Sunken Realms is a focused third-person dungeon crawler with roguelite elements. It’s a game built around exploring an abandoned underground city, killing monsters, and collecting resources, all while getting stronger and going deeper. There is no enormous open world and no endless list of things that need to be done, which could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how much depth you’re craving. We found this to be a good thing, as we enjoyed the mechanics when everything was a bit on the lighter side.
The story is about Alric, whose father disappeared after descending into the ruins beneath the city. As expected, Alric decides to follow him underground, despite all the warnings he receives. The game tries to tell this story, but we struggled to believe much of what was happening. Alric enters the dungeon looking for his father and, almost immediately, the first stranger we meet is more than happy to let us use the camp at our leisure. There is very little hesitation about allowing a complete stranger to move in and use the place as a base of operations. Then we are gifted a powerful being that lights our way through the darkness and can even pull us back from the dead.
We understand what the game is trying to do. It wants us to have a safe place to return to, someone to talk to, and a magical companion during our expeditions. The problem is that the way we get all of this feels far too convenient. There isn’t enough resistance or explanation to make these events feel believable within the world.
The recordings we find while exploring are more successful at making Aedaria feel like a place with a history. They tell us little pieces of information about what happened here, and finding one while exploring a forgotten room is usually more interesting than another conversation that exists mainly to move us toward the next part of the story.
Exploring Aedaria
Sunken Realms is built around six sections containing 109 hand-crafted rooms. These rooms are procedurally rearranged whenever we enter the dungeon, so we don’t get exactly the same layout every time. The individual rooms are designed by hand and then shuffled around. We might recognise a room we’ve visited before, but the path leading to it can be completely different on the next expedition. This works well at the beginning because we’re still learning the environments, figuring out where things lead, and discovering what each new section has waiting for us. But we have noticed that most of the rooms seem quite generic, empty, and, sadly, uninspiring. We explored and fought, but we didn’t much enjoy seeing the same old recycled elements. Pretty soon, we started recognising those rooms, enemies, and encounters. Moving the rooms around can only change things so much, we’re afraid. Sunken Realms did its best, but, at the end of the day, you still have a compact dungeon adventure where the focus is on experimenting with equipment, spells, and approach.
As we explore, we collect resources, open chests, and find recordings that tell us more about the lore and the history of Aedaria. These recordings are one of the main ways the game fills in the world around us. It’s these little pieces of information that somewhat flesh out the narrative and give some insight into the things that have transpired in the ruins.
Kill the monsters
Most of the enemies seem quite easy to kill, and all we need to do is start attacking first and keep spamming that attack button. There is stamina to manage, so we’re not completely free to swing our weapon forever, but most regular enemies don’t put up enough of a fight. There is a parry system, though, and this is considerably more interesting, but you lack the incentive to use it in most encounters. Regardless, if we parry at the exact moment an enemy attacks, we can follow it up with a counterattack. Getting the timing right feels good, particularly when we’re facing an enemy that can actually punish us for making a mistake.
Combat also includes ranged attacks and magic. We can learn spells as we explore and change our equipment as we progress, but basic melee combat remains the thing we liked using most of the time. The problem is that enemies don’t always force us to use all these systems. A lot of encounters can be solved by simply getting close and attacking until whatever is standing in front of us stops moving. The parry system is there and can be useful, but the game doesn’t consistently make us master it.
Enemies and chests provide gold and crafting materials, which we take back to camp and turn into useful items. Speaking of the camp, it’s there that we can craft weapons, cook food, brew potions, trade, and upgrade Alric through the Soul Forge before heading back underground. It’s all about the descent—exploring and fighting until we have enough of what we need, then heading back to safety to improve our equipment and prepare for another trip. The camp also hosts the story conversations that take place between expeditions. It’s all done in a subtle but well-thought-out way, and it’s a nice change of pace to sit around the campfire and just chat for a spell. We sort out our equipment, make a few items, and then, finally, jump into the fray again.
Sunken Realms hides some rough animations and moments where combat doesn’t feel as polished as we’d like. Recent updates have improved movement, dodging, climbing, and other parts of the experience, but the game still has that rough indie edge in several places.
The roguelite side of Sunken Realms has also become more flexible since launch, and we have three difficulty options at our disposal. Story lets us keep everything when we die and awards two Essences after each boss. Normal keeps equipped items but makes us lose the rest of what we’re carrying, while Hardcore takes everything away on death and provides no Essences at the end of a section. Having the choice is great, as we’ve never been fans of hardcore immersion and losing everything.
We tested Sunken Realms on an RTX 4060 Ti, and this is where things become difficult to recommend without a warning. At 1080p, the game is playable. Once we go above 1080p, though, performance falls off badly enough that we simply don’t consider those higher resolutions playable on this hardware. For a game that doesn’t exactly look like it’s pushing the RTX 4060 Ti to its limits, that struck us as a serious optimisation problem. There have also been issues with movement, cameras, maps, and various bits of general jank, although several of these have been addressed through post-launch updates.
A small dungeon crawler
Sunken Realms is an interesting title if you’re all about going down, killing monsters, collecting resources, finding lore, returning to camp, getting stronger, and going back in. We sure appreciated the hand-crafted rooms, changing layouts, camp progression, and parry system, but we feel a lot more could have been done to flesh out every single aspect. Even so, we enjoyed heading underground and seeing what was waiting for us, and we hope you check out the title in case you’re craving some button mashing.
Our score: 8/10
Sunken Realms
Developer: Magic Puncher Games
Publisher: Magic Puncher Games
Genre: Action RPG / Dungeon Crawler / Roguelite
Platform: PC
Release date: September 18, 2026
Players: Single-player
Price: $16.99
Leave a Reply