Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon Review

Approximate time to 100%: Aroun 20 hours or less
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 5
Is there a good guide available: I made this guide: https://www.missitheachievementhuntress.com/oceanhorn-chronos-dungeon-100-achievement-guide/
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, but since you are playing through the game 5 times, it is not likely to miss any of them if you keep an eye out for them in your last playthrough
Grinding Achievements: Yes, playing through the game 5 times is a bit grindy
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: Maybe, I only saw the umbrella special item 2 times in total over five playthroughs. So use it when you find it!
Does difficulty affect achievements: Yes, there is one achievement for completing the game on the hard difficulty
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

I’m new to the Oceanhorn games. I have had the other two games on my wishlist for a long time, but never played them. This review is from the perspective of someone new to the series and won’t be compared to earlier titles. I played the game in single-player mode, so I’m not familiar with how multiplayer exactly works and performs.

Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon is a great dungeon crawler where floors are short, so you feel like you’re making progress even if you are only able to play for a little bit. The story is relatively thin, but I didn’t mind that as I just enjoyed leveling up my character(s) and killing the enemies. You are trying to save your home world, and to do that, you need to find the Paradigm Hourglass that should be somewhere in this dungeon. However, time does a weird thing while being in the dungeon.

The game has four worlds in total. The first world has six floors and then a boss fight, the second world has eight floors and then a boss fight, and so on and so on. A lot of things are random in this game. Like the floor layout, the enemies, and even your skill tree. When playing a new game, they might all be different. There are four characters, and you can play as any of them and switch during the run. They only level up when they are the ones killing enemies. However, you don’t need them all on max level. In my hard mode run, I had two characters on max level and a third close to that, and in that mode, I did die a lot more and switched characters more often. However, it was also my first playthrough, so perhaps with more practice, I wouldn’t have to switch characters as often because one would die. In my four playthroughs on easy mode, I only leveled up my favorite character (the huntress) and haven’t used the others.

When starting a new game, you can decide on a specific attribute for each class. For example, if you choose Holy for a character, it will slowly heal over time, or if you choose Foolish, traps won’t hurt your character. I love the one where you can ignore traps or the one where you do more damage. The healing over time felt slow, and most of the time, you’ll find food items within the dungeon before you can even completely heal. However, being able to change things up and having a different skill tree for each character means that the runs feel distinct from one another.

Another thing I found very interesting is the danger level; this is a statistic that increases slightly every time you descend a floor level. But it goes faster up if you skip enemies. You can lower it by paying money at the Golden Goddess statue and by finding big coins inside crates and vases. This level seems to determine how beefy the enemies are. The lower the danger level, the easier they are to kill. I’m unsure if it also determines the number of enemies on a floor; I don’t think that number influences this.

Achievements in Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon unlock after closing the game. so you might want to close the game from time to time to check out which achievements you already unlocked. The game saves when you enter a new floor, so as long as you just entered a new floor, no progress is lost.

To unlock all the achievements, you have to play five times through the story. (Playing 5 times the last world doesn’t work). Gladly, the game is short, especially when playing on the easy difficulty. My last few playthroughs were only a little over 2 hours when ignoring all chests. Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon also has an achievement for using every special item, and for 100% the game. In the playthrough, you go for the 100% I also recommend going for the achievement of using all the special items, and just use them the moment you find one. As this playthrough will be a little bit longer, it gives you the chance to find them all. For a save with 100% you need to find all the treasures, which are hidden in purple chests. At the beginning of a floor, if there is a purple chest, the game will show you that and show you which direction you can find it. You can’t have any doubles, so this is just a case of finding 50 purple chests within one playthrough. All the other achievements you will likely unlock without even trying to get them, but maybe check the ones you’re missing for the 4th or 5th playthrough, so if you miss something, you can make sure to get them during those last runs.

I give Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon 4 out of 5 stars.

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