Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a popular, free, open-source roguelike game featuring tile-based graphics. The goal is to explore a deep dungeon, fight monsters, collect treasures, and escape with the Orb of Zot.
dungeon-crawler
roguelike
open-source
tile-graphics
fantasy
turnbased
permadeath
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: Free Roguelike Game for PC
A popular, open-source roguelike game featuring tile-based graphics, where you explore a deep dungeon, fight monsters, collect treasures and escape with the Orb of Zot.
What is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup?
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) is a popular, free, open-source roguelike game first released in 2006. It features tile-based graphics and deep, complex gameplay. The main goal is to explore a procedurally-generated dungeon with many floors, fighting dangerous monsters, collecting powerful weapons and treasures, increasing your character's skills, and ultimately retrieving the Orb of Zot to escape.
DCSS stands out for its depth, difficulty, replayability, and variety of character species and skills to choose from. The dungeon layouts and items are randomly generated each game, providing nearly endless variation. DCSS has an active developer community constantly expanding content with new monsters, items, areas, and more in frequent updates.
The game caters towards experienced roguelike players with its complexity, but also works well for beginners with an easy-to-grasp interface and tileset graphics. A wide set of configurations and graphical options are available. DCSS remains a cornerstone and one of the most popular traditional roguelike games.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Features
Features
- Tile-based graphics
- Randomly generated dungeons
- Many character races and classes to choose from
- Permadeath gameplay
- Complex item identification system
- Religion and god systems
- Spells and magical abilities
- Melee and ranged combat
- Branching dungeon structure with multiple paths
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Free and open source
Active development community
Frequent updates and new content
Challenging and replayable gameplay
Deep character customization
Engaging exploration gameplay loop
Cons
Very difficult and unforgiving
Steep learning curve
ASCII version not as accessible
Can feel repetitive over time
Limited story and worldbuilding
Official Links
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