Crawl

The Good

• Excellent pixel art and animation
• Excellent sound design and chiptune music
• Fun, frantic arcade-style gameplay
• Well-polished and evocative of the best of 1990s coin-ops like Gauntlet

The Bad
I can't actually think of criticisms for Crawl. It does pretty much everything it does well, and is a masterclass in polish and presentation in its style.

The Bottom Line
Crawl is a great indie frenemy-co-op arcade game that just oozes charm and polish. Everything from sound design and chiptune music to the pixel graphics and animation are just spot-on, and if this were a 1990s arcade game, it would be a genre-defining classic up there with the best of them.

It's an action-slasher dungeon crawler in which up to 4 doomed adventurers (either player or bots) proceed through a dungeon in which THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE. At any given moment, one player is the adventurer, and three of the players are vengeful spirits working together to kill the adventurer, but also competing to get the last killing blow. Whoever can kill the adventurer, knocks him into being one of the vengeful spirits, and takes his place as the living adventurer.

The main vehicles of this are traps and pentagrams. Traps can be controlled by the spirits to trigger and launch attacks at the adventurer, and pentagrams transform the spirits into physical monsters (the kinds of which are chosen at the beginning of each game) who can then attack the adventurer.

As each game session progresses, the longer a player spends in either mode, the more currency (gold for the adventurer, ectoplasm for the spirits) each player gains for upgrading. Adventurers are upgraded in the item shops, and manifestable monsters are upgraded at the end of every level.

This function, particularly the monster upgrading, serves as a leveling feature, since, if you have a bad game and can never seem to become the adventurer, you'll get a lot of ectoplasm for monster upgrading, making you have the most deadly monsters, which gives you more chance to be THE ONE.

At the end, there are big monster bosses to fight, and THE ONE wins if he can defeat it. Meanwhile, the petty vengeful spirits, if they can't win, at least want to help the monster boss beat the adventurer.