Kerkerkruip

So - an IF roguelike. Randomly generated content, permanent deaths, dungeon crawling, and all that. Not actually the first, even - Wumpus2000 is a different take on the concept - but this is astonishingly well done. Hardly surprising from Gijsbers, really. So what does it actually involve? Well, you're a totally generic person who's been plonked down in the dungeons of the dread wizard Malygris, who you must defeat before you can escape - and you must defeat at least some of the other denizens of the dungeons before you can hope to do that.

As a roguelike, it's pretty short - each playthrough is unlikely to take more than an hour, but that's hardly surprising with the combinatorial explosion it must involve. Trying to create a piece of IF which takes months to play as many standard roguelikes do would be, I suspect, impossible.

Anyway, the real question is - is it any good? Yes, yes it is. It's short, has fun and intuitive combat, strange rooms to explore, better artefacts to find, monsters to fight, and all that. The length really does help with the addictiveness - you'll always be wanting just one more go. Maybe this time you'll get past the mindslug, now you've beaten Malygris in easy mode it's only fair to have a go at the harder setting now, and so forth.

So. All in all, tremendous fun, and I hope Victor Gijsbers keeps releasing updates for a long time to come.