On paper, the pitch for dungeon-delving video game Necropolis sounds pretty off-putting: a roguelike, permadeath-loaded spin on Dark Souls, in which friends can inadvertently kill each other when they team up in co-op. Specifically, its off-putting nature is two-fold. If you’re not a hardcore gamer, that sentence is gobbledygook, but if you are a hardcore gamer, you’ll look at that pitch with appropriate trepidation. You can’t just slam all of those words together and get a fun, functional game… can you?

The bad news is that a single session of Necropolis won’t answer those doubts. Harebrained Schemes’ first foray into the roguelike genre relies on a few too many random-content-generation tropes that don’t all lend themselves well to an action-RPG that revolves around giant dungeons, heavy swords, and surprise monster attacks.

The worse news comes if you let Necropolis infect your brain in a “just one more” capacity. If you give the game enough of a chance, you’ll uncover just enough systems that do work to make the dedication worth the pain. But perhaps only barely.