“Your friends are all bastards.” That’s the message Powerhoof seem to be sending with their game Crawl. One player controls a dungeon explorer as he moves from tomb to tomb collecting loot, the other three are disgruntled spirits trying to kill them. Possessing traps or using arcane symbols to rise as a monster, the spirits have a lot of tools at their command for splatting the human.
However, whoever kills the human is resurrected themselves and must fight off the other three players.
All the action takes place across a single screen, so things will get confused and messy. That should play into Crawl’s mechanics perfectly, though. With three vengeful spirits trying to tear the human apart, the constant springing of traps and spawning of monsters should make for hectic hilarity.
The winner is whoever is in control of the human at the dungeon’s end. That might seem like it’s only worth killing the human near the finale, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, but, because of the gear the human can buy with discovered loot, human’s can tool up and last a long time in face of three ghosts.
And, that finale. Each dungeon ends with a boss fight, naturally. But this boss is controlled by all three of the spectral players. Madness.
Currently multiplayer is only local but Powerhoof are exploring online as a possibility. There are bots to play against, though.
You can read more on the developer’s blog and Greenlight page.