Developed by NCS Corporation and published by Masaya Games in Japan and NEC in North America in 1990, Double Dungeons is a one or two-player, first-person, dungeon-crawling JRPG with real-time combat. The game’s unique selling point is that it features two-player split-screen cooperative play, which is unusual for a game like this, and which makes it simultaneously playable with a friend.

At the beginning of the game you can choose between 22 dungeons to play, the last of which only becomes available when you’ve beaten all the others. The game uses passwords to continue games.

Double Dungeons plays a certain way and there are a number of mechanics to understand as you explore. The first one is the fact that most monsters that you encounter don’t chase you and stay in one place, and they also re-spawn quickly. This makes it relatively easy to skirt around anything you don’t want to fight, that is: unless they’re blocking your way. It also makes it easy to grind by killing monsters repeatedly. Each successful kill earns Experience Points (EXP) and a small amount of gold.

Secondly, if your health is depleted in combat you don’t actually die and you don’t lose anything you’re carrying. You’re simply sent back to the start of the dungeon you’re on. You can replenish your health, though, by eating food or drinking Refresh potions.

Thirdly, if you’re playing with a second player you can help each other out in sticky situations – and you can see each other in the maze. For example, I had a situation where player one was getting way ahead – in terms of levels – than player two, because player one was stuck behind a Marsh Snake (a tough enemy to kill on the first level) and couldn’t reach the shop to upgrade. So I had player one kill the snake to allow player two to get through and finally reach the shop. You can also team up and attack the same monster together. Cooperative play like that is satisfying.

Lastly, when you complete a dungeon, then start another, you are re-set back to level one and must play through it from the beginning. Your characters don’t follow on from dungeon to dungeon, which I have to say I found to be disappointing.

Obviously, when you first start out you’re very weak, with just a dagger and pot lid as a shield, so an early priority is to earn enough gold to upgrade your weapons and armour. And to build your levels by killing green slimes (the lowest and least risky enemy in the game). It’s worth noting at this point that Double Dungeons doesn’t seem to cater for magic-users and is exclusively a hack-and-slash game for fighters.

Each player can press the Select button to bring up an info screen that shows their level, their gold, and their currently equipped weapon and armour. The direction you’re facing is also shown at the bottom of the screen.

Each dungeon has a boss and if you manage to defeat it, it will give you one letter of the password for the final level.

While the early levels are fairly small and challenging, later levels are monstrously large, but unfortunately there is no real graphical variation in the dungeons themselves (like there is in something like Dungeon Hack), which – to me – is a big missed opportunity.

While Double Dungeons is interesting to play for a while, its appeal I think is limited due to its lack of graphical variety, and also the fact that it’s just not very atmospheric. The music – which isn’t bad per se – is the same throughout the game and also lacks variety. I think that the developer could easily have boosted the game’s overall look and appeal with some simple tricks that wouldn’t have cost much in terms of memory/storage use, but that they weren’t interested in – or didn’t think of – that. Instead they created gigantic, samey levels that most players were unlikely to ever complete.

More: Double Dungeons on Wikipedia