Crawl

“Lost in here and haunted, just as the cripple had foretold. Suspicions rise in rotting minds, he sneers and grips the hidden blade.”



This week’s recommendation is Crawl, a 2D dungeon crawling couch horror game by Powerhoof. Powerhoof is an Australian independent game studio consisting of Dave Lloyd and Barney Cumming. As well as Crawl, Powerhoof has published Regular Human Basketball, The Drifter and several smaller games.

In Crawl, you play as a party of up to four companions exploring a dungeon… for about three seconds. The game starts with your group betraying each other, each member dying with a single attack until there is only one. From there, the players are each a ghost, squabbling over control of the one remaining body as they progress through randomly generated dungeons. The ghosts can throw objects, possess statues, activate traps and summon monsters to squeeze the life from the single human, at which point the one to land the killing blow takes over. This cycle repeats until the human reaches level 10, at which point they can fight a boss (also controlled by the other players) to win the game.



The atmosphere of this game is fantastic. The pixel art is visually striking and memorable, like a cabinet arcade game but with incredibly fluid animations. The environment strikes a great balance between a creepy gothic style and fun couch-game tone, with bright and vibrant colours used to depict the horrible things waiting in the dungeon. The soundtrack is also great, with 8-bit chiptune tracks that match both the creepy and high-energy parts of the game. Each game is introduced with a creepy narration describing how the party falls to infighting, a few of which have stuck with me since I first played the game years ago.



Crawl does not have inbuilt online multiplayer, but Powerhoof has written guides on how to play remotely using Parsec.

Crawl can be found on Steam here.

The guide for playing with Parsec can be found here.