Have you been pining for a specific style of RPGs from the early 1990s? Indie games developer NiBo Games—based in Prague, Czech Republic (Czechia)—is working on a game called Paper Dungeon – Deep Down that should be up your alley.
NiBo Games is an indie dev with key members having decades of AAA game development experience. Project Lead and Main Developer Nikola Bornová designed games like Painkiller: Overdose (the old, good boomer-shooter, not the recent release), Momento Mori 2, and even co-authored Dračí doupě+, a pen and paper RPG. Executive Producer Martin Strnad worked at companies including Bohemia Interactive, Warhorse Studios and Techland and has credits on DayZ, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Dying Light 2: Stay Human. Composer and Sound Designer Hana Bornová previously worked on Pat a Mat and Memento Mori 2.
Paper Dungeon – Deep Down may be the team’s debut title, but these people have shipped good games before.
Paper Dungeon – Deep Down is a first-person grid-based dungeon crawler RPG with turn-based battles and a party system. The HUD has six clickable buttons to move around the grid.
If that sounds a lot like the Might & Magic games, you’d be right, the series is one of the many big inspos for Paper Dungeon including Dungeon Master, Wizardry, Lands of Lore, Eye of the Beholder, and a more recent game Legend of Grimrock.
(If you need another reference point, think of the early Shin Megami Tensei/Persona games from the 90’s, which also uses first-person dungeon crawling and a party-based, turn-based combat system.)
However, Paper Dungeon – Deep Dive isn’t just a medieval dungeon crawler, it also has psychological horror elements inspired by games including The Evil Within, Layers Of Fear and, most intriguingly, Soma.
In Paper Dungeon – Deep Dive, you lead a party of four heroes in a giant miniature tabletop world, where the surreal dungeons are supposed to be the manifestations of “your own guilt and memories.”
The game will feature:
- UX and quality-of-life features that makes the grid-based exploration more line with modern expectations, turn-based battles where positioning and resource management matters
- Status effects that can interact with each other (over 40 of them, some can be logically comboed like Wet cancels out Burning but makes you susceptible to Shocked)
- 12 unique heroes with “unique roles, quirks and abilities” (three recruitable party members, each character including the main character can be geared and specced to your needs)
- Traps and puzzles within the hand-crafted dungeons
- “An emotional narrative about guilt and tragic loss, set in a limbo between life and death” as the Overseer torments you with having to dungeon crawl
The game may have psychological horror elements, but it doesn’t present itself as a full-on horror game. Enemies are pleasant-looking giant miniatures, the dungeon seen in the screenshots and trailer doesn’t look that dank or ominous, and the trailer ends on the ominous foreshadowing of a “giant marshmallow man.” Is this what Central European dark humour and horror is about? It sure is an interesting tone.
Paper Dungeon – Deep Down is localised in 16 languages, including Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian. Here’s the same trailer, but with Indonesian subtitles.
Paper Dungeon – Deep Down has been long in development, since 2021, and for now doesn’t have a release date yet.
Paper Dungeon – Deep Down will be out on PC (Steam). A free demo is planned to arrive in early 2026. The Early Access release is target to drop in late 2026, with the full release to come in early 2027.