@ you > stairs down r rat g goblin o orc D dragon ( weapon [ armor ! potion $ gold % corpse

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, no account required. Walk into a monster to attack it; walk onto a weapon, armor, potion, or pile of gold to pick it up automatically (better gear replaces worse). Standing on the > tile descends to the next level. The dragon waits on level five.

Character creation

Every run starts with a character creation screen: pick a race, a class, and a starting ability. The four races each carry a small modifier and a special quirk:

• Hobbit — fast on their feet (25% chance enemies waste their turn near you), but lower HP and reduced vision.
• Man — balanced, slightly lucky.
• Elf — sees one tile farther in every direction; stronger magic affinity.
• Dwarf — can carve through walls a few times per run, opening shortcuts and emergency exits.

The three classes offer different opening kits and roles:

• Warrior — iron sword and leather armor; the durable melee build.
• Rogue — light kit, more potions, fewer defenses; rewards careful play.
• Mage — knows three spells from level one (Magic Missile, Fireball, Frost Nova), wears the Ring of Lightness, and quaffs more potions; trades raw HP scaling for spell capacity on level-up.

Four starting abilities (Tough, Heroic, Stalwart, Healer) further tweak HP, attack, defense, and potion count. With four races, three classes, and four abilities, every run plays a little differently.

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 level, 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 — the run 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.

Mage spells and scrolls

Mages cast three signature spells — Magic Missile (a cheap ranged bolt that ignores armor), Fireball (a 4-mana area-of-effect explosion that can damage the caster if they're in the blast), and Frost Nova (a 6-mana adjacent freeze that disables surrounding monsters for three turns). Mana regenerates slowly; healing potions also restore it. Any class can read scrolls — including the Scroll of Fireball (a one-shot spell anyone can cast) and the Scroll of Invulnerability (twenty turns of damage immunity). Scrolls are rare and almost exclusively found in shops.

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.

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; deepest floor reached is the headline metric, with ties broken by lower turn count. Wins (slaying the dragon on floor five) display a 👑; deaths display a ✝.

Controls

• Arrows or WASD to move; YUBN for diagonals
• Click an inventory item to equip; Shift+click to drop
• Q to quaff a healing potion (also restores mana)
• Space + letter to cast a spell (Mage only)
• R + letter to read a scroll (any class)
• X + direction to carve through a wall (Dwarf only)
• Bump & to enter a shop
• . or 5 to wait one turn