“The dungeon crawler where your friends control the monsters”

As their website puts it, this dungeon crawler is extremely addictive because of its proprietary gaming mechanic. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The basic principle of the game is that it is a local multiplayer game (meaning that it is best played with other people on the same computer), in which all of the players, except for one, are ghosts. This means that the ghosts can possess traps or become monsters to try to fight and kill the one player who is the human.

The human has a big health and attack advantage over the ghosts, so it is much like a juggernaut match. The cleverness of the game, however, comes into play in that the ghost who kills the human before all of the other ghosts, then becomes the human. This “back and forth” goes on until the human becomes level 10.

At this point, the human is able to go into a portal and fight the boss. The boss is an extremely difficult monster who is controlled by all of the other ghosts. It is crucial, as the human who first kills the boss is the one who wins.

This feature makes the game astonishingly deep, in that strategy, tactics, and even betrayal are necessary keys to victory.

Furthering the depth of the game is a fairly broad unlock-able portion. This features many different monsters and traps to discover as the ghosts. It also features many different weapons, abilities, and potions to be used as the human. These can be accessed in the game itself by going to the shop as a human (where you can spend gold to buy potions, weapons, etc.), or at the end of each floor as a ghost (where you can spend wrath to buy upgrades for your monsters). There is also a submenu on the menu screen that allows you to see all of these.

As if that’s not enough, there are also 2 different single player features. You can either start an actual match, but, instead of playing against other people, you play against the CPU. Or, you can do challenges with specific monsters in the “unlockable” section of the menu.

The one tricky thing about this game, and all other local multiplayer games is that you can only realistically play with 2 players on a computer or laptop. The best way to play true local multiplayer is on a big TV screen with other controllers. This makes the game slightly less accessible, as you may have to buy controllers in order to actually play, but depending on who you are, this could be well worth it. Not to mention that the single player capabilities make up for that as well.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Crawl is a great game, especially if you have friends who you know would enjoy it. I highly suggest it to those who love dungeon crawlers or local multiplayer games; or if you just want to try something unique.

Click here to purchase Crawl from Steam for $10