Daniel (@dungeondive) reviews Dungeons of Galora, a solo dungeon-crawling RPG from Gustavo Fileto — a review copy, now available as a physical book or a PDF through itch.io and Space Penguin Inc. What sets it apart is its setting: Latin American folklore and mythology, framed as descendants returning to the ransacked island of Galora to recover their ancestors’ looted relics from ruins corrupted by colonisers. The writing and the striking, characterful art are all Gustavo’s own.
Mechanically it’s lean and quick — a dungeon runs 15–20 minutes, a full campaign a couple of hours. You point-crawl through ten dungeons toward a supreme boss, playing a character with a name, a rolled side-mission, and three attributes: Power, Resilience, and Cunning. Two ideas stand out. The test target scales with progression (base five plus half your level), so the world grows more dangerous even as you grow stronger — difficulty without inflating enemy numbers. And combat is resolved by a fixed number of rounds keyed to enemy tier (one round for a common foe, up to four for a legendary one): survive the rounds and you win, with no enemy HP to track. Add relics, light and fixed conditions, and per-dungeon themes, and you get a compact crawl Daniel clearly enjoyed — though he’s hungry to see Galora expand beyond its dungeon walls.
Daniel calls the fixed-round combat one of the smartest tricks he’s seen for making a crawl play fast. Would you trade tracking enemy HP for simply surviving N rounds — or does something valuable get lost when the enemy can’t be whittled down?