u/Splatoonplushie

References used:
Lucca (Chrono-Trigger), main reference.
Veronica (Dandy’s World), expression and pose
Friction (Sentinels of the Multiverse) Pants, lack of socks, blue circles, color scheme, and shoes
Tachyon (Sentinels of the Multiverse), hair color (Unity and Friction have black hair so I figured that to continue the pattern, Tremble should have strawberry blonde hair to match Tachyon)

Explanations:

Depth Spelunking tier: Depth Spelunking is a game that I would argue is the rolemodel for how these other games should present themselves. There's so much I could honestly talk about when it comes to what Depth Spelunking does that these other game should utilize but I think the most notable ones to mention are the break rooms (especially if there's a badge for reaching floor 100), dynamic entity spawns, background music and floor skip system which are what truly allow Depth Spelunking to shine higher than the rest of these games.

S tier; these are the ones that are really good but aren't better than Depth Spelunking.

Anchored: This has a lot of great stuff going for it, bangin soundtrack, references to pop culture in skins (Susie Sparks, Ralsei Remedy), and actual LORE! It's well put together and feels rather balanced. Also the voicelines in the game are something I enjoy. Its main problems are the lack of character design variability and how for 95% of the game you're essentially doing the same thing other than that one floor/mode where you storm in with shotguns. However, it's my favorite "Dandylike" and is very impressive for something made by a solo developer.

Dolly's Factory: Great character designs, interesting boss fights, moments that break up the usual gameplay loop, nice music, and some adorable skins make this a solid game, especially when compared to how it was in testing. My main issue though is that it doesn't feel too separate from Dandy's World due to the similarity in skill check mechanics and how often you're doing machines as well as the crappy reject AI.

A+ tier: These games are games that come so close to being S tier but just aren't there. They aren't able to be in A tier because I consider them better than what's in A tier but they're just not good enough for S tier

Hugo's Asylum: this one is what I'm starting with because it best explains what exactly places games into this tier. Hugo's Asylum has so much going for it, voice acting, unique mechanics, enticing gameplay, a car character which allows you to reference Asgore running over Dess, it's entirely possible that it would be at Depth Spelunking's level. It's possible, but not assured. This is because the game feels oh so janky. It seriously feels like the game is held together on duct tape with things like the dagger weapon glitching out one of the characters, the overall janky feel of it, how if you buy a skin, you can equip the skin even if you don't have the character (and by doing so, you can play as that character), the jankiness with one of the enemies as it just jumps out at you and you gotta avoid moving, but it's hard to tell when it's coming and it can attack you in a safe room, you get it. It is on the brink of being really good, it's just super buggy.

Toons Universe: This game has a lot going for it like the voice acting, character designs, overall personality of the infecteds, the artstyle, etc, but the lack of variability with what you're doing (and that god awful blue room map that is way too cramped) just sets just short of being S tier. It feels a lot more polished up and functioning than Hugo's Asylum but it's just short of S tier due to things like Koi's ability not feeling great, or how using GnR's ability and accidentally crashing into a wall causes you to get stuck.

A tier: These ones are good but they could be better.

Fractured: is a great R.E.P.O lookalike and I honestly enjoy it, but the loot crates along with some of the enemy designs (mall Gorbos) kinda kill the vibe for me. While it has a lot of good ideas (like the four different modes for floors), I kinda just wish there was more explanations for how the enemies behave, especially the shadow demon thing. It's great everywhere else though

Dandy's World: I'm just gonna speedrun this since it should be a little obvious; pros: great character designs, nice theming, Delilah Keen's existence (lets not argue about Delilah's morality please), Veronica x Shanon, Gigi's existence, and the pioneer of a lot of these games. Cons: gameplay, rp area, Brightney's mastery quests, abundance of skins.

B tier: they're alright.

Twilight's Zone has a great presentation and a nice gameplay idea with spirit catchers and machines, but the developer's priorities have been pointed towards the events rather than the main source of gameplay which is a problem when the main gameplay map has really narrow corridors, and there's one map in which the spirits just camp the area that has all the machines. To add salt to the wound, one of the Christmas event maps featured a narrow maze area with an objective buried in it, getting into the maze and out was super difficult, especially if the bellboy spirit spawned because he'd just block the one correct path. (keep developer motive in the back of the mind, it'll be important later in these explanations)

Sugary District: I don't want to discuss this one until we get to D tier, you'll likely understand why when we get there.

C tier: They need serious improvements

Crafters is basically Dandy's World is everything moved at 2 mph. IT IS SLOW. Objectives take ages because you need to light four candles by performing a ritual but that ritual takes what feels like an eternity to even do one candle. Sure if you get perfect rhythm, you can half the time but that's when we get to the other part of the problem. It also doesn't give information about stuff in the game. There's no information about the stats of the starting characters that you can choose, it also doesn't tell you that choosing the green bunny is a trap because there's no advance level character for her. The game doesn't explain what perfect rhythm means or how to get it. The enemy AI also seems a tad atrocious and there's like one map that's just reskinned four times to fit the 4 different elements.

Crazy Skidlets has a similar problem to Crafters in that it also feels slow, but it moreso suffers from making the gameplay too simple. All the characters have 2 stats, speed and stamina if I recall correctly which sounds nice on paper until your realize just how much it makes characters appear identical to one another. Not only that, but the starting characters aren't able to out pace of the enemies at all (and it seemed pretty common if it spawned in the third zone in my first run). However, the thing that really cements this one as C tier for more is that you have to spend robux to unlock two characters which might not seem crazy until you realize how all the other games that I've mentioned here don't require robux to unlock any characters.

D tier; Cookie Kingdom Runner's tier.

I'm just gonna start off with this; in this explanation, I am not going to factor in the controversys with the developers of Cookie Kingdom Runners. This is purely based on gameplay. This explanation is also going to be broken up to also discuss Sugary District (I'll explain why when we get there). Also, this game has been taken down from Roblox, so I'll be using past tense when talking about Cookie Kingdom Runners

Cookie Kingdom Runners: This game was by far the worst of all of these. You have a need to pay to unlock certain characters like Crazy Skidlets, a gacha system to unlock new cookies and trinkets (where you can get duplicates), no balance when it comes to characters, and ... I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start off with some of the basics, there was 4 normal entities (Sunset Crumble, Marshmallow Puff Rabbit Crumble, White Lily Crumble, and Silent Salt Crumble) and 5 bosses (Sea Serpent Crumble, Mist Void Crumble, Shadow Milk Crumble, Eternal Sugar Crumble, and Dark Enchantress Crumble), but despite all that variety (if you can even call it that) they all worked the exact same with some minor differences (I.E. Sunset Cookie would hit for two instead of one) between each one. I'll swing back to these enemies later though because that's gonna be something important for later. The gameplay was pretty much the exact same as Toons Universe (two different types of machines) but with a boss every ten floors which gets stale really fast. Now then, let's discuss dev intent here because this is something interesting and is something I want to bring up (particularly to help set the stage of part two of this section), Cookie Kingdom Runners' updates were weekly updates often focused around some new "op" character that had been added to the game. While there were some updates that added in other stuff, the main gist was "Hey everyone, we added in Shadow Milk Cookie in the game" or "Hey everyone, we added in Dark Cacao Cookie" (which is what the thumbnail of it is saying). This is important to note because this philosophy of just adding in new cookies and not looking at the actual gameplay is likely the reason the gameplay was as terrible as it was. The devs weren't focused on bug testing and making sure things worked, let alone was balanced (because those new "op" cookies were shit when they had a cookie of "rare" rating called "Moonlight Cookie" (it was actually Stardust Cookie) that could infinitely heal themself as many hearts as they wanted with no limit (which means they could just have an infinite amount of health). The devs were only focused on making new cookies to impress kids into spending money on the game for those cookies, who'd then feel obligated to play the game, and then get cash out of them even more with the slow gameplay loop that they had set up. I mean, this is even on full display with how the devs would rush out new characters so fast that they ended making a seperate update just to update rp mode to reflect all the new cookies they had added since they weren't doing that as new cookies were being added nor were they updating the enemy log when they were adding in new enemies either until a much later update too. However, that was then, what is now?

Enter stage right, Sugary District. Sugary District takes the remnants of Cookie Kingdom Runners, removes the controversial parts like the Cookie Run characters and the stolen ocs (except maybe Stopwatch Cookie I think, idk if they ended up working out a deal or something to hold onto the character or what) credits artists and modelers, and the updates seem to be more organized. Gameplay is the same as Cookie Kingdom Runners, however, there's currently 5 normal crumbles (Sunset Crumble and Marshmallow Puff Rabbit Crumble survived the purge with Peanut Butter Crumble, Pink Lemonade Crumble, and Apple Caramel Cookie joining them) and each of these five actually feel different from each other. Meanwhile, Sea Serpent Crumble currently fills the role as the only boss crumble. Even better, when the new enemies were added, they had their info logs added with them unlike the predecessor which added them like a month later, so there wasn't any confusion on how they worked nor was this an obvious bumrush into attracting kids to spend mom's credit card on the game. Sugary District removed the gambling and instead just have a shop with all the different cookie and trinkets available for players, and the cookies have received different rankings to help show which ones have more stars than others and are better based on stats. The developer intent from Sugary District is a lot more focused on trying to improve the actual gameplay of the game rather adding a ton of Cookie Run characters slap the word "op" on them and hope kids get their parents credit card to buy those characters believing that they are the best characters in the game. With this better direction combined with actually interesting enemies and new enemy modifiers (like Determined which slows enemies to a snail's pace but when they see you, their attention span will never end), I have to say, I actually kinda enjoy this one especially thanks to the changes the new developers have performed and that's why I have Sugary District in low B tier.

Sorry this post is long, but feel free to share your thoughts on my opinions (or just tell me how wrong I am to put Sugary District in B tier) or to suggest other delverlikes I should play.

I understand that this is a little looser when it comes to Dandy's World content, but technically, the vast majority of these games are referred to as "dandylikes" because of their inspiration from Dandy's World (except Depth Spelunking).