Once you jump in, the gameplay is simple enough to grasp: you’ll move your monster one tile at a time with the left analog stick, and combat is handled automatically, Ys-style, with standard attacks doled as you bump into enemies. If you’ve played any recent Mystery Dungeon games - either in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon or Etrian Mystery Dungeon form - you’ll have a good idea of what to expect, although Yōdanji also retains another element common to older titles in the genre: a difficulty curve that points about 90-degree north. Yōdanji is an old-school, classical roguelike, which means you’re in for a dungeon-crawling experience with randomly-generated floors, turn-based movement and combat, a hunger system, and a heavy focus on positioning, items, and exploration.

After a cutely tongue-in-cheek introductory sequence, you’ll be introduced to three of the little creatures, and can then choose any one from among them to start your journey. Yōdanji kicks off with an appealingly left-field, Denpa Men-esque premise: yōkai - ghosts and monsters from Japanese folklore - are floating among us in the real world, and your Nintendo Switch is equipped with the power to scan and uncover them.

Yōdanji is a new instantiation of the concept from eShop RPG veterans KEMCO, and it’s a demonically difficult delight fun, fast gameplay, a great theme, and tons of replay value and variety make this an excellent addition to the Switch’s treasure chest of old-school experiences. Perhaps no template exemplifies this phenomenon as much as the ‘roguelike’, a game type born from its 1980 PC namesake and with a modern presence on nearly every console under the sun. While some videogame genres remain quite open-ended in interpretation - puzzles or platformers, for instance - others have become decidedly codified.

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