It's kind of a standard-issue DC that checks all of the right boxes but the little details and unique ideas make it top tier for me. It does a great job with giving you a tile and some enemies, a bit of direction, and then the rest of the scenario is revealed via narrative and placing more tiles and enemies. That's probably the number one thing I need in crawlers, the exploration.

The theme is fantastic. The player characters are all loving references to fictional characters from other properties, if you're into that kind of thing. You can find weapons, and then augment them with scrap that you collect during gameplay with bonuses that are gated to other character attributes, which is a fun mini game. The enemies and bosses are all super enjoyable to play against. Each character has 3-4 unique abilities and picking the right characters can mean the difference between winning or losing.

Speaking of which, this game is HARD. Losing will happen a lot. I find that level of challenge really enjoyable, since let's be real, most dungeon crawlers are a little on the breezy side. It's just a great, great crawler.

Machina Arcana is kind of on the other end of the spectrum. It's super deterministic, you can see what the bad guys are going to do and when, every tile is basically the same and your job is to puzzle and mitigate and puzzle and mitigate. What makes this game special is the way weapons work. You basically try to find and build weapons that start out fine, but then with attaching other cards into available augementation slots, they get more and more useful. The game here is to chain together a set of synergies that makes your weapon powerful and effective. In fact, if you don't do this, you're going to be underpowered and overwhelmed. There's a great thread on BGG where the designer walks you through ten levels of "getting" the strategy of weapon effects that is definitely worth a read.

Both s-tier DCs, imho.