Breakin’ the Dome, Breakin’ the Dome: The Glorious Indie Discovery That Is Dome Keeper
21K View2022-10-06
When you make a game that immediately reminds me of an Atari 2600 game, you have my curiosity.
When you make a game that goes on to remind me of TWO Atari 2600 games, you now have my attention.
Last week I happened upon Bippinbits’ Dome Keeper which reminds me of both Imagic’s Atlantis and Activision’s H.E.R.O. in the best of ways. At its core, the game itself is a roguelike that has you both protecting the dome-enclosed scientific base you live in with a giant laser cannon (much like Atlantis) while you are also spelunking and/or mining the caverns (much like H.E.R.O.) that lie beneath the dome. An underground opening allows you to burrow into the earth, and having a jetpack and a drill strapped to you means you can move and dig with ease in any and all directions. By digging you’ll find resources which will allow you to upgrade both your miner/scientist dude and, more importantly, your dome.
(As an aside here: Those who truly dig H.E.R.O. should check out the spiritual successor/remake that came out about a year ago, Stranded Miners in Space.)
Rather than those resources being added straight to your inventory, you need to manually haul them back up to the main/research section of the dome. You can only transport so many, and your flight speed is hampered if you’re overloaded, so it’s almost constantly a hair-raising, risk-vs.-reward balancing act of how much time you have versus how many resources you need before the next wave of ugly beasties are knocking at your door once again.
The key to success in Dome Keeper though comes with the upgrade chips you’ll find while digging. These give you powerful upgrades that can completely alter the way you play the game – as in an alternate gun mounted on the dome that automatically stuns the interminable enemies, or a transporter that allows you to instantly move from a dig site back to your dome when it’s under assault. Finding a chip will give you the choice between three upgrades…but the choices you’re given are always random in true roguelike fashion.
The essential goal of each dive into the earth is to discover an ultimate upgrade of sorts that unleashes a lethal attack on all the enemies in your vicinity. When you unearth this and bring it back to your dome, you’ve completed a run. There’s plenty of reason to keep jumping back into Dome Keeper, though, thanks to multiple difficulty levels and various starting perks that unlock the more you play. But don’t let Dome Keeper‘s simplicity put you off – in fact, it’s just that “attention to minimalism” that makes it a fantastic experience in the first place. It’s streamlined and just does what it does; it is free of bloat and overwrought mechanics which makes this “simple” game of survival against overwhelming odds easy to come back to for more, and more, and more.
With the overwhelming glut of games that are released these days, I know it’s hard to keep up with everything, but I feel it needs to be stated that “under-the-radar” indie games like Dome Keeper truly need your love and support – much more so than the “AAA” juggernauts of the gaming world – the Call of Duty’s, the Fortnite’s, the Overwatch’s, and the like. I know I still get excited when I come across an almost unknown, new and interesting title like this one as it reminds me of a time when my high school friends and I would trade Commodore 64 floppy disks that only had a directory of unknown game file names copied to them. The fun then was in the discovery and all the thoughts pinballing through your brain as the game(s) booted up: What the hell is this? Will it be awesome? Will it be terrible? Do I really have to do my Trigonometry homework?
Stumbling across games like Dome Keeper brings all that warm and fuzzy nostalgia back for me. In spades.
And I hope, on some level, it does for you too.
💬 Have you played any Atari 2600 games before? If so, what are your favorites? Please share them in the comments down below! Also, are you a fan of roguelike games? Tell us what some of your favorites are as well!
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