Dungeon Developer, Free Dungeon Crawler Game

Dungeon Developer seems like a typical dungeon crawler game. There are adventurers with various skills, there are mobs that must be destroyed and there is a boss at the final level. Yawn, right? Wrong. There is a twist to this game, a twist that will make you sympathetic to every game you ever play, for in Dungeon Developer, you play as the dungeon.

Yes. That's right. You are the omnipotent being who must set challenges before the foolhardy adventurers that have ventured inside your...self. The idea is to help them level up as quickly as possible, have them defeat the dungeon and then get the heck out of there.

There are different kinds of winning. If you manage to get your adventurers to the end of the dungeon in just 25 days, you will win the highest honor of all – the Platinum rating. A gold rating can be obtained if your adventurers make it out alive in 35 days and it goes on from there.

Does this sound interesting yet? It should.

Game play initially consists of constructing dungeons that the adventurers will adventure through, but it's not quite as simple as constructing a laybrinth and sitting back to enjoy the fruits of your labor. No, you see, every new level of dungeons needs to be unlocked by merit of your adventurers earning you enough gold to unlock it.

You earn gold when your adventurers kill monsters, but you lose gold when you lay paths in the dungeons (the deeper the dungeon, the more it costs to build there.) You also lose gold when you lay paths in the dungeon. It seemed to me that the only real way to make money was to have the players run the first few levels of the dungeon several times in order to earn enough cash to build the later levels.

If you expand too fast into new dungeons, or if your adventurers become badly maimed whilst in the dungeons, or if they make too many trips to your sacks of gold, you lose gold, which means that you can't unlock more levels of the dungeon, which means your adventurers are stuck running the existing levels for another few days. This game, my friends, is not nearly as easy as it seems.

To give the game the credit it's due, it's actually quite an involved piece of work. This isn't a causal game in the way that many online games are casual. This is a game that requires every bit of brain power you can wring out of your cerebral sponge.

Play Dungeon Developer