Crawl is, as the name suggests, a dungeon crawler but it offers an interesting gameplay twist that will surely grab your attention. Learn more about it in our Crawl review!

 

Crawl is a pixel art top-down dungeon crawler with a great chiptune soundtrack that brings something new to the table: when you die you will rise as a ghost, returning to your character’s body to attack others, but not directly since you have no physical presence! What this means is that you’ll end up possessing traps or monsters in the area or entering Pentagon circles to summon creatures to do your bidding. Once all puny humans are dead, you can rise from the dead, recovering your life so that you can rinse and repeat. It’s a chaotic but very fun game, even when playing with AI characters! But playing with other humans or a mix of humans and AI characters is definitely even more fun and hectic.

Each room in the dungeons is full of stuff like breakable crates full of loot, switches, and levers for you to use, as well as a useful shop where you can buy health potions, new weapons, spells and more. But to purchase things you will need gold, so be sure to get your greedy hands on as much of it as you can by damaging human heroes while you’re getting your ghost. Another thing to consider is you need to collect as many wrath points as possible, making the most of your time among the living after spending some valuable time among the dead… since you can use wrath points to pump up your beastly fiends since you’ll definitely end up dead again at some point!

If you reach particular milestones (stage 10) then you can finally activate a portal to escape from the dungeon, but there is a catch: there is a big horrible boss you must kill first before you can continue with your escape. A boss fight wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary for a dungeon crawler, except that other players (AI ones included) will get to control parts of the boss to make it a very dangerous fight where you’ll be tested in full to stay alive until the end.

The game is definitely designed with multiplayer in mind, but it can still be enjoyed by playing on your own – which is why it feels weird that there is no online multiplayer for this one. Yes, developing the online component is definitely not cheap or easy to do, but it is something that I would love to have for this excellent indie release. The good thing is that it’s not a deal-breaker since thanks to the Nintendo Switch’s nature you can use the Joy-Con to quickly set up a multiplayer session at home or on the go with great ease.

Crawl is a fun dungeon crawler on Nintendo Switch that will keep you busy for many hours either at home or on the go, playing on your own with AI bots or with a very entertaining local co-op/not really co-op in an adventure that will always keep your screen busy with action. Kudos to Powerhoof for working so hard on the game for so long, since I’m very happy about what they have given us on Nintendo’s latest console. Crawl is definitely worth a download, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

Disclaimer
This Crawl review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Powerhoof.