"Truly, accidental marketing at its finest": Indie dungeon RPG mistranslated as "Sh**ty Dungeon" actually got a huge boost from Japanese Steam users sharing the joke

An Italian indie game on Steam called The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles, which accidentally ended up being localized to "shitty dungeon" in Japan, actually received a ton of wishlists off the back of it.

Back in August, 2D dungeon-crawling, roguelite-adjacent RPG The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles got a Japanese Steam page. This was quickly picked up on by players, who noticed that the translation work wasn't exactly accurate. The translated title ended up as "Kuso Dungeon," which translates to "Shitty Dungeon" or, at best, the slightly less mean "Crap Dungeon."

The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles' creator Paolo Nicoletti spoke to GameSpark (translated by Automaton) and acknowledged the "Shitty Dungeon" saga.

"Everyone was laughing their heads off, and I was too," Nicoletti said, adding, "It was a completely unintentional accident, but it ended up bringing the game lots of attention."

Nicoletti noted that even though a correct translation was eventually pushed onto the game's Steam page for Japanese players, "Shitty Dungeon" went viral enough that the game actually received a surge of wishlists off the back of it (according to SteamDB the game is currently 327th in wishlist activity), with Nicoletti calling the game "truly, accidental marketing at its finest."

And after all of that, it looks like the game isn't "shitty" after all, as it's currently sitting with a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam. One of the top reviews for the game is in Japanese, and says (via machine translation), "The name 'Shitty Dungeon' makes me think it's a joke game, but it's actually quite well-made."

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