d10 Dungeon Gimmicks

Jack T. Cole

1: Ice. Snowpeak Ruins (Twilight Princess), Eleum Loyce (Dark Souls II). Slippery surfaces, block-sliding puzzles, frozen NPCs. Ice walls that need to be thawed for forwards progress.

2: Lava. Goron Mines (Twilight Princess), Volcano Manor (Elden Ring), Iron Keep (Dark Souls II) Large areas cut off by lethal lava flows. Flammable objects ignite in furnace-hot air. Giant forge machinery, flows that can be redirected to melt enemies/new passageways.

3: Factory. Lanaryu Mining Facility (Skyward Sword), Into the Abyss (Titanfall 2). Conveyor belts, electrical currents. Everything's on the move. Each room can be devoted to a particular step of the manufacturing process. Watch a random episode of "How it's Made" and go nuts.

4: Underwater. Lakebed Temple (Twilight Princess), Rapture (Bioshock). Specialized gear for surviving/fighting underwater. Pumps to change water levels, revealing sunken areas, and providing access to higher areas via swimming.

5: Floating. City in the Sky (Twilight Princess), Farum Azula (Elden Ring). Caved-out floors, making for treacherous gaps between areas. Precarious drops. Interactions with wind to blow enemies/yourself off the stage. 

6: Welcome to the House of Fun. Sen's Fortress (Dark Souls), Catacomb Mini-Dungeons (Elden Ring). Traps and secrets everywhere. Nothing is fair. But everything that kills you can also be turned against your enemies.

7: Inside a Creature. Inside Jabu Jabu's Belly (Ocarina of Time), Bowser (Bowser's Inside Story). Everything's made of wet throbbing meat. Dungeon layout dictated by the creature's anatomy. Enemies might be parasites or immune defenses. Classics include the insides a whale or a fish. 

8: Time Travel. A Crack in the Slab (Dishonored II), Lanayru Desert (Skywards Sword). Warp back and forth between present/past, or less commonly future renditions of the dungeon. Easiest to manage if the time shift effect is in an enclosed location, or highly localized. Change things in the past to effect the dungeon's present. Take things from the present back into the past. Puzzle-oriented.

9: Gravity Flipping. Two Moons (Blasphemous 2), Stone Tower Temple (Majora's Mask). A relatively short dungeon, that's effectively doubled in size because you can explore it either right-side-up or upside-down. Learning the layout of one version of the dungeon can help navigate the other version, reveal secret rooms, see puzzles from different angles, etc. Alternatively, a "Mirror Dungeon," which accomplishes the same thing, but everything's flipped right-left instead of up-down.

10: Laboratory. The Duke's Archive (Dark Souls), Talos I (Prey). An excuse to fill an area with all sorts of horrible super-science/magic. Frame puzzles as incomplete experiments. Like the "Factory," the dungeon can be working towards a single end goal, unlocking the secrets of a particular artifact/phenomenon/entity.