Starring versions of some of my favorite characters from Koihime Musou, Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain is now on Steam. It’s a curious mix of dungeon management, tower defence, time management, and visual novel, so I wanted to try it out.
It is strongly recommended to use the adult patch to play this game, as the default Steam version is missing significant amounts of content. A version with this patch is what is being reviewed here. You can also instead buy the full release from other platforms. No official version of this release contains the expansion (Hoshiyomi no Shintaku) content.
The Demon Queen Karin
The protagonist, Kazuto, is a regular human adventurer who just so happens to love dungeons. Recruited by the demon accountant Fuu, he finds himself in the role of dungeon manager of a newly established dungeon. Their goal is to make money to fund the expansion of the dungeon, eventually finding and releasing the seals that are keeping the Demon Queen Karin powerless and trapped within the mountain. He quickly gets over the fact that she’s seen as the greatest evil that humans have ever faced and that he’s signed up to help bring her back.
The opening revolves around recruiting more staff, who you’ll recognize easily if you’re familiar with Koihime Musou. All of the characters here are just slightly different. Keifa still obsessively loves Karin and hates men, but the latter is toned down enough for a romance to work; Shunran is still a fight-loving meathead but she has new concerns as an ogre princess; and Shuuran still loves her sister too much. Everyone and their new backstories are introduced here too, so familiarity with Koihime Musou isn’t necessary, even if it may help appreciate certain references more.
While there isn’t a huge amount to the plot and the major story details are mostly saved to the end, there’s a great cast of characters, mostly from the Gi (Wei) and Go (Wu) factions. Much of the playtime is spent in visual novel scenes. Some are centered around like dungeon management, others around stuff like casual slice-of-life moments like Karin and Fuu sending Kazuto out for sweets or silly moments along the lines of having a barbeque with all the demons and the smell encouraging the nearby adventurers to do the same instead of attacking their dungeon. There’s even the occasional moment where it drops some of the lore about Karin and Fuu’s past between scenes of characters enthusing about manga.
While Suzukuri Dungeon’s story isn’t exactly deep, I had a great time reading through it and ended up losing track of time while playing for hours until the middle of the night a couple of days in a row. Admittedly, I did already like many of the characters involved, so enjoying more time with them in a new setting isn’t a surprise.
Romance, Sex, and Pain
Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain has twelve heroines. Two have a shared ending, and two have multiple endings.
Each round, you get one talk point. This can be spent on reading a scene from one of those heroine’s routes, as long as you meet the other conditions. These might be connected to story progression or having stats connected to your dungeon. Progress is also incredibly obtuse in its requirements at times. Most endings are easy to unlock as they’re just a case of playing naturally and waiting for the right heroine scenes to unlock (even if what requirement is next isn’t explained), but Renfa’s was an absolute nightmare as it involved keeping two stats consistently low to avoid other scenes triggering and another high, while surviving, not getting too much experience, and not running out of turns.
The romance itself is minimal. It feels more like getting along well until sex suddenly happens. Still, it’s nice to see the one-on-one time, whether it is spent on adventures or working together instead of dates and holding hands.
Sexual content involved isn’t exactly vanilla and while it doesn’t go too far, enthusiastic consent often isn’t a major concern here (on both sides). Mild kinks are included and body types range from average to very small.
While you can only choose one ending, you can pursue (and sleep with) all of the heroines. This is only really acknowledged a couple of times. I did find it a pity that they didn’t do more with Kazuto’s philandering in one particular route due to the situation.
As a nice bonus, there are two hidden characters to unlock. They only have a few scenes each, but they round out the list of heroines nicely.
Building a Dungeon
The dungeon-building and tower-defence gameplay is quite a minimal experience. In short, you can place down rooms in a very limited number of slots (upgrades add more, but it’s still a small number). Some of these rooms can be combat areas where you can assign your characters to stand and fight, some will be traps, and others will be miscellaneous that offer other benefits like additional money or healing.
Adventurers invade from the front and they’ll go through your traps or people, damaging them along the way. They’ll also randomly take different paths, so there’s an element of luck involved.
The only interaction you get while they’re invading is to wait for a gauge to fill up, then use a power. Most powers fall along the lines of healing or buffing. I typically only got to do this once or twice per round.
There is a ton of choice of rooms to use, but between the cost being too high to frequently change rooms until the late game and many of the rooms not seeming particularly helpful, this wasn’t much of a positive.
As well as rooms, you can choose some recruits to assign to your character to help them defend the assigned room. These do have some variety and there are plenty to choose from, but again I didn’t feel like the choice mattered much. On top of that, these units gain experience and you can use somewhat scarce resources to increase their stats, so changing between them based on the situation felt like a waste.
When completing a round, it awards money and experience, which can be used to progress and build more.
Near the end of the game, I found that I just had to keep the layout the same and use the same tactic. Even on the SSS-difficulty dungeons my strategy worked without any issues most of the time.
I wasn’t too enthused about the dungeon gameplay, but each round is over quickly. These sections were needed to trigger new story scenes, but there was some satisfaction in seeing things come easier as time went on as well.
Time-and-Time Again
Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain isn’t meant to be completed in one playthrough. The gameplay loop involves getting as far as you can until you either lose all gold in your hoard to enemy adventurers, run out of turns (increasing your dungeon level enough adds more), or reach a good ending. Then it’s onto new game plus.
Subsequent runs can go much faster. Already-read visual novel scenes can be skipped, character levels and certain unlocks are carried over so defending the dungeon is much easier, and some previously completed levels of attackers are skipped through which makes experience come quicker.
I did find repeating the dungeon gameplay rather repetitive, but it wasn’t too bad since it’s so short. It’s possible to make use of saves to see multiple endings from one run too which helps. This isn’t always the case though, as certain endings lock out others or take too much time to meet the requirements of while getting others.
Technically Not a Great Release
Sadly, Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain isn’t the most polished release. Considering that it’s been out on Johren for several years before its Steam release, I’d not expect any of these to change, other than perhaps Steam-specific issues.
My experience didn’t start very well, as Suzukuri Dungeon crashed the first time I ran it. In fairness, I’ve since played about 25 hours and completed the game without it happening again.
Fullscreen behaves rather oddly. It’s not ideal, but not too unusual for a visual novel or similar to minimize when clicking on another monitor on a multi-monitor setup. That said, it is unusual for a progress bar to come up whenever clicking back onto the game and having to wait before it starts displaying again. Windowed mode is odd too, with the mouse having to remain over the game for any interactions (such as pressing enter) to work, even if the window is otherwise the active window.
The Advanced settings button launches a Japanese-only options box. The exit dialog is also only in Japanese.
Steam achievements trigger at odd times in a few cases. At one point, some wouldn’t trigger at all, but this has been fixed.
On the topic of Steam, this release is severely cut back without the patch, even for 18+ game standards. As far as I can tell, all of the story scenes have been removed. Clicking the ‘Talk’ button just spends a point and does nothing, visiting nearby villages only triggers a dungeon raid instead of a scene before it, and even the scenes that explain what the new traps are for have been removed. Almost none of this is adult content. Considering that the visual novel portions are both the main draw and that the dungeon gameplay isn’t exactly amazing, the patch feels mandatory here. I can understand that this is likely a case of ensuring that it gets on Steam in some form, but I could imagine people who aren’t knowledgeable about visual novels and the need for patches picking this up since it’s a dungeon game, so it’s a pity that it couldn’t get some of the scenes at least.
Many of these issues are not much of a problem individually, but all together it’s not great. While these are the only issues I’ve had, I have heard a few people mention problems launching and playing the game. Just keep in mind that Steam and JAST both have good refund policies if needed.
Sights and Sounds of Karin
While Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain claims to have 596 CGs, most of these are variants of the same images. Still, it has a very significant amount at 105 not counting the variants. The vast majority are adult CGs and there’s the occasional super-deformed (chibi) one. There’s a good number of sprites too. They do have a distinctive style, which I personally like, but they may not be to everyone’s taste.
The background music fits nicely and the voice acting sounds great too. The entire cast seems to be highly experienced with tons of past roles, and as far as I can tell the voice actresses for returning characters all reprised their old roles. While the main character remains quiet, even the random demon workers with throwaway lines are voiced. Kazuto isn’t voiced for story segments, as is standard.
Verdict
Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain is a title I enjoyed a lot, but it has some major flaws. Fairly basic dungeon gameplay, obtuse requirements to proceed, and the occasional technical issue don’t help. Still, if you can put up with these, there are a lot of great moments with the characters. It was worth it for me, but your mileage may vary, especially if you’re not already a Koihime Musou fan.
SUZUKURI DUNGEON: KARIN IN THE MOUNTAIN IS RECOMMENDED
Purchase: JAST USA
If you are looking for another erotic game with sim elements, you might want to check out Himegashima Island. If you’re interested in other visual novels, we have also covered a wide variety both originally in English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Many thanks go to Shiravune for a PC review code for Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
