I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I just recently discovered Desktop Dungeons, a delightful dungeon crawler that takes away the grind and monotony of the traditional roguelike and slims it down into a game that really only takes about 10-15 minutes to play.

Desktop Dungeons is, in so many words, a roguelike. It has all the characteristics of what a roguelike should be. There are randomly generated dungeons, monsters, and items/spells to acquire. All of this is mashed into a world where you’re just some hapless hero looking to rid the dungeon of the monsters within. That said, it’s not exactly what you’d expect out of a traditional roguelike.

In fact, as somebody who traditionally doesn’t really care for roguelikes, I absolutely love Desktop Dungeons. Why? Because it’s almost like the anti-roguelike roguelike. It takes everything that’s awesome about the genre, but makes it a bit more palatable to gamers who might find traditional roguelikes to be too boring/difficult/crude.

True to it’s genre, Desktop Dungeons throws you right into a randomly generated dungeon. You have no idea of the layout of the dungeon, nor do you have any items, spells, or other such things to help you. That’s all stuff you have to find. Additionally, you can join religions that will give you certain abilities (but also take some away).

Each dungeon is populated by a series of monsters ranging in level from 1 (weak) to 10 (very difficult) and at the end of each dungeon there is a boss that you must defeat to have completed the dungeon, no easy task I assure you. Completing a dungeon successfully will unlock additional game modes, races, and classes.

Starting the game may seem a like a daunting task, after all, anybody who is familiar with roguelikes will be prepared to sink a lot of time and energy into the game. But that’s what makes Desktop Dungeons so brilliant, completing an entire dungeon only takes about 15 minutes.

You see, despite starting out at level 1 each time you jump into a new dungeon, killing monsters and leveling up doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s a simple process. You wander around the map until you find monsters that are leveled appropriately to your own; then you guys take turns whomping on each other until one of you dies. Killing the enemy will give you a bit of experience while leaving you damaged. In order to heal yourself you can either drink a potion or simply explore some unexplored part of the dungeon. This means you’re basically flying through the dungeon without the need for persistent grinding.

Of course, what I like best about Desktop Dungeons isn’t the fact that you can level up really quick or that each dungeon only takes a few minutes to complete, it’s that, despite being a streamlined approach, the game still provides the level of depth and replayability that makes the genre so well loved.

Desktop Dungeons comes with multiple classes  (each of which has a different play style), along with multiple races (of which each handles glyphs differently), as well as different game modes (of which each has different objectives and challenges). All in all, there are 7 races, 18 classes, and 8 different game modes along with online leaderboards. This provides hours worth of enjoyment out of a game that doesn’t require a huge investment to get a satisfactory experience out of.

In the end, there’s little not to like about Desktop Dungeons. It provides you with satisfying gameplay that’s both deep and streamlined at the same time. It also comes with delightfully retro 8-bit graphics created by Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame). Finally, and probably best of all, it’s completely free. You don’t have to pay a dime for this game. What more could you ask for?

If you have yet to play Desktop Dungeons, I sincerely can’t recommend it enough. Go download this right now.

[download via Nag]