DEEP THOUGHTS

LABYRINTH OF GALLERIA is a dizzyingly deep dungeon-crawl from Disgaea's devs

- Dominic Tarason

The PlayStation Vita was an underrated treasure trove of mid-budget RPGs, and one of the last big releases for it was Labyrinth of Galleria, a witchy dungeon crawl and sequel to 2016’s Labyrinth of Refrain from Disgaea devs Nippon Ichi. Galleria has gone unlocalised for some time, making me fear one of the Vita’s swansongs would never reach the West.

Fortunately, it’s just fashionably late, and has become a personal obsession and a killer app for my Steam Deck.

Labyrinth of Refrain is a ‘Blobber’ dungeon crawl RPG. A sub-genre famed for putting systems over story. You navigate a 3D, first-person dungeon with a party of adventurers that behave more like a rolling blob of limbs, swords, spells and numbers. Those familiar with Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea series can see the danger here. Galleria may start simple, but escalates into maximalist chaos.

You play as a disembodied spirit, summoned by a witch to map out a dungeon with a swarm of expendable wooden puppet familiars. While they’ve faces, voices and even likes and dislikes, they’re not alive, so even if they get dismembered, you can glue them back together.