Sweeper-type games

I came across this game on itch.io the other day called Dragonsweeper, a game somewhat based on Minesweeper, the classic Windows game. Instead of mines, you’re a knight clearing various fantasy monsters from a dungeon. Some of these monsters are too strong for you to beat at first, so you have to carefully fight the weaker ones to level up. It’s intended to be played blind, and you’re expected to learn as you go. So if you want to try the game spoiler-free, don’t read past this paragraph until you’ve played it.

I had a lot of fun with Dragonsweeper. I liked the graphics (especially the victory screen art), and the soundtrack made me feel like I was playing a Miniclip game back in 2007. Like Spelunky, the game has a sense of progression that isn’t so much about what happens in a single run, but rather your learning process over multiple runs. As you play, you gradually learn how the game works and gain insight about how to approach picking blocks.

On the one hand, there’s a basic factual discovery about the rules of the game: how leveling up works, what the different scrolls do, the patterns monsters spawn in. I appreciate that the game doesn’t hand all of this to you right away, but instead invites you to learn it for yourself, giving you just enough hints in the cryptic Monsternomicon.

But there’s also this second layer of discovery, which is the strategy you want to use. When I first started playing, I was just hitting monsters and healing and leveling up at random, just trying not to die. I had my first breakthrough in the game when I realized that I should instead try to use up all my hearts before healing or leveling up. With this realization, I had a conceptual key that unlocked more of the game for me.

Some of these breakthroughs not only helped me beat the game, but also made me appreciate its design. For example, at some point I realized my hearts were kind of like a budget for resolving uncertainty. If you have eight hearts, it’s safe for you to click a block where you might take up to eight hearts of damage, as long as you have a level up or heart scroll to heal from it. You can use this to your advantage as your level gets higher and higher, allowing you to take greater risks and clear more of the board.

I played Dragonsweeper until I could do a full clear of the board, achieving the max score of 303. I noticed on the victory screen that it said it was inspired by “Mamono Sweeper”, and I was curious to see another “sweeper-type” game and trace the influence it had on Dragonsweeper.

Mamono Sweeper (mamono from Japanese 魔物: evil spirit) is a somewhat simpler game, but still very satisfying to play. Since there is no healing in this one, there’s less of an experience of budgeting uncertainty like in Dragonsweeper, but there are other kinds of deductions to learn. Mamono Sweeper has a very “pure” feel to it, like classic Minesweeper, where the strategic insights almost feel like you’re doing math.* I guess in a sense, that’s exactly what you’re doing, because most of the strategy revolves around properties of sums with different numbers of unknowns.

I love games like these that take an existing design and twist it. Both of these “sweeper-type” games take advantage of their predecessor’s strengths and offer something new that fits the format well. I liked seeing the simple but fruitful way Mamono Sweeper builds on Minesweeper, and I liked being able to trace pieces of what I experienced in Dragonsweeper back through Mamono Sweeper. That type of creative dialogue is something I really value about art in general.

Do you like Minesweeper? Did you try Dragonsweeper and/or Mamono Sweeper? Did you enjoy them? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.

* To be clear, “feels like doing math” is a positive in my book