Crypt BETA

Crypt is a turn-based dungeon-crawler in the tradition of NetHack and Brogue, rendered in ASCII glyphs you can read at a glance. The whole game is keyboard-driven and runs in your browser, no install required. Walk into a monster to attack it; walk onto a weapon, armor, potion, ring, scroll, or pile of gold to pick it up. Standing on the > tile and pressing > descends to the next floor.

Five dungeons, five bosses

Each dungeon is five floors deep, and the fifth floor of every dungeon holds a different boss. Survive the boss and you return to a town hub between dungeons, where you can descend into the next one. The ladder: Each dungeon level scales harder: monsters get +10% HP and +10% attack per dungeon level beyond the first. A Floor-5 Lich on DL5 is the toughest creature in the game. Every boss kill on DL1 through DL4 triggers a celebration screen with stats and rotating flavor before you return to town; the Lich kill on DL5 leads straight to the retirement screen.

Character creation

Every run starts with a character creation screen: pick a race, a class, and a starting ability. Base stats are 20 HP, 3 ATK, 0 DEF. Race and class modifiers stack on top.

Races

Classes

Four starting abilities (Tough +5 HP, Heroic +1 ATK, Stalwart +1 DEF, Healer +2 potions) tweak your first run's build. On subsequent runs, abilities are replaced by the Legacy wish system: cards drawn from your previous run's quality, scaling from safety-net boons after a fast death to powerful combos after a deep clear.

Cross-player corpses

The headline mechanic. Every time a player dies, anywhere, on any run, on any device, their corpse, gold, and final equipment are stored at the depth they fell on. On every fresh dungeon floor, a handful of those corpses are scattered through the rooms, marked with a % glyph. Step onto one to read the dead player's epitaph and inherit whatever they were carrying. You'll find your own past corpses too, since the system remembers. This turns the game from pure single-player into something quietly multiplayer: your runs leave a trail, and other players' runs leave gifts and warnings on your floors.

Don't walk past a corpse and forget it. Once you've seen a corpse and then left it sight-unseen for 30 turns, it vanishes. The log will tell you something sinister was lurking, and you'll hear a low whisper at the edge of the room. The body is gone, and so is everything it was carrying. Step on the corpse first, then decide whether to take the loot.

Hidden vault chambers

Starting on DL2, there's a 25% chance the floor contains a sealed 3x3 vault chamber. The walls of the vault are cracked, rendered in rust-orange so everyone can see them. Anyone can spot the chamber. Only Dwarves can break in (press X and a direction at a cracked wall to carve through; three carve charges per run). Inside waits the Reaver (Χ), a tier-3 mini-boss with HP 38, ATK 12, DEF 5. Killing the Reaver yields the Reaver's Axe, a special weapon that grows stronger as you score kills with it, and three piles of gold worth 60 to 110 each. A non-Dwarf can see the vault but cannot enter, which is sometimes the more painful outcome.

The shadow ecology

Deeper floors hold a family of shadow-themed monsters rendered in Greek letters. The cast spans tiers: tier-2 wanderers (υ shade, κ night hound, ι dusk creeper), tier-3 casters and life-drainers (ν gloom wraith, Ζ shadow priest, Η midnight horror), and tier-4 elites (Μ dread lord, Τ void stalker). Several are bow-immune. Several blind or confuse on hit. Press ? in-game to read the bestiary entry for any monster you've seen.

Mage spells and scrolls

Mages start with three spells from level 1: Magic Missile (4 damage, single target, ignores armor), Fireball (5 damage area, 4 mana, can damage the caster if they're in the blast), and Frost Nova (3 damage around the caster, 6 mana, freezes adjacent monsters for three turns). Lightning Bolt unlocks at Mage level 5: 6 damage piercing in a straight line, the answer to chained groups. Chain Lightning (8/5/3 damage, chains through nearby targets, 10 mana) unlocks at Mage level 7. Frostbite (a 4-damage freezing cone, 3 mana) is not a level unlock: it comes only from the tier-3 Legacy wish. Mana regenerates passively (1 mana every 10 turns); healing potions also restore it. Any class can read scrolls: Scroll of Fireball (a one-shot spell anyone can cast) and Scroll of Invulnerability (twenty turns of damage immunity). Scrolls are rare and almost exclusively found in shops.

Necromancer minions

The Necromancer doesn't fight directly. They raise undead. Starting with four souls, they spend souls on minions: a skeleton costs 2 souls, a ghoul 5 souls, a revenant 10 souls. Each minion type has different strengths (a skeleton is cheap and replaceable, a revenant is a wall of muscle that can absorb a boss hit). Souls regenerate from kills: +2 for your own kills, +1 for minion kills. Play the Necromancer as a position-and-let-the-skeletons-tank class. Weak in melee themselves, but a wall of undead clears rooms.

Rare merchant shops

Fifteen percent of runs spawn a shop on floor three; three percent of runs get a second shop on floor five. The shopkeeper is a & glyph in bright purple. Bump them to open the shop and browse five randomly-stocked items: healing potions, greater potions (full HP and full mana refill in one quaff), iron swords, plate armor, mithril plate (zero-weight armor), Ring of Vision, scrolls of fireball, scrolls of invulnerability. Stock varies between runs but every shop guarantees at least one potion, one scroll, and one piece of gear. On floor one you'll hear the distant clink of coins if a shop awaits below.

Reading the map

Lowercase letters are weaker monsters (rat, goblin, bat). Uppercase are stronger (Ogre, Wight, Dragon). A crown next to a monster name on hover means it's a boss.

Tips

Permadeath. When you die, that run is over. No reloading saves to undo a mistake. Each save can only be loaded once.

Auto-save and resume. The game saves after every action, so closing the tab accidentally is safe. The run resumes the next time you visit. There's also an explicit "Save & Quit" button in the top bar. Resume is single-use: the save deletes itself when you load it. Death deletes the save. Winning deletes the save.

Regeneration. Mana regenerates passively for any class that uses it (1 mana every 10 turns). HP does NOT regenerate on its own. Heal by drinking potions, finding healing scrolls, or wielding certain artifacts. Resting (.) burns turns waiting for mana, useful before a heavy fight.

Encumbrance. Four tiers based on weight carried vs your carry cap. Light (under 80%): no penalty. Medium (80–94%): 25% chance to stumble each turn. Heavy (95–100%): 50% chance. Overloaded (over 100%): stumble every turn, and new pickups refused. Stumbling lets adjacent monsters get a free hit. Drop what you don't need.

Leveling and progression

Killing monsters grants XP. Level-ups raise your max HP, attack, defense, and (at certain levels) vision range. Mages gain max-mana on character levels two, three, five, and seven. Some level-ups also restore HP, a nice surprise mid-floor. The leaderboard tracks every completed run; highest score is the headline metric, with deepest floor and lowest turn count as tiebreakers. Wins display 👑 followed by the dungeon level cleared (so a Lich kill at DL5 is "👑 DL5"). Deaths display ✝ followed by the highest dungeon level you fully cleared before dying, if any (so dying in DL5 floor 5 with DL1 through DL4 cleared reads "✝ DL4"); a death without any clears reads just ✝.

Controls

• Arrows or WASD to move; QEZC or numpad 7 9 1 3 for diagonals
• Space: class signature (Warrior arms Power Strike, Mage opens the spell picker, Necromancer opens the raise picker; Rogue lies in wait to charge Ambush, an armor-piercing strike)
• i opens inventory; ? opens the bestiary (monsters you've seen); ; examines an adjacent tile
• p to quaff a healing potion (restores HP and mana); r to read a scroll; f to fire your bow (after finding one)
• X then a direction to carve through a wall (Dwarf only, 3 charges per run)
• Bump & to enter a shop
• . or 5 to wait one turn; step onto the > tile to descend (no way back up)
• Mouse over anything on the map for stats and details
• Esc closes any open modal

First time playing? An interactive 3-screen tutorial opens automatically on your first run. You can also re-open it any time from the ? help button in the top bar.