Crawlers, Blobbers, and Procedural Death Labyrinths - Let's Die in a Dungeon!

[Mixi Blacksand]

I love dungeons. I love going into them alone or in parties, one turn at a time or in real time, hand made or computer generated, and having a nightmarish adventure in resource management and total party wipes. Let's talk about some of our favorite dungeons!

Gamers have longed to be thrown into the dungeon since the early days. Way back in the 70s on the University of Illinois PLATO mainframe system, students were writing games onto the system. One of the first crawlers is known as 'pedit5' because it was sneakily inserted along side some other 'pedit' programs (and was frequently deleted by admins.) This would inspire other games on the PLATO system, including 'moria,' which not only introduced wireframe first person graphics, but 10 player co-op play in 1975. If you're not afraid of using a terminal emulator, you can play moria and some other PLATO games at cyber1.



For those of us who weren't engineering students in the 70s, we were introduced into the joys of dungeon diving other ways. The first-person dungeon crawl was a popular format in the 80s and 90s. Wizardry was one of the most impactful releases. It solidified the formula of making a custom party, starting in a home-base town, and making progressively deeper delves into a dungeon you had to map by hand. Its popularity persists today, and there's even a free modern Wiz game on Steam right now.

My personal introduction to the genre was The Bard's Tale, but there's a whole host of others of varying quality and sanity from the era. If you're wondering what the heck 'blobber' in the thread title means, people started calling these games that because you play as a 'blob' of heroes all stuck into a mass of limbs on a single tile.

While some folks were painstakingly making maps one first-person tile at a time, another style of dungeon was being dug. Beneath Apple Manor and Rogue stuck with the top-down view of games like pedit5 and dnd, but made their dungeons procedurally generated. As it turns out, that bit of randomness really, really tickled certain brains. Games like Moria (not to be confused with the earlier Moria), Angband, ADOM, and nethack strove for increasing levels of complexity to absurdity - while over in Japan the idea spawned the Mystery Dungeon series, which has remained a tight, accessible experience of trying to manage your own bad luck.

What constitutes a roguelike in 2025 is a topic that has been thoroughly beaten into the ground, so I'd love if we could simply embrace the plethora of great games that use procedural dungeons, whatever gameplay flavors they use on top of that.

Not everyone was content to sit and ponder the action one turn at a time. Dungeon Master turned up the heat by making you manage a team of four adventurers in real time, swinging swords, hurling projectiles, and casting magic while square-dancing around the dungeon to avoid retaliation.



Many folks today know this style of game from 2012's Legend of Grimrock, which is in my opinion an exemplary entry in the genre.

Dungeon Master and its ilk were still snappy tile-based affairs, while by the 90s smooth 3D was starting to become the standard. The good folks at Origin took a look at this and said 'hold my beer' before dropping Ultima Underworld. A one-hero affair, what it lacked in party management it replaced with a detailed world full of stuff to interact with in... relatively smooth 3D. If you want to know all about it, Majuular has been doing a wonderful video essay series on the Ultimas, including these spinoffs.



... and that's just a brief overview of the start of gaming's obsession with dungeons. I didn't even talk about Diablo! What are some of your favorites? Y'all mapping on your DSes with Etrian Odyessy? Building the georama in Dark Cloud? On your 2000th hour of Hades? Post your favs here!

[Trysdyn]

The original Avatar on the PLATO/CYBIS was something I set up an entire emulator stack to play. There is a local-run PLATO emulator and someone grabbed a dump of everything that was on it at some point and it's still kicking around; that's the basis of cyber1. The entire stack is about 2GB, which is absolutely ridiculous for the 70s.

Avatar inspired the development of Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol which is also still kicking around, but is in a weird abandonware-resale-monetized space where you're proooobably best off getting the "demo" somewhere. If you want Avatar or Moria vibes with a modern coat of paint (okay modern-ish, it's a Win 3.1 game), that's a thing to look into.

If you want the modern take on the blobber concept, the Etrian series is probably the gold standard there. The main five games just get better as you go, with 4 and 5 largely being equal in my view. The gaiden games like Untold and Nexus get a little squirrely but they're all amazing. I don't think I need to sing their praises too much.

What I will boost is Legends of Amberland and its sequel. Someone in 2022 or so decided "I love Might & Magic 3 so much, I want to make a spiritual successor" and did just that. It plays a wee bit different, but it feels exactly like wandering around Isles of Terra again once you get into it; just with some QoL bolt-tightening and difficulty options.

And finally, the jank option I love inflicting on people is the Famicom Disk System Deep Dungeon series. Audio warning for terrible, awful, no really it's bad music on that one. That's a 4 game series and the first three games are all disasters in different ways. The 4th game is actually amazing. Asmilk bought the company making it and made an actual banger of a game and then dropped the series after that. Shame.

My first love in the blobber genre is the Might & Magic original five though. I change which one I consider my favorite about as often as I change my socks, but they're all great. At the moment M&M2 is probably barely beating out the Xeen duo in that place in my head. I still need to play Sword of Xeen, the weird fangame that got elevated to an officially published work.

[dragongirlfangs]

I have so, so so much love in my heart for ADOM. It's absolutely my favorite "classical" roguelike ("true" roguelike? Will I be laughed off the stage for mentioning the Berlin Interpretation?). That's not for lack of trying! Maybe this will be the year I finally get into NetHack...

I digress. The amount of content present even in v1.1.1 of ADOM (the most modern when I discovered the game in the late aughts/early 10s) frankly blew my mind as a kid; I daydreamed often about the characters I played, imagining vivid backstories and truly imagining so much more than you would with a modern fully-featured roguelike. There's a beauty to the ascii graphics that really can't be understated!

It took me nearly a decade of playing to finally reach my first Ultra Ending, which was only possible due to some truly incredible drops in the late game (getting a Wand of Wishing with 5 charges... I don't know if any other game has made me feel quite as godlike as I did in that moment, haha). It's brutal, uncompromising and every inch forward feels like a huge accomplishment... it's a really awesome game!

[Trysdyn]

("true" roguelike? Will I be laughed off the stage for mentioning the Berlin Interpretation?)

I call them "Classic roguelikes" at this point myself, which makes me eyecross. But words change meaning and okay fine

ADOM's one I never could get into. Mostly because I tried it as an impatient teen and that left impressions. I should try it again. I tend to prefer more chaotic less structured experiences, but I mean I liked ToME recently and that's pretty structured.

I did recently play Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal, which are classic roguelikes on old Sega consoles. Super barebones, but very pure experiences.

[Mixi Blacksand]

The Berlin Interpretation and similar pedantry are something I'd like to keep out of the thread. I think it's a huge distraction from appreciating what each game does well trying to carefully silo them all that way. Game genre taxonomy is a nebulous thing and we should embrace that.

[Loosf]

i love wizardrylikes

I really love wizardrylikes

I have burnt myself off from wizardry likes, letsplaying SMT Strange Journey then trying to letsplay wizardry 6-8

I got to like one third of wiz7 and then life got in the way in horrible ways and I have not picked that one up again.
I still do like them a lot. The latest one I bought was

and it is really fucking cool

You also cannot really go wrong with the Elminage games.
Another one I can recommend is the gog version of stranger in sword city
https://www.gog.com/en/game/saviors_of_ ... _revisited

Oh wait, they added this version to steam now as well.

[Mixi Blacksand]

Stranger of Sword City has one of my favorite features in these games: Custom character portraits. You can bring all your best friends with you to die horribly due to your bad decision making and dice rolls.

[sunlightFrequency]

hello as the resident Might & Magic VI enjoyer I am compelled to post this 22 hour full longplay of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr3I_N5cMw

It's not locked to a grid like some of the other examples posted, but I've heard it referred to as a "blobber" too so I'm posting it. I will also take any excuse to promote my favorite RPG of all time.

[Mixi Blacksand]

Dungeons need not confine you to the grid! A really interesting game is Dicing Knight. It's an action roguelike with metaprogression on the Wondersawn... way back in 2004 before that genre blew up. The gimmick is all of your actions involve in-game dice rolls - which you can see or affect with powerups! It's a really solid experience most people haven't touched.

[Komma Chameleon]

Avatar inspired the development of Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol which is also still kicking around, but is in a weird abandonware-resale-monetized space where you're proooobably best off getting the "demo" somewhere. If you want Avatar or Moria vibes with a modern coat of paint (okay modern-ish, it's a Win 3.1 game), that's a thing to look into.

I've sunk sooo much time into Dejenol. It might be childhoold nostalgia, but I swear there's a secret sauce in that game that makes the loop ultra satisfying. Maybe it feels fast paced compared to other blobbers, or maybe I just like watching the numbers go up.

Another thing: since these games usually have a first-person perspective, I like naming my party members after my fursonas and imagining it's them on this forsaken adventure. It's fun!

[Trysdyn]

Dungeons need not confine you to the grid! A really interesting game is Dicing Knight.

This is an amazing speedrun if you use the weird menu glitch to warp yourself to the last floor in each dungeon (which apparently someone had happen and just went "huh that's weird" and I'm the one who figured out how to actually do it). You can beat the entire game, including the final "infinite" dungeon in about 20 minutes and still have to think on your feet and adjust to the dungeon generation and orb drop RNG.

It's still a solid game without that but I found the dungeons get a bit long in the tooth later on.

[Weasel]

hello as the resident Might & Magic VI enjoyer I am compelled to post this 22 hour full longplay of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr3I_N5cMw

It's not locked to a grid like some of the other examples posted, but I've heard it referred to as a "blobber" too so I'm posting it. I will also take any excuse to promote my favorite RPG of all time.

Yeeeah, M&M6 (and 7 and 8) is great. I had never played those games back in the day, because I thought their prerendered sprites looked ugly, but after watching an LP of the first (6th) one I stopped watching after a few hours and then sunk some +50 of my own into it.
Having zero nostalgia for those games, I never knew I needed "first person party Diablo" in my life and I am now bummed out that there aren't any successors picking up the torch from New World Computing.

Then went back and played through World of Xeen a year ago; honestly, I think if you rereleased the game with modern QoL new players would still have a grand old time with it, the low difficulty and fun skill-based exploration hold up well.

I never really got into dungeon crawlers back in the day (the ASCII ones were far too intimidating), but ended up in the genre via the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games and Wizardry 8.

And much like with M&M6, I am bummed out that no one is really making spiritual successors to Wiz 8. There are balance problems with how sloggy the combat gets (and getting stuck in a pathfinding conga line in Trynton is pain), but it just feels like such a step forward for the genre...
And then all the Wizardry successors instead emulate the early Wizardry games. Which, hey, if you enjoyed those, have at it, but they all start feeling samey to me after a while. I put plenty of hours into the likes of Class of Heroes and Etrian Odyssey and dozens of others and none of them feel like they put in half as much effort pushing what crawlers could be as a game from 2000.

[Mixi Blacksand]

I was just half-jokingly saying the other day we need someone to embrace the aesthetic of later M&M and Wiz and make a crawler with Musou levels of enemy density.

[DrTeflon]

i love wizardrylikes

I really love wizardrylikes

I have burnt myself off from wizardry likes, letsplaying SMT Strange Journey then trying to letsplay wizardry 6-8

I got to like one third of wiz7 and then life got in the way in horrible ways and I have not picked that one up again.
I still do like them a lot. The latest one I bought was

and it is really fucking cool

You also cannot really go wrong with the Elminage games.
Another one I can recommend is the gog version of stranger in sword city
https://www.gog.com/en/game/saviors_of_ ... _revisited

Oh wait, they added this version to steam now as well.

Undernauts mentioned lets gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. I really liked what I played of it.

Not exactly a dungeon crawler, but one that i've been following the development closely is Archaelund. It mixes first person explorations with top down combat.



And Cyclopean: The Great Abyss is coming out this thursday (July 17th).



I haven't played much of it tho. I really like the vibes and it's from the same dev as "Islands of the Caliph", another recommendation:

[Lolo De Puzlo]

I've found that I've lost the patience for a lot of RPGs but one blobber I didnenjoy was QUESTER



A very no-no sense blobber that almost feels partially like Dragon Slayer in a weird eay. There's also an expansion in OSaka and a new game in the works in a fantasy setting.

[Mixi Blacksand]

I'd recommend fans of the genre check out the work of Graverobber Foundation. They've done a collection of small crawlers with interesting gameplay quirks. Survival-horror levels of resource management, 6DOF, autobattling - they also did a Hydlide-like, which is a real rare thing to see in the Western market. They're all on sale right now so it's a great time to try 'em out.

[Weasel]

I've not played it yet, because it's still in early access and I don't play games before they're finished (I'll just burn myself out on an unfinished product and never touch the final release), but I'm told The Darkness Below has a very Might&Magic feel to it.

Certainly looks the part!

[SlushieCat]

It's on the lighter side but I have been following Ruadine for quite a while and 1.0 finally came out yesterday. It's really neat and has awesome art and music.

[Weasel]

Oh I love the look of it.

[scratchingway]

Undernauts mentioned! I'm not super far into it yet, but I'm digging it. I missed the boat on that genre, and have bounced off of EO1 and 2 (for now, anyway), but Undernauts has a combination of vibes, gameplay, and QoL that has worked for me.

I've been playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup off and on since it was Linley's and... still have yet to ascend with the Orb. It's wild how much it's changed over the years, and how much it hasn't. But I'd like to beat it once before I die, lol.

I'll take a moment to shout out the SMT-like (or so I'm told) Artificial Dream in Arcadia -- I've got about 20 hours in it (need to get back to it...) and I've had a ton of fun with the groovy jams, silly writing, and fun combat (with shmup minigame). Definitely worth my sawbuck.

[Trysdyn]

The entire "Experience Inc" Blobber collection is great. If people like Undernauts, the same devs made Operation Abyss and Babel, and Savior of Sapphire Wings which carry the same vibe.

They also made Sword City which is not the same vibe but is neat in its own way.

Also if you want something completely wild that has the same feel as a "soft Wizardry" or Experience Inc game, check out Labyrinth of Zangetsu. I mean look at this! The entire thing is done in an artstyle reminiescent of Japanese inkbrush work.

[Weasel]

For a bit of a palette cleanser, StarCrawlers is a sci-fi blobber that's really neat. All the party classes are wildly different from each other and it makes for a nice refresher from fantasy tropes.



Unfortunately the follow up does not appear to have been as positively received, from nixing the party to removing faction missions in favour of just having a specific goal you're pursuing.

[Trysdyn]

Unfortunately the follow up does not appear to have been as positively received, from nixing the party to removing faction missions in favour of just having a specific goal you're pursuing.

I've also seen multiple people try to stream the sequel and find it runs like absolute butt on even modern rigs. I wonder if they ever fixed that.

But yeah the first one's amazing.

[DJAtomika]

And out of left field is my personal favourite dungeon from one of my favourite MMOs that's fallen off the wagon in recent years:

Prophecy


Everything about it, from the map layout, environmental design, to the ambience that plays within this Destiny 2 dungeon hits all the right spots for me. And the weapons it gives are also dope too!

[Weasel]

Cyclopean: The Great Abyss just came out of early access, it's a retro crawler that reminds me of early Ultima games (with an overworld, and then first person dungeons) set in HP Lovecraft's Dreamlands.

I don't think I'm in the right headspace for it right now, but if anyone tries it please post your impressions!