Linley's Dungeon Crawl

Game Description

Linley's Dungeon Crawl (or "Crawl") is a well-known roguelike that features expansive race/class selection and a large religious pantheon. The goal of Crawl is to recover the "Orb of Zot" hidden deep within the dungeon complex.

Community Rating:

4.2

from 26 ratings

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Game Info

Tags:
turn-based roguelike

Date of Release:
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October 1997
Linley Henzell
Roguelike
Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, DOS
Singleplayer
Custom
English
Freeware

Related Links:	Homepage, Dungeon Crawl Tile Version, Dungeon Crawlthrough
Also try:	Dwarf Fortress, Spelunky
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Download

DOS:	zip 562 KB
Windows:	zip 487 KB
Linux:	download 804 KB
Mac OS X:	tgz 1 MB

Reviews

4 of 4 people found
this review helpful.

5 Great Roguelike, or Greatest Roguelike?

by Adrahil

Let me preface this by saying my score and review are based on Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Stone Soup is a project in which a couple dedicated people took an abandoned project (Linleys DC) and updated and worked on it extensively. And they are doing a great job. New races, Gods, and more interesting options for preexisting Gods.

On to the review. Crawl is the best roguelike I’ve played. It isn’t cripplingly memorization based, like many others. The game feels kind of easy from the get go (if you’ve played a roguelike), yet the mid game and late game can be incredibly punishing, throwing some extremely difficult situations at you. Which is something else great about Crawl, there are no guarantees, but there are no unavoidable deaths, either (after Dungeon level 1, anyway). Everytime you die, you’ll realize what you should have done different.

Character creation is great in Crawl, with hundreds of possible combinations. Tons of races, tons of classes, and on top of that, there are several gods you can worship, who drastically alter gameplay. And once your character is made, you can alter him as you see fit. If your start a wizard, and find a katana and dragon armor on level 1, you can start using them, and before you know it your armor and blades skills will shoot up, and you’ll be the greatest warrior around.

Unlike other Roguelikes, new players and vets alike will find themselves dead time and time again. In games like Nethack, once you have memorized every aspect of the game, ascending time and time again is not particularly difficult. After ascending several characters myself, including a 15 rune run, I can say Crawl never becomes easy. There is nothing worse than losing a character in the room with the Orb of Zot. Which I’ve done. Twice.

The difficulty is primarily because of the loot system, and the great variation in loot you will find yourself wielding. Sometimes your fighter’ll find a gold dragon armour laying around in the early dungeon. And sometimes you’ll be prepping for your zot run, and look over everything you’ve found in all the 80 levels you’ve explored so far, and wonder how you’ve found absolutely nothing worth note, and your resistances are laughably low.

These variances are what make Crawl great, as it is random, so you’re not going to be dipping your longsword into a fountain over and over til it turns into Excalibur, like a certain other game. Instead, you’ll just be praying you find something nice before you turn the corner and see that Shadow Dragon.

5 Fantastic

by jimmyscrounger

Others have written enough, I am just reviewing to post a link. DOWNLOAD THIS GAME FROM HERE

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

That is the Stone Soup homepage described below. This is classic great roguelike gameplay with a perfect UI and very easy-to-understand controls and mechanics. If you ever considered getting into roguelikes, download this now.

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2 of 2 people found
this review helpful.

5 The Perfect Roguelike

by Mr_Seth

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.

(Edit: Revised Review Follows!)

Holy smegging ZOT.

Upon the advice of another reviewer, I took a look at the Stone Soup edition of Crawl, and was immediately blown out of my proverbial seat, pants, and socks.

The issues with clarity regarding races and classes? Gone, with the addition of a helpful FAQ. New gods, items, and mouse-interface-slash-tileset? Brilliant. And I have to say, the new gods are incredible. I especially like the Unformed, the god of the Abyss. The divinely granted ability to teleport AND to warp off the abyss at will has saved my bacon a few times, let me tell you that.

Get it. Get it now.

5 Suddenly... I get it

by rockidr4

I have tried on multiple occasions to find the reason that so many people love the roguelike. I found many that people hate them. I thought that I just needed to find a more popular one. This as I found out, was a terrible idea (Thanks Nethack!).

After floundering about, trying to figure it out, I found… (cue fanfare) Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. I have never made it nearly as far through this game as I did through nethack, and yet, I enjoyed losing way more.

It reminds me of spelunky (which first sparked my interest in the genre), no matter how many times you get to the second area, you’re still proud of yourself.

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