Linley's Dungeon Crawl

5 The Perfect Roguelike
I was hardly a stranger to the Roguelike genre before I started on Crawl. As a youth, I cut my teeth on semiroguelikes such as Kroz, Castle Adventure, and ZZT. In the period right before I found Crawl, I was an avid fan of Nethack, ADOM, and a few other classics of the genre. And then I found crawl, and I never looked back.

Crawl is three things, right off the bat. First, it’s relatively intuitive. After about fifteen minutes of double-checking the help screen, you don’t need it anymore, and you’re pretty much good to go for the entire rest of the game. That’s a good sight better than a lot of other favorites of the genre, and I am looking at you, Dwarf Fortress! Second, it’s big. Yes, a lot of Roguelikes have a theoretically infinite number of levels, and I suppose that Crawl is no different in that regard, but the world FEELS big. That’s because there are so many sub-levels of the dungeon to find – so far I’ve found the Orcish Mines, the Den, the Lair, the Labyrinth, the Vaults, and unfortunately I’ve ended up on the Abyss a few times, each time ending in my death. Third, the game is absolutely addictive in that “just one more level, oh wow is it already two in the morning” way.

Now, the game isn’t quite perfect. For one, it’s painfully hard to get casters up and running, because of their relative inability to cast in armor. Levelling is a long, dull process late in the game, as the EP requirements skyrocket, and I’d kill for some better documentation, especially of the various races and their respective strengths and weaknesses. I mean, what IS the difference between a Hill Dwarf and a Mountain Dwarf? Buggered if I know, but then again, I usually roll a Human Chaos Knight of Xom nowadays, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain about that too awful much.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a good dungeon crawl, look no further. If nothing else, mucking around with the vast amount of races and classes is a good way to blow an hour, and it’s a tiny file. I mean, look at it. Less than a meg, unless you’re running a Mac. You could keep the entire game in a subfolder on your desktop, with a copy of the subfolder as a save file in case your character bites the big one.

Not that I do that.

Wink wink.