So, after playing Crawl, we want know only one thing, how did they make a game that is this incredibly fun? Designer/coder, Dave Lloyd’s response seems humble, but it’s also probably just true. He says, “We try to take every opportunity to get friends around to play, to see what makes us giggle and scream at each other the most, then build on that.”
This is a dungeon crawler where one player is the hero and the rest play as ghosts who possesses objects or are summoned to physical form at glowing pentagrams. When the hero dies, his vanquisher is restored to life as the hero, and the old hero becomes a ghost. Still following? Only one person at a time is “winning” the game, but progression bundles the 2-4 players up and hurls them onwards together. This is because experience, goodies and gear are provided for hero and ghosts in roughly equal measure. Between each floor of the dungeon, everyone has an opportunity to evolve the monsters their ghost can become, by spending vitae collected. We evolved a slime into a powerful illithid and a rat through various minotaurs to a giant. Meanwhile the hero is sacrificing blood for money and buying ever more ridiculous items.
Crawl is a retro-themed arcade game in a way that thoroughly transcends the era it is supposed to represent. This is a game of excess. The music is too fast, the colours are too bright, the magic sword deals too much damage, everyone levels too quickly, the unrelenting chiptune-style music has too many notes in it and, best of all, you never have to insert another coin (after purchasing it).
This is a dungeon crawler where one player is the hero and the rest play as ghosts who possesses objects or are summoned to physical form at glowing pentagrams. When the hero dies, his vanquisher is restored to life as the hero, and the old hero becomes a ghost. Still following? Only one person at a time is “winning” the game, but progression bundles the 2-4 players up and hurls them onwards together. This is because experience, goodies and gear are provided for hero and ghosts in roughly equal measure. Between each floor of the dungeon, everyone has an opportunity to evolve the monsters their ghost can become, by spending vitae collected. We evolved a slime into a powerful illithid and a rat through various minotaurs to a giant. Meanwhile the hero is sacrificing blood for money and buying ever more ridiculous items.
Crawl is a retro-themed arcade game in a way that thoroughly transcends the era it is supposed to represent. This is a game of excess. The music is too fast, the colours are too bright, the magic sword deals too much damage, everyone levels too quickly, the unrelenting chiptune-style music has too many notes in it and, best of all, you never have to insert another coin (after purchasing it).
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