Will_Ball gives this a solid "Rad" on the Ghost Scale
This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.
Will_Ball gives this a "Rad" on the Ghost Scale
This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.
The team at Powerhoof was kind enough to send Cheerful Ghost a download key for Crawl for the Nintendo Switch. After watching the trailer, I was ready to download it and give it a go.

Crawl puts you in control of a person trying to escape a dungeon, slay a beast and, in the end, freeing yourself. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well it is not. On you journey to free yourself, you are surrounded by three ghosts, who also want to make it out. Their goal is to kill you, regain human form and then try to free themselves. There can only be one human alive at one time, so not only are you battling the beasts of the dungeon, but you are battling the ghosts. Did I mention that each ghost/person can be controlled by another player (or AI)? Well it can. Welcome to Crawl!

Crawl is a hard game to explain, you must see it in action. It is a dungeon crawler/gauntlet-type game.

As a human, your goal is to defeat monsters, level up, get gold, upgrade your weapons, and make your way to the final boss.

As a ghost, your job is to beat up on the human, which you can do in multiple ways. One way to beat up on the human is to summon a monster from a summoning site. This is where you can do the most damage. Another way to kick some human ass is to possess some object, which causes a little damage. The final way make the human's day suck is to send slimes after them. You can accumulate slime like creatures by obtaining orbs throughout the game.

While your human levels up during the course of the game, your ghost can level up its monsters in between levels based on points you earn from humans leveling up. It is kind of confusing, but works once you play the game.

I love playing Crawl in spurts. It has a fun pixelated art style and a lot of character. On the Switch screen the gameplay can be quite chaotic, and sometimes you can lose track of where you character is. I have yet to play it on the TV, but it could help alleviate that problem. Even though it is chaotic on the Switch screen, it is quite enjoyable.

I could see this game being a great party game. If you have three other players going at it, there would be a lot of fun to be had. I originally thought the game had online support, so I could try multiplayer out, but it does not. This game is purely local multiplayer.

Overall, it is an enjoyable game, that can easily kill some downtime. I plan to keep playing this from time to time.

Crawl is available on pretty much every platform, so if you want to give it a go, you should have a computer/console ready to play it.