Monsters & Mayhem

Monsters & Mayhem is essentially a Gauntlet (arcade) clone but without steadily decreasing health and only one hero character available to play as. Enemies look very similar to the originals they were inspired from but have varying levels of strength depending on their colours. They also turn into ghosts and fly off screen when vanquished. There are also no enemy spawners. Pick-up are also limited to only chests which contain keys, treasure and power-ups and a new addition: secrets tiles. When stepped on, they either give a bonus or are cursed; curses being damaging or can even remove some or all power-ups. This and the fact that it is possible to run out of keys leaving a player stranded on a level makes the game very unfair but it knows this and shows you how to cheat very early on. You are therefore heavily reliant on your memory to remember which secret tiles you should avoid and which will give you a boost. You can opt to avoid all secret tiles altogether but some are necessary to complete certain levels...

The game originally in its Shareware form launched full screen and was not very friendly with modern versions of Windows but in the final Freeware release (see links for download) it's in a window and for the most part plays nicer. Many moons ago high-scores could be uploaded to an external website but that's also long gone along with Locatha's homepage.

The game comes with a level editor that supports the creation of dungeons with up to 1000 levels each. There is a user created dungeon available for download at Locatha's (archived) website.