Depth Dwellers - Retro Reflections

Depth Dwellers by developer and publisher Trisoft—MS-DOS retro reflection written by Hamza.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 

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To describe it in one line, Depth Dwellers is a massive eyesore. Back in '94, when id Software released their magnum opus, Doom, suddenly everyone wanted to hop on the new wagon that had driven into town and create a Doom-clone of their own. Some achieved success, others not so much—and this game is decidedly the latter.

Attacking you head-on with spelling mistakes and a story no one bothered to read, Depth Dwellers starts off just like any other shooter. You begin in a room, wondering how you got there, and—blast!—you get killed by the very first enemy you encounter, in this case, the one on your right. The POV is first-person, naturally, but it is so heavily zoomed in that it feels as if you are playing through a fishbowl or a magnifying glass. The level designs are mediocre at best, confusing at their absolute worst, and completely uninspiring. I mean, Zork has better mazes than this. Did I just commit social suicide by mentioning a legendary classic in a review of a mediocre game such as this?

If it took you 20 minutes to finish the first level and you only got lost about 151 times, then yes, you're actually playing it correctly—because you were playing it "normally," the way you would play any other game. Apparently, Depth Dwellers calls for something else entirely, and what that is, I do not want to know.

However, not every aspect of Depth Dwellers is legendarily bad, no matter the impression it might give you. The music, for example, is pretty good. The same short, ambiguous track keeps looping in the background; and though it doesn't fit the overall violence and horror theme of the game at all, if you were to take it independently, the music is quite nice. The other redeeming factor is how Depth Dwellers excels at capturing a horrific, dread-forsaken atmosphere. This is evident the second you are thrown into the game.

The ominous moans of tortured prisoners that occasionally break the moody silence, coupled with the use of muted, dull colors like black, brown, and grey, all contribute to a memorable horror setting... but unfortunately, the execution just isn't strong. Thus, Depth Dwellers falls short of both playability and likability. It had the time to gather its resources, but not the common sense to use them correctly or in the way intended.

In short, as one of the earliest Doom-clones from before the genre even got a proper name, Depth Dwellers should have succeeded where it utterly failed, but it so happened that it utterly failed where it should have succeeded. It became such a massive eyesore that one can rightly call it the Bubsy 3D of the FPS genre.

Note: Screenshots from all platforms that were available at the time can be found here at Moby Games.