From Archaelund to Zanki Zero - Explore the Depths of Our Dungeon Crawler Guide

A Kobold Story : Trenchcoat Adventurer PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3989640/A_Kobold_Story__Trenchcoat_Adventurer/

A recent release, but one of the coziest, cutest ways to learn the ropes of the genre. Instead of building a party here, you're controlling three adorable googly-eyed kobolds wrapped in a trenchcoat, their stats growing based on what you feed them, and they're not picky about their definition of 'food'. With relatively simple stats and simple yet creative loot, this is just a smile-raising, adorable way to figure out the ropes.

The entire game is presented in the form of their dungeoneering sketchbook, full of childish crayon doodlings of monsters, loot and the many tasty things they found. This one ticks every standard box for the genre, while paring things down as far as you could for a complete newcomer's intro. Don't expect this one to be especially long or challenging, but I dare you not to be charmed by this doodled world of Silly Little Guys. On a similarly silly note, keep an eye open for the upcoming Rizz Dungeon, which puts turns every dungeon delve into a quest to pick up cute monsters... and have them do the fighting for you.

Cryptmaster PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1885110/Cryptmaster/

Another lightweight riff on the genre, fusing grid-based exploration with word puzzles, typing challenges and no shortage of jokes. You're playing as a long-dead adventuring party, brought back to life as zombies by the titular Cryptmaster, on a quest to help him escape the dungeon, starting at the bottom and working up. Each party member (a fighter, a thief, a bard and a sea-witch) has a growing list of attacks that you have to type. The fighter can BOOT or HIT, while the witch can ZAP or summon FISH. The problem is that some enemies have special protected letters in their names, and if you type an attack containing that character, you're in trouble.

It is shockingly smart and creative, not especially long, and full of secrets and easter eggs to uncover. The Cryptmaster reacts to almost any nonsense you might type with full human voicework, proving that the developers put far too much time and effort into preempting your gremlin shenanigans. You could easily lose hours to the card-collecting minigame, which also dovetails into the typing and spelling mechanics. It might not teach you much about dungeon crawlers in general, but it'll expand your vocabulary!

Dragon Ruins II PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3293490/Dragon_Ruins_II/

Billing itself as "a dungeon crawler for tired people", the Dragon Ruins series shaves the genre down to its absolute barest essentials. Wizardry-inspired dungeon crawling but with simplified stats and itemization, but with auto-battler combat that plays out in real-time as you explore. Encounter a monster, and your party will fight it at the top of the screen while you remain laser-focused on the process of navigating the dungeon, collecting items and progressing quests.

It makes for a much more relaxed and casual experience than others in the genre, paired with a moody dungeon synth soundtrack that remains mostly-chill and low-tempo even in the middle of the biggest fight, with the most intense tracks sounding merely unwelcoming. For an interesting, similarly low-fi counterpart, check out Path of The Abyss, with its aggressive active-time-battle combat and frantic FM Synth soundtrack to match, if you want an dungeon crawl for less-tired people.

Dungeon Antiqua 2 PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4005090/Dungeon_Antiqua_2/

What happens when you stick the original Wizardry and the original Final Fantasy in a blender? This delicious cocktail of familiar elements that go together shockingly well. While it's well worth starting with the original Dungeon Antiqua before diving into the more open sequel. If you've ever played a SNES-era Final Fantasy, you'll know what you're doing here, but under the hood lies those classic Wizardry character classes and systems, humming away with ancient energies.

While the Final Fantasy elements are mostly superficial (this is still a tough old-school dungeon crawler with a custom party, not a story-led JRPG), they make playing a Wizardry-style dungeon crawler feel a lot cozier, with a quick and accessible UI, easily parsed fights and a nicely readable perspective on the dungeon maps. While the first game is a short and breezy experience through a single large-ish dungeon (likely beatable in an afternoon), Dungeon Antiqua 2 is a much larger experience set across several main quests, each with their own labyrinth to conquer.

Darkest Dungeon PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/262060/Darkest_Dungeon/

While the dungeons here are procedurally generated, it would still feel wrong to skip on Darkest Dungeon here, as it effectively defined a whole new strain of the genre. Pairing party-based tactical combat with long-term management elements, as you slowly cultivate a staff rotation of adventuring parties in your growing town. Not all progress is positive, either, as your adventurers can pick up nasty traumas which might prevent them from continuing their careers. Or they could just die permanently.

Plus it's wrapped in a wonderfully moody Lovecraftian aesthetic and heavily shadowed art reminiscent of classic comics like Hellboy. Darkest Dungeon is a game with real long-term appeal too, with a Steam Workshop packed full of new classes, enemies and locations to explore. Most impressively is Black Reliquary, a total conversion mod inspired by the works of Robert E. Howard (author of Conan the Barbarian) over Lovecraft, effectively a whole new game running on the Darkest Dungeon engine.

Zanki Zero: Last Beginning PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/819020/Zanki_Zero_Last_Beginning/

What happens when you fuse Legend Of Grimrock with Danganronpa? This fascinating mix of real-time dungeon crawling and post-apocalyptic weirdness. No custom characters here. Instead, you're controlling a squad of fast-ageing clones, each one with a distinct class in combat, but stats that change as they speedrun through childhood to adulthood and into old age before croaking and respawning at the beginning of the cycle.

Why are they being put through this? Why is the world a ruined wreck full of mutant monsters? That's all part of the mystery that you'll have to unravel piece by piece. This one's more story-heavy than your average grid-based dungeon crawler, but there's still plenty of interesting party building, some smart dungeon design and - as this one's Dungeon Master style - plenty of reflexes involved in dodging enemy attacks. Also worth noting that the user review scores for this one have been dinged a bit for 'censorship'. Specifically, a couple pieces of slightly too risque art featuring the child versions of the characters have been excised from the English release. We wouldn't worry about it.

Tower of Mask PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2918410/Tower_of_Mask/

A recent Japanese indie gem, roughly in the same genre as Legend of Grimrock, but with a single-character focus and slightly more action-oriented combat. Enemies dodge, duck and weave, and your hits need to be manually aimed at exposed body parts (ideally heads) if you want to do the most damage possible, with enemy shields posing a genuine obstacle. Movement is grid-based, but the more reactive, physical combat gives this one an almost Souls-like feel as you hop back out of range of attacks and duck back in for a quick hit.

Being more action-heavy doesn't mean that the dungeon is any slouch either. It's absolutely packed full of traps, teleporters, dangerous mechanisms and tricky optional areas packed full of loot. It's well worth exploring every corner, because eagle-eyed players might just find themselves a gun or two, able to end fights with the more agile, pesky dungeon denizens in a couple quick blasts if you aim straight. Quite why a magical dungeon full of strange masked cultists also has modern-day guns in it is just part of the mystery to be unraveled.

Legend of Grimrock 2 PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/251730/Legend_of_Grimrock_2/

While I'd recommend newcomers start with the original Legend Of Grimrock, the two games were pivotal in bringing back Dungeon Master-style games back into style. Despite being set in a grid-based world and you having four characters, this is a real-time action-RPG, with a big focus on carefully timing your movement to evade attacks while poking at enemies or launching spells/projectiles when you've got a long corridor between you and them.

Both Grimrock games have fantastic dungeon design, with smart/evil combat encounters designed to keep you on the back-foot, brain-teasing puzzles, multi-layer movement and hidden switches embedded in innocuous-looking walls aplenty. While Grimrock 1 is set entirely within a vertical mega-dungeon, Grimrock 2's world is more horizontal, with a large overworld connecting several smaller dungeons. Both games also have mountains of mods, featuring dozens of full-game-length adventures each.

Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2248430/Touhou_Artificial_Dream_in_Arcadia/

One of the great rules of indie games is that Touhou subsumes everything eventually. The shmup series about girls in frilly hats now covers all genres, and Artificial Dream In Arcadia is one of the best dungeon crawlers in recent years. Essentially a Touhou-themed take on a classic SNES-era Shin Megami Tensei game. A mixture of classic grid-based dungeon crawler and creature collector, with enemies able to be captured through a short (and thematically appropriate) side-scrolling shmup minigame, making for a very customizable party.

This being Touhou, instead of collecting an assortment of demons and gods (as you do in the SMT series), you're assembling a swarm of rampaging clones of the various iconic women (many of whom are gods and demons) from across the series, so dialogue is relatively light here. There's also no knowledge needed of the series, as you're playing as Sumireko Usami, an occultist nerd from modern-day Tokyo, exploring the magical realm of Gensokyo in her dreams, with the game intentionally leaning on that outsider's angle.

Interestingly, this one also has Steam Workshop support. While there aren't masses of mods for it, there's a few beefy new dungeons to go exploring, plus some iconic ones remade from Shin Megami Tensei, Phantasy Star and more.

Voidspire Tactics PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/415920/Voidspire_Tactics/

Back in our big CRPG primer, we featured Horizon's Gate, an open-world, age-of-sail adventure by solo indie developer Rad Codex, featuring Final Fantasy Tactics-inspired combat. Voidspire Tactics shares Horizon's Gate's low-fi aesthetic and combat, but the entire game here is one colossal interconnected dungeon crawl. There's some story to unravel here, and some cool JRPG-inspired setpieces along the way, but this is a game primarily about crunchy combat and encounter design.

Interestingly, Voidspire Tactics also cribs a few notes from the likes of Divinity: Original Sin (or Baldur's Gate 3), with your combat abilities able to alter the world around you. Want to cross a lake? Ice magic can create a temporary bridge. Trees blocking the way? Just equip an axe and chop it down, or blast it with a fireball. Intuitive, but makes for a more physical-feeling dungeon. It's also a great introduction to Rad Codex's other games, all of which are excellent.

Archaelund PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1082970/Archaelund/

Still deep in early access at the time of writing, but Archaelund is a fascinating mixture of old and new, classic dungeon-crawler and open-world CRPG that didn't quite fit anywhere else. A high-fantasy adventure with full party customization, exploration is handled in real-time, free-roaming 3D. This allows for especially detailed dungeons where you can poke and prod at items in the environment and interact on a deeper level, albeit at the cost of classic grid-based readability sometimes.

Where Archaelund really sings is in combat. Whenever a fight breaks out, the camera pulls back to an overhead perspective, putting your party on a tactical battle grid (the grids were just hiding!) and letting you view your characters individually. There's real depth to these fights, with positioning being important, especially if you want your melee fighters to shield spellcasters from harm. It feels a bit like a more refined version of Wizardry 8's combat - a game that narrowly missed this list due to being just a little too old, thorny and buggy.

Tower of Time PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/617480/Tower_of_Time/

Other than its more explorable and story-driven sequel (the very underrated Dark Envoy), there really is nothing else quite like Tower of Time. Yes, it's a journey through a massive, multi-layered, hand-crafted mega-dungeon with a party of customizable yet pre-defined characters. There's stat-altering gear to be found, optional areas that balance risk and reward, and lore to unravel as you dig deeper. So far, so standard.

But the moment a fight starts, Tower of Time becomes one of a kind. Every fight plays out like a pausable real-time hybrid of MMO raid encounter and sometimes even tower defence, with waves of enemies or bosses with big area-of-effect attacks providing constant pressure. All of your party's attacks and abilities (including a lot of useful crowd control) operate on cooldowns and with minimal resource cost, making it smart to use everything you've got. Even on Normal difficulty, you'll need to. Despite its oddball design, this one is deeply compelling stuff.

StarCrawlers PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/318970/StarCrawlers/

While almost everything on this list has been traditional swords & sorcery adventuring (with the occasional bit of Touhou), anywhere can be a dungeon if you squint hard enough. Corporate towers and research facilities? Yep, multi-layered structure full of traps, enemies and loot! That's a dungeon alright. And there's plenty of them to explore in StarCrawlers with your custom party of four. Some nice modern quality-of-life features too, including a timeline showing you exactly which enemy is going to take a shot next, letting you interrupt their turn or defend if needed.

Unlike most games in this lineup, StarCrawlers has procedurally generated dungeons rather than hand-crafted ones, designed for shorter delves as you carve out your position as a cyberpunk mercenary crew. There's a lot of factions hiring to send you on missions, and sticking with one will eventually earn you some nice perks, at the cost of upsetting their rivals, so there's good replay value here.

METRO QUESTER PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4402650/METRO_QUESTER/

An exciting experiment in minimalist dungeon crawl design, aiming to echo the experience of early microcomputer hack n' slash adventures. Metro Quester (and its standalone expansion Quester: Osaka) is a post-apocalyptic mega-dungeon set underneath the ruins of Japan, with character classes to match. Riot police can provide physical cover for the party and stun enemies, while high-tech fighters command drones from the back row. There's magic users, psychics, martial artists and all kinds of other oddballs to re discovered as you explore further and wider, too.

What really defines Metro Quester is the very open nature of the dungeon. It's hand-crafted but intentionally messy, sometimes forcing your party to waste time and limited food digging through obstacles and rubble. Time is a constant pressure too, with it possible to lose outright if you starve, and the more characters you have, the more they'll consume. While not especially hard, the game constantly pushes you forward into the unknown.

The only real down-side of the Metro Quester games is their bizarre release situation. Early adopters know these games as just 'Quester' and 'Quester: Osaka'. The games were re-released under the Metro Quester name under new publisher Kemco, mostly unchanged, but missing the final patch that the older, now-delisted versions received. It shouldn't fundamentally change your experience, but it's annoying for sure. As an aside, the Quester engine was later used in Monochrome Echoes, a more traditional JRPG-styled adventure.

Etrian Odyssey HD PC

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/29538/Etrian_Odyssey_Origins_Collection/

For those truly bitten by the dungeon-crawling bug and wanting to experience the TRUE soul of the genre, there are few picks better than the recently-remastered Etrian Odyssey trilogy. Don't let the cute anime aesthetics fool you. These are properly hardcore games in the classic Wizardry vein, with tons of classes, skills and systems to wrangle.

What really sets Etrian Odyssey apart from the crowd are two things. First, manual mapping. While you can turn this off, that loses half the charm of these games. Every couple chambers, you're recommended to bust out your digital pen-and-paper and draw your dungeon map one room at a time. The process of mentally mapping it all out and placing items to denote interesting landmarks of interactive items if compelling. Secondly FOEs - roaming 'out of level' bosses, visible on the map (so long as you're charted that area) and freely patrolling. Initially, these are a death sentence, and later a great hunting opportunity and test of your party's skills, making the dungeons feel a little more alive, and a lot more dangerous.

Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1570510/Undernauts_Labyrinth_of_Yomi/

While it would be easy to just put the remake of the original Wizardry in here, if you're after something properly old-school, Undernauts puts a great thematic spin on things. Set in 1970s Japan, a vast magical dungeon has appeared, and sketchy companies (like yours) are making big bucks by hiring the desperate and needy to delve underground in search of the treasures guarded below. There's a vein of dark comedy to this one.

Under the surface, this is classic Wizardry-style dungeon crawling with very similar classes, stat systems and dungeon designs. But the surface is what makes it so cool. Put delinquent high-schoolers, rogue traffic cops and stage magicians in your party, and then try to keep them alive so you don't have to pay out anything to their families. There's some scathing satire happening here. As an aside, we're also looking forward to Demon Kill Demon: Yomi 1984, the upcoming sequel.

The Bard's Tale Trilogy PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/843260/The_Bards_Tale_Trilogy/

While the modern reboot of the series is contentious for some (I liked it, but your mileage may vary), few would question the bonafides of this remastered trilogy of classics. The original Bard's Tale games are truly old-school, dating way back to the '80s, and are also the blobbiest of 'blobbers' possible. Not only do you have a fully custom party of up to seven heroes, but you'll often be fighting dozens of enemies a time, a single attack wiping out several at a time. At least you won't need to remember quite as many keyboard inputs for this pot, which includes full modern gamepad support.

The entire world of The Bard's Tale is arguably one giant dungeon. Even the surface cities you'll be returning to are mazes to be explored and still frequently dangerous locations. While the dungeons themselves are smaller in scale, they're also multi-layered. Each game is also operating on a larger scale than the one before, with the first game being a relatively short and breezy adventure, and the third an epic adventure. Thanks to being able to transfer characters between campaigns, this trilogy can be treated as a single, massive adventure too.

Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1998340/Labyrinth_of_Galleria_The_Moon_Society/

What happens when the Disgaea developers (famous for their strategy-RPGs where it's reasonable to have level 9999 characters) try their hand at a traditional turn-based dungeon crawl? Absolute numerical bedlam, unsurprisingly. Ever wanted to have a party of FOURTY active characters with individually damageable limbs, each with customizable stat growth, esoteric classes and massive build variance? How about the ability to kick down almost any wall in the dungeon, with level design built around that unusual ability. This one's for people who really want to delve deep into an RPG's numerical systems and try to break the game, or get broken by it.

Surprisingly this doesn't come at the cost of storytelling. The game tells a surprisingly dark, mature and very twisty story of a young diviner taken under the wing of a kindly old witch, as the two of them are hired to build an army of puppet soldiers to investigate a grand dungeon beneath a mysterious countryside mansion. My only complaint is that the dungeons aren't as visually different as they could be, with more environment types showing up earlier in its predecessor. But otherwise, everything else is a step up, and there's little reason to play the first game.

Labyrinth of Touhou Tri -The Dreaming Girls & The Mysterious Orbs- PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3067930/Labyrinth_of_Touhou_Tri_The_Dreaming_Girls__The_Mysterious_Orbs/

The second Touhou game on this list, but much deeper down in our dungeon of dungeons, because this one's for sickos - both Touhou devotees and dungeon crawling obsessives. The third in a series (although each is a fully standalone adventure and a fine place to start) by a truly RPG-obsessed designer, there's massive hand-crafted dungeons to explore and so, SO many fights to get into in search of loot and power.

What really defines this game is that it's all about party composition. There's 40+ playable, customizable characters, each of which has a distinct gimmick or three and multiple skill trees. You get to take 12 of them on any given expedition, with four front-line fighters and the remainder providing passive buffs and able to be swapped into the front-lines as needed.

And you WILL need those reserves, because the bosses are brutally tough, but extremely fair. You're given a full list of what attacks they'll perform in what order, and even their logic flow-charts if they react to actions, and need to sit down and properly think about how to counter each upcoming move. Difficult, but gratifying, and it'll make you pause and think about every single stat, skill and strategic choice you've made. At least the soundtrack is great, making those long, tough battles nice places to hang out over multiple retries.

DUNGEON ENCOUNTERS PC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1451080/DUNGEON_ENCOUNTERS/

And here, on the deepest, darkest layer, lies a game designed by and for dungeon crawler sickos. Specifically, some of the most veteran developers at Square-Enix. Dungeon Encounters has almost no story. The dungeon is an abstract, many-layered grid punctuated by numbers that refer to event cards that pop up when you land on the corresponding tile. The music is all covers of copyright-free classical pieces. It is also hideously compelling if you're operating on the same wavelength as the creators.

Gain stat points for fully exploring every grid-tile on the map. Get robbed by a thief so powerful they can put you into deep debt. Assemble a vast range of characters with weird quirks and puzzle out the best combos to cheese your way past encounters. This one is a true experiment in formalist game design, and we wouldn't have it any other way. The most amazing thing is that this came from such a massive developer and publisher. More of this kind of stuff, please!