Just building corridors and rooms isn't enough; you have to constantly upgrade things, but you can only enter your dungeon to both pillage and build once a day. Head in at sunrise and emerge at sunset to sell off your stash of stuff, buy new materials and gather quests from the townsfolk. Simple, no? In actuality, the game is really rather complex, but instead of saddling you with all the info all at once, it's slowly doled out in little bites from multiple sources, most of which will often give you the materials you need for your first lesson. It really is a cool system, and when you suddenly can split your daily upgrade cycle between weapons, armor, a better dungeon and some tasty eats, things get interesting.

But again, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. We'll start with eating, since it's absolutely crucial to character development. See, you don't actually gain levels by way of experience, oh no. Instead, the things you eat determine if you'll bag a few more HP or MP every night when you head to be. Though you can make some very basic HP/MP boosters that will add a point here and there with common ingredients, the real gains come from using drops from monsters with common ingredients like veggies to make a hearty stew or soup that will give you far bigger gains. Since you can only find these ingredients by killing monsters, there's a nice system of development in place. Once you've eaten, you can head off to bed to save the game and move on to the next day to start it all over again.

Ah, but there's more to do in town than just sell the stuff you found in your DYI dungeon. The townspeople will often have basic requests to make of you while you're down below, ranging from finding rings or basic items to killing mini-bosses to help with summons. A carpenter that builds all the hallways and rooms for you also has sets that let you add marble, wood stone and other visual upgrades to your halls (essential for bringing in better monsters), plus new upgrades for rooms like turning them into bedrooms store rooms, chapels, altars, fountain rooms and the like. Again, as each of the new items is unlocked, you're usually given a test sample to see how it all works.

In the market, you'll find a little cutie selling everything from basic cooking ingredients to more building materials for the dungeons, and she'll buy all your stuff too, as will the Buyer in the market that promises fair prices (and so far she seems to be telling the truth). Also at your service is a museum that records all the monsters, items and weapons you encounter in your travels, an apothecary that sells potions and revives you if you fall in the dungeon for no charge, a pair of sisters that also sell potions and magic spells and an armorer/blacksmith that will sell you better weapons an armor.

There's also a castle, home to a meek (and so far shy) princess that seems to want something but will never just come out and say what it is, though it's also here where you're awarded stat-boosting rings once you've hit a certain monster kill limit. We even noticed a set of ruins next to our dungeon that will allow you to hook up and play with a friend via Ad-Hoc, but alas we only have the one copy of the game right now.

For a site that routinely rips on games for being repetitive (including XSEED's own recent release of Valhalla Knights), it feels a little weird to be so addicted to doing more or less the same thing every time. But given the sheer number of way to lure in different monsters, from building up all the hallways in your dungeons to helping the townsfolk to constantly leveling up every night (even if just by a little), it seems like Global A Entertainment has done a bang-up job of blending basic role-playing game elements with some light simulation and juuuust enough complication in the rules that you constantly want to make and remake the different floors of the dungeons until you're really pulling in high level enemies, which in turn gets you more loot, which in turn gives you more money to build better dungeons andohgodwejustwanttoplaymore.

As mentioned earlier, the game dose ship at the end of this month, so we'll have a full, proper run-down once we've progressed through more than just the second floor and third tier of unlockable building materials. For now, though, be sure to check out all the screens and movies we've upped of the game. There's lots o' good stuff in there.