Minerva’s Mansion?
Help Minerva survive her adventure in a haunted house full of sinister ghosts! This spooky rogue-lite features heaps of procedural dungeons, ghosts, and loot.
Don’t Die, Minerva! is an Early Access/Game Preview game, so this is only a preview of what is available at this point. The game places you in the role of Minerva who explores a haunted house with her trusty flashlight that will fend off ghosts, you’d be forgiven for thinking Professor E.Gadd from Luigi’s Mansion was going to descend and give the poor girl a vacuum cleaner, but the combat is more like a twin-stick shooter when it comes to using the flashlight.
You’ll also get other items you can use in battle, but these can only be used every so often and you’ll also get loot that will upgrade your stats overall as you ascend the floors of the house. Each floor is procedurally generated, so you will have no idea what to expect. Luckily if you can find a portal, you can exit the house at that level to buy items before teleporting back in where you were. But ultimately, it depends on how far you can get before you well…for a lack of a better word, die.
The art style for Don’t Die, Minerva! is simplistic, but charming and runs at a steady framerate overall. For a game in Xbox’s Game Preview and Steam’s Early Access, I’m surprised by how polished the game is overall. I’d love to see some sort of co-op mode added, but I honestly don’t know if that is in the works.
The Verdict (So Far…)
As it stands, Don’t Die, Minerva! is a decent rogue-lite game that is surprisingly polished for a game in Game Preview/Early Access. Time will tell if it has the staying power and if more content will be added, but so far it’s looking like one of the surprise games of 2019/2020.