ORJ: Kerkerkruip

With the resurgence of the roguelike genre, many of the classics (NetHack, ADOM, Angband) and newcomers (Caves of Qud, TGGW, Golden Krone Hotel) are gaining in popularity and renown. But there are so many hidden gems, obscure roguelikes few people know about and play, even though they would deserve much more attention. Here is one of them.

Have you played Zork? I have tried it a few years ago, convinced by its status of a cult classic to give it a chance even though I had next to no experience with interactive fiction games. I was amazed and delighted by the way you could interact with the world, by how immersive it was to actually write the commands rather than just press a control button.

I have never finished it because I don't particularly like static puzzle games where you die and try again until you find the one way to solve it successfully, but since then I was thinking how interesting it could be to combine the principles of roguelikes (mainly procedural generation and permadeath) with the feeling of immersion achieved by interactive fiction. And eventually, I found out there already is a game that does just that.

Kerkerkruip (appropriately meaning "dungeon crawl" in Dutch) is an experiment gone right. You are thrown into a randomly generated dungeon to fight for your life. There is no Undo command and no save and reload. You will die messily, except this time it won't be on an ASCII map, surrounded by hostile letters and punctuation, but rather your death will be described to you in textual detail.

There are some fun monsters to be fought in Kerkerkruip.

And the design of Kerkerkruip immediately shows its ingenuity - conscious of the cumbersome nature of commands required for interactive fiction, the game will not force you into a slew of fights. No, that would quickly become boring in the text interface. Instead, there are very few fights - maybe six or seven monsters in the whole dungeon - but there are no trivial fights. You can and will surely die to the lowliest of enemies, unless you learn to fight tactically.

Every monster has some special powers and abilities
that require you to adapt in your fighting or die trying.

And the game offers a wide variety of tactics in a combat. There is no simple "bump attack", but rather a set of actions and reactions you can use to gain advantage over your opponent. You can concentrate for better chance of successful strike, dodge and block and parry, break enemy concentration to make them miss you, or use any of the special powers and items you gain later in the game. It more than makes up for the lack of positioning and terrain awareness usual in classic roguelikes.

BTW, you can also become a cultist of Aite if you find her altar.

As you would expect from interactive fiction, the game takes great pains to present an interesting, interactive world. Sure, you only see a single dungeon and get next to no backstory for your character, but in the spirit of Dark Souls, every item you find presents a tiny snippet of narration that you can combine into a story. I enjoy this form of storytelling, and these bits and pieces of untold tales combined with the strangely magitek Renaissance setting make for a compelling background story.

Tentacles and madness...

All in all, I just like running through the dungeon, trying to interact with the various furnishings and contraptions present - and they all can be used in some way, if you can find the right commands or circumstances - and looking for any advantage I can use to beat the dangerous monsters. And if you actually manage to slay (or befriend) Malygris, the Wizard of Kerkerkruip, the game will bump up its difficulty, adding new items and enemies to the mix.

Right from the start, there is so much to do and explore!

Every room holds some surprise for you.

You won't gain XP nor regenerate HP, but you can absorb
the souls of slain enemies and gain all of their powers.

There is even a bridge over lava in this dungeon.

The game has a development blog and a public GitHub repository. It is still in development, thou it seems to be rather slow-going right now. Download a nicely packed release here, or grab the source code and run it with your favourite Inform 7 interpreter. You can even play Kerkerkruip online here, but sadly just an outdated release.

Happy hacking and don't die!