Fitting in between ToME and Caves of Qud, Dungeon Crawl is a fast paced turn-based roguelike with a high level of randomization.
While I greatly enjoyed ToME, I’m starting to suspect that was more thanks to ‘collecting’ all the unlockable content rather than the actual gameplay. Here everything is available from the beginning and after trying a variety of race/class combos I’ve not had much luck getting invested. Two things in particular are holding me back:
– The skill leveling system.
– A design philosophy that promotes leaving and coming back later.
The skill system is odd in that the XP you get for killing things is applied both to your level and skills at the same time, and it’s very easy to accidently spread yourself too thin or end up underpowered if you leave things on automatic. Basically you’ll want to switch it to manual mode and then pick 1-2 skills to advance to certain milestones before deactivating them and picking different ones. But what happens if the randomization doesn’t give you weapons or spells related to the skills you’ve focused on? Well, you’re kind of screwed and all that XP was wasted.
As for the backtracking issue, when I play games I like to clear out a level/area completely before moving on to the next. I do not, under any circumstances, want to have to leave an area uncleared only to come back some interminable amount of time later on. Here there are often clusters of monsters scattered about which are significantly stronger than the average and/or entire sublevels featuring massive difficulty spikes. Most of the time they’re not even segregated and so I’m not sure exactly how you’re supposed to ‘come back later’ when you can’t really run away from them to begin with.
Mostly what playing this has accomplished was make me nostalgic for the first Diablo.