The Hidden Scrolls
You're not exploring a dungeon. You're managing five different shortages at once.
A turn-based tactical roguelike set in a Spring and Autumn fantasy world. You recruit from 13 character classes, lead 4-person squads into five regions, manage morale and permanent death, and return to base to upgrade buildings and craft gear. The combat uses an 8-square grid formation system where positioning and skill synergies matter more than raw stats.
The Hidden Scrolls is positioning itself as Dungeon Crawler-adjacent when players are actually spending time on it as a puzzle about incompleteness—a game where you're constantly managing roster depth, item slots, and expedition scope against systems that don't quite talk to each other.
Multiple sampled reviewers repeatedly compare the game to Dungeon Crawler, suggesting they entered expecting a direct successor; the comparison recurs not as praise but as frustration that the copy is incomplete—missing Dungeon Crawler 2's trinket diversity, relationship system, and item usability in combat.
The highest-engagement positive reviews come from players who reframe the game as a retreat-management puzzle rather than a dungeon crawler: they emphasize morale collapse, formation strategy, and the decision to come home alive as the actual challenge.
UI and accessibility complaints appear in roughly one-third of negative reviews, often listed first, suggesting they function as a friction point that pushes away players who might otherwise tolerate higher difficulty.
The sampled reviews show a consistent technical and design barrier: players report critical bugs (battles freezing, units becoming unselectable, saved characters losing equipment upon death), frustrating UI overhead (inventory stacking limits too low, no search function for 13+ recruits, no preset loadouts for equipment or squad composition), and a progression loop where combat yields no experience—meaning many players optimize entirely around avoidance rather than engagement. Several negative reviews from longer-play sessions indicate these barriers accumulate and become unforgiving once the novelty of the water-ink art wears off.
See the game in motion.
Assemble a 4-person party from 13 classes, explore five regions, manage morale and permanent death, return to base to recruit, construct buildings, and enlist historical figures to strengthen your forces.
A more forgiving Dungeon Crawler remake dressed in water-ink art and Spring and Autumn history. Harder than advertised, easier than Dungeon Crawler, strategic about positioning but frustrating about progression. The art is consistently praised. Everything else is negotiated.
39 public Steam reviews analyzed across 2 languages.
Synthesized from public Steam reviews. Not affiliated with Valve Corporation.
Player-language signals, not generic review scores.
Best for
- —Dungeon Crawler players who want the same pressure in a different aesthetic
- —Tactical roguelike fans who care more about formation puzzle-solving than combat animation
- —Players who enjoy high-consequence exploration where retreat is a valid strategy
Simplified Chinese reviews distinguish themselves by volume and depth of technical complaint. They report specific bugs (unit selection freezing on frog boss, quest-critical items unavailable, character death causing equipment loss) and missing features (no preset squads, no roster search by name) with consistency. They also provide the strongest positive signal: reviewers with 300+ Dungeon Crawler hours explicitly reframe the game as a retreat-management puzzle, not an exploration game. This reframing appears nowhere in the smaller Traditional Chinese sample.
More games with overlapping community patterns.
Deep editorial analysis
The Hidden Scrolls sells itself as a Chinese-themed Dungeon Crawler successor, but the community's real complaint isn't that it copies Dungeon Crawler—it's that it copies the framework without addressing what makes Dungeon Crawler's progression actually work. One reviewer with 300+ hours in Dungeon Crawler noted that useful trinkets are scarce, boss loot barely helps, and the item economy feels designed to frustrate rather than reward. Another player described the core loop as search, retreat, repeat—notably absent the fight part that would make combat feel necessary. The game has no character preset system. It has no equipment loadout saves. You can't search your roster of 13+ recruits by name or role. These aren't missing features; they're invitations to quit.
But here's the thing: players who survived the first ten hours report something unexpected. The water-ink and oil-paint art direction—the Spring and Autumn historical callbacks, the permanent death stakes, the morale spiral—creates a pressure that Dungeon Crawler players recognize and crave. One reviewer described the folding feeling as exactly what they wanted: high-risk exploration where every decision to push forward or retreat is a live negotiation with roster health, resources, and the knowledge that one character death could unwind hours of setup. The game doesn't reward mastery of combat tactics the way Dungeon Crawler does. It rewards mastery of retreat—knowing exactly when to cut losses and come home alive. That's not a bug. That's the actual game. The official description mentions permanent death as a mechanical consequence. Players are finding it's the emotional center.
Signal data
% positive reviews
Under-the-radar potential
Store framing vs player language
Voice and personality in reviews
Would a stranger click buy?
93 reviews currently indexed
39 analyzed · schinese, tchinese
Last synthesized: Jul 19, 2026 · 39 reviews in that synthesis
Revlize indexed this signal before it reached scale.
7/19/2026 · 74 reviews
93 reviews
+26% · +19
Why it entered the radar: hidden gem.
This timeline records correlation only. Revlize does not claim to have caused later growth.
Review sampling, evidence boundaries and public-signal methodology.
Frequently asked
Technically no. Multiple reviewers note that the optimal strategy is often to search for resources and retreat without engaging enemies. Combat yields no experience. This is either a design flaw or the actual intended difficulty—players are divided on which.
Battles freezing mid-combat, unit selection becoming unresponsive, character death causing equipment loss, and soft-locks when certain abilities are used. Several reviewers report these persist across multiple playthroughs and can make one-save-only mode unplayable.
Water-ink and oil-paint hybrid visuals are consistently praised as the game's strongest element. Character design, environment atmosphere, and attack effects all receive specific positive mention. UI design is not part of this praise.