The Gaming Den

What are some fun, free to download dungeon crawlers?

Roguelikes, Wizardry, Diablo, those kinds of games.

Monster's Den 2 is free web-based and pretty fun.

Desktop Dungeons, Tales of MajEyal

Din's Curse is a Diablo style dungeon crawler. Its big draw is a dynamic world where if a boss spawns and you don't kill it eventually it sends mooks to town to murder your venders and questgivers.

I second the recommendation for Din's Curse. I've had a lot of fun as both a necromancer and a paladin. The funny thing is the necromancer was actually a better tank in the MMO sense because one of the first-level abilities is a big AOE DOT that draws aggro from everything within a huge radius. The fact that monsters can randomly spawn as Champion or Epic versions of themselves sucks when fighting monsters that split on death, but it's great for necromancers because your skeletons have the same chance of being epic as other random spawns.

It's an MMO, but I've recently started playing Path of Exile. Its main feature is that your active skills are items that slot into your equipment so changing combat tactics is relatively simple. It also has a gigantic skill web for passive bonuses that is very hard to rebuild, so you'll end up specializing in one weapon type pretty quickly but otherwise have broad options for what spells etc to use. My only complaint is that it's not possible to change which skills are assigned to which button when you swap between weapon sets, which makes swapping between melee and ranged combat more cumbersome than it needs to be.

If you've got an android phone, download Pixel Dungeon. Zero permissions required, 100% free, no banner advertisements, and it is a solid as fuck roguelike. You might have some misgivings about playing a game of that genre using a touchscreen, but the control scheme in Pixel Dungeon will make you believe.

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I just noticed that nobody said Dungeons of Dredmor, either, which is weird because Essence has totally done a shitload of modwork on that game (some of which is featured in an officially sanctioned expansion pack). There's also tome-class item in the game named after me, though, so I'm totally down to pick up the recommendation slack, here.

It is a graphical PC roguelike with a strong comedic undercurrent. The goal was to deobfuscate a genre that suffers from consummately shit interfaces, but unlike something like Pixel Dungeon, they retain the full complexity that you might expect. The devs are trying to achieve the same goal with Dwarf Fortress in their next game, but that's not out yet.

I've also played a lot of Torchlight, which was a primary Diablo-like during those intersitial years before DIII was announced. It is okay-to-good, and can be modded, though I don't think anybody ever produced anything more than mild rebalances and quality of life stuff. Tourchlight II is a game I purchased but never played, if that speaks at all to how compelling the original was.

Torchlight 2 has much more extensive modding and moddability than Torchlight 1 did.

I could never get into Dungeons of Dredmor. Comedic games are fun and all and I'm aware that roguelikes tend to be pretty farcical, but if I'm hunkering down for 20+ hours of gameplay I don't want to constantly feel like I'm the butt of some joke unless the game is really funny. Like Space Quest funny. I'd rather have a roguelike with no aesthetic at all than one that goes out of its way to make you feel like a tool.

Nethack is a classic, and if you haven't played it yet, I recommend you try it a couple times. (Being a rogue-like, you'll die a bunch, thus 'multiple times')

My software repositories have informed me that the following are free RPGs:

• Flare
• Freedroid RPG
• Angband
• Waste's Edge

I'm assuming you don't want MMOs

I've been playing a bit of Brogue lately. It's a roguelike thing with some rather pretty ASCII graphics; the use of shading is really quite impressive. There's a popular tileset, but I think the ASCII might actually look better. Brogue was apparently the main inspiration for Pixel Dungeon, but its systems seem to be a bit more complicated.

The catalog of enemies is kind of boring and limited (kobolds, goblins, etc.), but each enemy tends to have unique-ish behavior (monkeys run up, steal your stuff, and run away, goblin shamans summon floating swords while trying to stay away from you) that makes the most of the small bestiary. The character system is quite system, particularly compared to something like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or whatever.

Path of Exile is free.