April 14, 2005

Crawl

by peterb

As long as I'm talking about rogue-like games, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Linley's Dungeon Crawl. More baroque than rogue, but not quite so overburdened as (or, on the other hand, as polished as) Nethack, it's worth a look.

Death comes quickly in Crawl; at any given point, you are only two or three wrong moves away from an ignominious end. While on the one hand this sounds tiresome, it is actually a refreshing break from games like Angband, where the entire first 12 hours of the game consist of a walk in the park, and then the difficulty suddenly ramps up from "trivial" to "impossible" in the space of a few minutes. In Crawl, any time you see more than one enemy on the screen at once, you have to give serious consideration to running away as a viable strategy.

The game tries, with some success, to implement a Morrowind-like "gain proficiency in the skills you actually use" system, where practicing skills is more important, in an absolute sense, than what "level" you are. This creates a feeling of specialization in the characters that is somewhat lacking in games such as Angband and Nethack, where really the end goal is to acquire equipment that makes your character the all-singing all-dancing God of War. In Crawl, your character's skills matter much more than what he is carrying. This is exciting.

The only real downside to the game's relative immaturity is a crushing lack of in-game documentation (an aspect of gameplay in which Nethack is the gold standard). There's not a lot of "flavor" text here. It is a roguelike stripped down to essentials.

But sometimes the essentials are worth being stripped down to. People talk about the fact that Nethack literally has the kitchen sink in it as a virtue, but I think it's a vice. It represents, to me, a loss of direction, a nonsequitur if you will, like a fart joke in a Jane Austen novel. The entire existence of the Sokoban levels in Nethack are an example of something that would have been a good April Fool's joke — once — but now are regrettably baked in to the balance of the game, to the game's detriment.

Development on Crawl seems to have slowed down in the past few years. This is a shame. If there's anyone out there looking for a project to contribute to, I think you could do a lot worse than to contribute to this one.

In many ways, Crawl is Nethack without all the stupid junk in it. Anyone who loves the genre should give it a close examination.

The Dungeon Crawl website is here. There are binaries available for Windows and MacOS, and the game can be easily compiled on Linux or BSD. The wikipedia entry on Crawl has a nice description of some of the more esoteric aspects of the game, including its interesting skill and magic systems.

Posted by peterb at April 14, 2005 08:17 PM | Bookmark This
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Crawl
Excerpt: Crawl by: peterbAs long as I'm talking about rogue-like games, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Linley's Dungeon Crawl. More baroque than rogue, but not quite so overburdened as (or, on the other hand, as polished as) Nethack, it's...
Weblog: GameNews
Tracked: April 17, 2005 01:55 AM

Heee! I edited that entry, and I am thoroughly addicted to it!

I wonder if yall'll be doing DND.EXE next?

Posted by XtinaS at April 14, 2005 10:25 PM

I landed on this site's Last Admiral Returns page on a whim while browsing the famous Underdogs abandonware site, visited the blog's top page on a whim too, and what do I see but my greatest obsession of the last 10 months and one of my greatest obsessions of all time, the lovely Crawl? Cool!

Just to add a little comment on Crawl; it's a gem among roguelikes because:
* You're never rewarded for doing tedious things, which is in my experience tantamount to being punished for not doing them.
* The game design is brilliantly *elegant*; the game design elements *work* together beautifully well.
* It's neither too big (ADOM, Angband) nor too small (DOOM: The Roguelike) -- for my tastes, at least.
* Variety, variety, variety, based on high combinability of basic elements (but combinability as in Go, not as in Nethack).

The basic version provided on the Crawl site is a poor advertisement for Crawl, really, because not only has there been an ASCII third-party patch release with tons of interface annoyances removed, there's also been a graphical third-party release that recently has also started to incorporate the interface patch. The links are as follows.

"Darshan's Travel Patch", as it's called:

http://www.angelfire.com/trek/mazewest/

TileCrawl:

http://crawlj.sourceforge.jp/down_e.html

Hope this inspires some folks to check out this brilliant, brilliant underdog.

Posted by Erik at April 15, 2005 10:50 AM

Don't worry, DoomRL will be bigger when it reaches 1.0.0 ;-)

Posted by KKisielewicz at April 30, 2005 02:44 AM

I arrived here, funnily enough, the exact same way that Erik did, and I hold almost the exact same opinion of Crawl that he does, except his recommendation isn't really strong enough. ;) In terms of balance, variety, and replayability, this one is streets ahead of every other roguelike. Winning Crawl takes years, just like winning Nethack, but the difference is that to win Nethack you need to spend a lot of time memorizing a bunch of spoilers, whereas to win Crawl you need to become very good at playing a very difficult game. But everything you need to know you can learn just by playing it.

Posted by thrasymedes at June 19, 2005 03:44 PM

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