Get ready to meet your next favorite videogame crab in The Dungeon Experience
The Dungeon Experience is a videogame about a theme park dungeon held together by strings. The theme park, I mean, not the videogame. It's got an uncanny animatronic barbarian and cardboard cutout monsters, the Lake of Pain is an inflatable kiddie pool, and the host is a mudcrab. Co-creator Jacob Janerka tells me he's workshopping a pitch to sum up this unusual concept. «The Dungeon Experience is like The Stanley Parable,» he says, «but the narrator is a talking crab who reads self-help books and has a hundred-dollar budget.»
That's a pretty good pitch. A walking simulator with minigames, The Dungeon Experience is a parody of RPGs where you experience one from the warped point of view of the creature you'd normally be fighting around the same time you tackle your first slime. «We wanted a Dungeon Master,» Janerka says, «but if it's just a regular guy, why don't we do something more interesting? We're making a videogame, you might as well take advantage of the medium.»
Janerka and his co-developer Simon Boxer, who was previously responsible for roguelike card game Ring of Pain, started by coming up with a list of low-level monsters who might make an interesting DM. «We had goblins, rats, whatever. Crab was much more endearing, especially in Bethesda games and stuff like that. The talking mudcrab from Morrowind was definitely a big inspiration.»
The concept of The Dungeon Experience arrived spontaneously while Janerka was in the middle of a game of Dungeons & Dragons. «It came from playing D&D for the first time when I was making the previous game,» he says, referring to his point-and-click adventure, Paradigm. «Our Dungeon Master was quite good, but I always found it really funny—the idea of someone who is very endearing
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