It’s winter, and that means it’s the perfect time to curl up at home with a mug of hot chocolate, and maybe neglect that workout practice you built up over the summer. Couple that with a season filled with heavy eating, and it’s an easy recipe for unexpectedly putting on a couple unwanted pounds.
Enter Dungeon Runner, a new app from British developer Six to Start that’s designed to get people moving by challenging them to a sequence of body weight exercises chained together by a bunch of 8-bit visuals. Users set up an iPhone or iPad with the free app, and then start up a difficulty-rated set of exercises including jumping jacks, squats and burpees.
Dungeon Runner tracks users’ reps by taking advantage of an iPhone or iPad’s front-facing camera and tracking users’ exercise using computer vision. It’s a bit like Just Dance, but with punches and burpees taking the place of dance moves. Users move through a dungeon corridor, fighting enemies, jumping over chasms, and collecting power ups before facing down a multi-stage boss fight.
Speaking from experience, it’s best to try your first workouts with Dungeon Runner at a time when you don’t mind doing absolutely brutal things to your leg muscles. My first workout, which included two back-to-back runs through the game’s two lowest-difficulty modes, left my quads and hamstrings sore for a couple of days after that.
The aftermath was rough, but the game’s visuals kept a smile on my face the entire time I was working out. It’s a high energy, medium intensity workout that’s enough to get your heart pounding without sacrificing a ton of time. People who want to get a long cardio workout in should probably look elsewhere.
As with any workout, it’s good to keep in touch with your body, and stop if you feel something wrong. I’ve found that the Dungeon Runner workouts are reasonably hard on my knees, and I imagine that people with other difficulties will find some of the other exercises difficult.
For that reason, I wish there was a way for users to pick which exercises they want to do. In addition to whatever physical difficulties certain exercises might cause people, there’s a lot of jumping involved in a typical Dungeon Runner workout. Between the jumping jacks, power squats, burpees and ski jumps, people who live anywhere but the bottom floor of an apartment building could easily end up on their neighbors’ bad side.
Dungeon Runner’s 8-bit visuals are great for motivation, but I wish that the app had a visual guide to the ideal form of each exercise. The company offers a textual description of what each named exercise actually means inside the settings menu, but I wish I could get some idea of what they actually want me to do in visual form.
It’s also worth noting that the game’s visuals are more suited to the larger screen of an iPad than an iPhone’s smaller display. I found my iPhone 6 reasonably readable, but people who don’t want to squint are probably better off setting up a tablet.
Overall, Dungeon Runner’s aesthetics and encouragement are a good way to get off the couch for a few minutes and get pumped to work out. It’s definitely worth a look for people who need a little extra push to get moving.
Dungeon Runner is available for free from the App Store.
