Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup For Mac

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a fun turn and tile-based roguelike game with immense replay value, where users explore dungeons in a randomly generated world. The choices and mistakes made by the player have a great impact on the game and influence the outcome.

The application does not contain an installer kit, so you can open it by double clicking on the donwloaded file. It runs without creating registry entries to burden your system.

A tutorial of five lessons is available, with the purpose of introducing the player to the game mechanics and lore. The main story is split into “Dungeon Crawl”, “Dungeon Sprint”, which is a difficult, fixed, single-level game mode (similar to survival mode), and “The Arena”, where computer-controlled battle simulations occur between creatures selected by the player. Apart from that, instructions, hints and high scores can be found in the menu. It possesses a savegame system to back up your progress.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has rudimentary graphics, where everything is composed of simple sprites and low-resolution models, from character to environment.

It's turn-based and all movements and interactions are sequential. Even though the graphics are underwhelming, it still offers a pleasant overall feel, especially when you start to realize how much content there really is.

The developer was very thoughtful and made sure that all explanations are as thorough and concise as possible, covering every action of effect that the player might be encountering or interested in. Even if the means for development aren't exactly state of the art, the time and passion invested can still be observed.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup features a total of 26 species and races to choose from. It has its fair share of common fantasy stories borrowed from famous ones, but each has its own archetype and benefits or disadvantages over the other, in addition to a context and background story. It includes sophisticated magic, religion and skill systems with many different weapons and creatures, making it a unique and challenging experience.

The authors clearly invested into detailing a lot of things. It contains numerous RPG elements and soft stats that modern games have, and even some less used features, like attack delay or initiative.

The character gets hungry over time and has to rest for a while to regain health and fighting prowess. Important events will interrupt your sleep, or wandering creatures that attack you.

The game retains the customary RPG elements raised to nowadays' standard: mana, health, stats (e.g.strength, agility, level count and experience thresholds), as well as encumbrance rating for garment items and armor pieces.

What it lacks in animations and sound effects or music more than makes up in charismatic storytelling, and it manages to evoke a certain feeling and captivation that is similar to first installments of other games of the sort, like Ultima, Diablo or Fallout. It keeps you glued to the screen, either for the nostalgia factor or mere curiosity.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has the right amount of hand holding, and forces you to think your way around obstacles, instead of using brute force all the time. Many times you will be determined to engage in tactical decisions like avoiding combat altogether,or returning ot an earlier point after exploring and looting secluded parts of the map.

Surely, the level of execution pales in comparison to even some mediocre games out there, but the content is so rich and the lore so varied, that it can easily stand on its own, on par with an AAA title. It even surpasses many, because it glues players to the screen with its immersive gameplay and story, and oozes overall tremendous value.

For the effort put into it and atmosphere, it deserves a full score, even if the graphics are at a bare minimum, but games aren't just about that. It gets everything else right, even if it's devoid of sound.