rewind, that clarity goes out the window. While the user interface does technically provide you with more, and *more clear* information compared to Desktop Dungeons, it's also gigantic, hideous, lacks any charm, can't be scaled down, and worse yet, blocks the playing field. Despite Rewind being released for the PC, it looks and feels like a low-effort mobile game port. The playing field itself can't also all be viewed at once conveniently. Zooming out to be able to see the whole game field makes the 3D models of enemies difficult to distinguish from one another, and the user interface ends up blocking the upper-left corner of the field, so you need to scroll the map around to be able to see anyway. It is a pain to play, and the only environment on which I could possibly imagine wanting to play this version of the game is a phone. I understand that a lot of the decisions made for this game were due to the problems the team created by choosing the resolution they did in 2011, and yes, the original game does have some problems relating to that. The original game is virtually unplayable on 4K monitors, etc etc. I get that. But this? This ain't it. As it stands, there is not a single thing I like in Rewind over the original, and I cannot under any circumstance recommend it while the original is still around. I'm sorry.