A developer has asked players to give their upcoming Steam game a go, despite it having a very off-putting name.
Coming up with a name for your video game is a very important job and one that indie developers, in particular, often aren’t very good at – although Nintendo’s new Drag x Drive isn’t exactly great either.
A good, striking name can help a game stand out from the competition and catch the wandering eye of a customer casually browsing the shelves of a shop or a digital storefront.
One upcoming Steam game, however, has caught attention in Japan for having an amusingly rude name, but one the studio insists wasn’t intentional.
The game is called The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles, or just Crazy Hyper Dungeon for short, and is a rougelite dungeon crawler from Italian publisher/developer Fix-a-Bug.
We’ve never heard of it or the studio before but, according to its website, it made waves at last year’s Tokyo Game Show and won the 2024 Red Bull Indie Forge, a competition meant to showcase indie productions made in Italy.
However it was called something else in Japan, though. As spotted by ugetsutakosu4 on X (as translated by Automaton), Crazy Hyper-Dungeon was translated to Kuso Dungeon, whichmeans… Crap Dungeon.
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While there’s no one-to-one translation for the word ‘kuso,’ it’s often used as a curse word or to describe something as being of poor quality. So, the title could also read as Rubbish Dungeon or S*** Dungeon. Regardless, anyone browsing Steam in Japan will think the game itself is admitting it’s not very good.
The post in question caught quite a bit of attention and soon reached the game’s official Discord, prompting one of the game’s programmers, Giorgio Macratore, to issue a response.
He said the name would be changed, confirming it as a mistranslation, though admitted he still laughed when he saw what its name had become.
‘I’m fixing it now… but honestly, I’m still laughing,’ wrote Macratore, adding, ‘Please give our game a try, I’m hoping it’s not actually crap.’
As for how this could have happened, the most likely answer is that the game’s name was machine translated for the Japanese Steam storefront. This would make sense since machine translations were reportedly used for the Japanese localisation of Crazy Hyper-Dungeon’s demo at the Tokyo Game Show last year.
We’ve checked the Japanese Steam storefront for ourselves and the name appears to be fixed, as it now sports the correct title. Although this naming mishap may benefit Crazy Hyper-Dungeon since it will have drawn attention to it.
Coincidentally, it received a new demo earlier today, ahead of its launch on October 23, so if you’re at all interested you can try it out and see if the Kuso Dungeon moniker was undeserving or not.
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