Welcome back to Backlog Busters, a column dedicated to clearing our never-ending video game backlog. Today, we’ll be descending into the depths with Ishtar Games’ 2024 release Forgotten Mines.
Here’s what you need to know: Forgotten Mines is a 2D top-down roguelike dungeon crawler where you control a party of 3 and venture into the dungeon, clearing mobs and mining ores.
Developed by: Ishtar Games
Played on: Steam
Length: 10 hours (17 hours for completionists)
Forgotten Mines offers a very interesting dungeon-crawler experience with an 8×8 grid as your battlefield, randomly scattered with breakable mineral ores that block paths, and water tiles that stop characters from crossing. The tight battlefield filled with obstacles requires more active planning and strategic foresight from the player to constantly be thinking 2 or 3 steps ahead, even 4 sometimes.
With the number of enemies exceeding the number of party members, the planning required to ensure no one party member is outnumbered by the enemies from all directions creates an additional layer of complex thinking that the player goes through. On top of the sheer amount of enemies per map, there are a good number of enemy varieties, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, which makes for interesting situations for the players to plan out.
![](https://themagicrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-139-1024x576.png)
In regards to the enemies and playable characters, there are 3 main archetypes similar to those found in every RPG, which are melee, archer and mage. But don’t let that deter you, as there are many other subclasses within the 3 archetypes.
For example, just for melee, there are knights with heavy armour, a berserker with a strong axe, a paladin with a 2-tile thrusting spear, a planeswalker who can deal elemental sword slashes, and many, many more. It will feel a little overwhelming at the start, as you may feel uncertain of which characters might be good or “meta”, but as you start to unlock all the available characters over time you will eventually find the team that works for you.
Of course, for a roguelike game, with every run you do, each of the character classes will have a randomised buff and debuff, so you will need to change accordingly and shift up your team slightly to fit your playstyle. In addition to unlocking new character classes, you can purchase amulets which can be used in a group of 3 at a time, which brings different buffs to each run such as more damage to orcs, more slashing damage or double damage to chests you find during your run.
![](https://themagicrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-140-1024x576.png)
To unlock the characters and amulets, you’ll need to mine diamonds that you find on each level, with each floor randomizing between 0-4. Each diamond ore you mine will only drop 1 diamond, which makes the grinding for character classes unlock a little tedious and time consuming. Sometimes, you won’t even have enough turns to mine out all the diamonds scattered around the level, so you’ll probably get a little less than you expect.
During my playthrough, I felt that there were some parts of the game that felt a little too punishing to the players. For example, the ‘Defeat’ screen plays a very deep rumbling sound effect that really feels like it’s also making your gut rumble, which might sound like a sign of a good sound effect, but as a roguelike game, it may have the opposite effect of being too intimidating and discouraging players from trying again.
On top of that, the scaling from Area 1 to Area 2 feels quite steep, with monsters in Area 2 dealing more damage and even debuffs such as poison, making the difficulty ramp up very quickly as you will now need to observe your party’s health a lot more closely.
Conclusion
The game does offer a very unique roguelike experience that not many games out there offer, especially with its limited grid space, strategic planning in both the battle phase and selecting your party members and its difficulty-fun battles you play.
I genuinely did have a lot of fun playing through Area 1 up till I reached the bosses, because the difficulty scaling was quite a fun challenge to beat, but the difficulty scaling felt like it took a hard 90-degree turn every time I reached Area 2. It could just be skill-issue on my part, but having to make that long journey every time to just learn how to play Area 2 does make it a little annoying after a while.
Overall, Forgotten Mines is a great game for those who would actively play it in short bursts, slowly learning and mastering the levels and whatever the ‘meta’ party members are.
This article was contributed by Darren Barker, your sleepy coffee-drinking game design student and co-founder of The Cham Drinkers. Follow him on X/Twitter where he posts and retweets about the ASEAN Game Dev scene and cats.
Forgotten Mines is currently on sale with a 30% discount from now until February 1st. Wishlist or buy the game on Steam, and top up your Steam wallets on Codashop for extra bonuses.