Shattered Pixel Dungeon Review: What Players and Critics Say, and Who It Suits

How this review was made: we haven’t played Shattered Pixel Dungeon. This page puts together what its players, the press and its developer say, each with a date, and the ratings as the stores showed them on 17 October 2026. Our Shattered Pixel Dungeon page covers the file we host.

Short answer: for a free game on Android, the praise is close to unanimous: 4.8 stars from 173,000 reviews on Google Play, first place in TheGamer’s list of the best open-source games, and a “desert island game” for TouchArcade. It is a traditional roguelike: turn-based, a new dungeon every run, and when you die the run is over. What divides players is exactly that. It is hard, has no difficulty setting and no saves to go back to, and luck shapes each run. If that sounds like fun, the sources say there are few better games of its kind on a phone. If losing an hour’s run to one mistake sounds like a reason to stop, read the criticism below first.

The ratings

Where	Rating on 17 October 2026	Which version it rates
Google Play	4.8 stars from 173K reviews; 5M+ downloads	The developer’s Google Play build: free, with optional supporter purchases
Steam	English reviews: Very Positive, 92% of 864; last 30 days: 90% of 41; Steam’s summary for all languages: Overwhelmingly Positive, about 2,100 reviews	The paid PC version
App Store	4.9 stars from 4.2K ratings	The paid iPhone and iPad version
itch.io	4.9 stars from 158 ratings	The developer’s free and paid downloads
Metacritic	No critic score (“tbd”); users 8.1 from 14 ratings	Metacritic’s main page for the game

None of these rates the file we host. That is the developer’s open-source build of the same version, 4.0.2, without the Google Play extras.

What it is

The developer’s description: “a traditional roguelike dungeon crawler RPG that’s simple to get into but hard to master”. You pick a hero and go down through 26 floors in 5 regions, fighting monsters, finding equipment and identifying potions and scrolls whose effects change every game. Its feature list counts 6 heroes, each with 2 subclasses, over 300 items, more than 60 kinds of regular enemy and 10 bosses.

It started in 2014, as the developer’s store text puts it, “as a project to rebalance Pixel Dungeon”, Watabou’s game from 2012, and “has steadily grown into its own game”. One developer, Evan Debenham, makes it, with artists and a composer for some of the art and music and volunteer translators. In 2024 he wrote that “Shattered is my full-time job”, and in January 2026 that it had passed “200k total units sold” across the paid platforms.

What the press says

No major outlet has given it a critic score that Metacritic lists. The reviews and features we found:

• TouchArcade, Game of the Week, August 2021, when the game reached version 1.0 and came to iPhone (no score): “Shattered Pixel Dungeon is just such a finely honed version of the game with even more content and a much more approachable feel.” And: “This is a real-deal roguelike game that demands a lot from its players. You will die, and die a lot, and then you’ll die some more after that.” Its conclusion: “Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a desert island game if there ever was one”.
• 148Apps, August 2021, on the iPhone version: “My only problem with the game is that with all these possibilities, some runs can feel doomed from the start.” And: “just know that it might take a dozen or more crawls before you get to dig into the deeper, more satisfying depths of the experience.”
• Linux Format gave the PC version 9/10 in July 2022, quoted on the Steam page: “This is a classic rogue-like dungeon crawler that has a near-decade of mobile polish applied, taking it to pixel perfection.”
• Den of Geek, in a list of the best traditional roguelikes, January 2024: “the mobile ports are genuinely the most comfortable to play.”
• TheGamer put it first among open-source games in March 2024: it “continues to represent the gold standard of open-source gaming.” Mindustry is third on the same list.
• Kotaku, in a list of phone games, January 2026: of the many games built on Pixel Dungeon, “it’s generally agreed the best of these is Shattered Pixel Dungeon”, and it “feels uncomplicated and welcoming to play”. Its “It’s $5” matches the iPhone price; on Android the game is free.

Older pieces describe fewer heroes and bosses: the Duelist arrived in 2023, the Cleric in 2025, and version 4.0 in September 2026 added a large new quest.

What players praise and criticise

We went through the reviews that Google Play and Steam rank as most relevant or most helpful: 80 on Google Play, including 40 of the one- and two-star ones, and 40 on Steam. That is a sample picked by the stores, not a survey.

The praise centres on a free game with nothing pushed at you. A five-star Google Play review from April 2026: “it has literally zero ads. None! Not even banner ads or ads on the menu screen.” Others call it hard but fair, and like that it keeps getting updated and can be played with one hand. On Steam, many of the most helpful positive reviews come from people who played it on their phone first; one from May 2025: “I honestly only purchased this game on Steam to help fund the developer. I have over 600 hours played on my Android.”

The criticism, mostly from the low-rated Google Play reviews:

• Too hard, with no way to make it easier. “This game could really benefit from an easy mode or an advanced settings menu of sorts for difficulty” (two stars, June 2026). There is no difficulty setting, only challenges that make it harder.
• Luck decides too much. A negative Steam review from November 2025: “if the game happens to give me good stuff then I’ll have a good run, otherwise I’m gonna die pretty early.” The 148Apps line about runs “doomed from the start” says the same.
• Food. “Your character has the metabolism of a hummingbird, there’s not enough food” (one star, July 2026).
• Losing long runs. “There are no checkpoints or saves, so one unlucky turn ruins hours of progress” (two stars, August 2026). No equipment or levels carry over from one run to the next either, only unlocks such as heroes and badges, which some players miss and others defend.
• The new item art in version 4.0 drew a few one-star reviews in September 2026: “The new look of the items is horrible. the old ones looked great.”

How hard is it

The developer doesn’t hide it. The store text: “You probably won’t win on your first try, but there are many tricks and strategies to discover and learn on the path to getting your first win.” The in-game guidebook goes further: “Don’t be upset if you are dying a lot, this game is hard! Focus on learning the game and steadily improving, not on winning right away.”

Help comes in small doses: the guidebook “will magically let you know when it’s best to read each page”, and version 1.4 added a tutorial in 2022. Some modes stay locked until you have won once. That applies to the challenges, the daily run (“Every day a new game is available that is the same for everyone!”) and custom seeds, which generate the same dungeon for anyone who enters them. Players who have won describe it taking from a few dozen to about 200 runs.

On a phone

This is where the game started, and the developer says the phone version is the full game: “There are no base differences between the Android and Desktop versions of the game, gameplay is exactly the same and the game will pick different UI modes to offer or default to based on the size of the screen its running on.” Since September 2025 it uses the full screen on phones with a small notch or camera hole. It plays offline, needs no account, and runs on Android 5.0 and later; the developer keeps an older version, 3.2.1, for Android 4.0 to 4.4. Game controllers work too, and our game page describes the settings.

Which version to get

	Price on 17 October 2026	What differs
Google Play	Free; optional purchases from US$4.99 to $19.99	Play Games sync; Firebase analytics, which the privacy policy says you can turn off
The developer’s open-source build (this site, also on F-Droid and GitHub)	Free	No purchases and no data collection; a Support the Game screen links to Patreon
itch.io	Free, or a paid version from US$4.99	The paid one has “a few cosmetic extras such as the ability to rename heroes and items, and extra pages in the game’s rankings screen”
Steam	US$9.99 (half price when we checked)	Steam achievements and cloud saves
App Store	US$4.99	iPhone and iPad

The game is the same in all of them. The Google Play purchases are there to support the developer; he says the paid itch.io version “includes many of the supporter purchase features built-in”, and describes its extras as cosmetic, but the full list of Google Play perks isn’t published. The privacy policy: “data collection is only present in the Google Play and App Store versions”.

How it has changed

The developer’s store text promises “Updates roughly every 3 months”, and the game has been updated since 2014, though the latest big gap was longer: the game’s own change list says version 4.0 came “281 days after v3.3.0”, with patches to 3.3 in between. The milestones:

• August 2021, version 1.0 and the iPhone release; March 2022, the PC release on Steam.
• 2023 and 2025, two new heroes: the Duelist and the Cleric.
• 9 September 2026, version 4.0, “arguably Shattered’s biggest update yet”: a new quest in a vault “roughly the size of three dungeon floors”, which you enter without your gear, plus new item art and six new enchantments. The current patch, 4.0.2, came out on 7 October 2026.

The verdict, from the sources

• Likely to suit you if you like turn-based games where you think through each move, and don’t mind starting over: the critics, both stores’ ratings and the developer’s own track record point the same way, and on Android it costs nothing and shows no ads.
• Think twice if you want an easy mode, saves you can go back to, or progress that carries between runs. Those are the most common reasons for low ratings, and the game has none of them by design.
• Players of the original Pixel Dungeon get the same basic game with more heroes, items and bosses, new music and many changes to balance.

Similar games on this site

• Rat King Pixel Dungeon 2: a fan-made version of Shattered Pixel Dungeon itself, with stronger heroes.
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Brogue CE: deeper and more traditional roguelikes, fully offline.