$14.99Crawl Everyone Gets to Be the Monster
A dungeon crawler where your friends play the monsters. One of you crawls, the rest haunt the dungeon as ghosts, setting traps and possessing beasts to kill the hero and steal their body. Retro pixel art, gore, and a race to the final boss.
Is Crawl worth it?
Crawl is worth it if…
- you have friends on a couch and a taste for betrayal
- you want a dungeon crawler where the monsters are played by real people
- you like retro pixel art, chiptune soundtracks and Lovecraftian dread
- you enjoy competitive games where the lead keeps changing hands
- you want runs of about half an hour that end with "one more"
Screenshots
Kill the hero, become the hero
The setup is a loop of revenge. One player is the hero, fighting through the dungeon for XP and loot. The others are dead, and they are not taking it well. As ghosts they possess monsters, spring traps and throw whatever the room offers at whoever is still alive. Land the killing blow and you take over as the new hero, while the corpse you made joins you on the ghost side.
Grow your monsters, spend your gold
Both sides build up as the run goes on. The hero levels up and spends gold on weapons, spells and items that shape how they fight. The ghosts earn their own currency from kills and evolve their creatures with it: over 60 monsters, from vermin up to demons and undead warriors, each with its own tricks to learn. So a run is an arms race. You pick your build, your friends pick their beasts, and the dungeon decides which of you gets to test it first.
A party game with body horror
This is the rare party game where the trash talk is built into the rules. Rules take a minute to explain: one hero, everyone else haunts them, killing blow steals the body. After that it is chaos, and the chaos is the point. You and your friends invent your own win conditions, whether that is beating the boss, hitting the highest level or simply not letting a friend survive for more than a moment. A session runs about half an hour, and groups tend to line up another one immediately.
Co-op with a knife in it
Crawl is competitive co-op in the purest sense: everyone in the same room, everyone against everyone, all of it good-natured. Working together to take down the current hero, then turning on each other the second one of you becomes human, is the whole rhythm of a session. It is easy to learn, so the person who has never played can jump straight in, and the balancing keeps giving the losing side better monsters to fight back with. Short rounds mean nobody is stuck watching from the sidelines for long.
