Crawl

Crawl is a local-multiplayer dungeon crawler where the central twist is that the dungeon is being controlled by your friends. One player at a time is the hero, working their way through randomly generated rooms of cruel traps and horrid beasts; the other players up to four total are the dungeon itself, possessing every monster and trap as they cycle through enemy types in real time. When the hero dies, whichever player landed the killing blow takes their place — and now the previous hero gets to control the monsters trying to kill them back.

The race is for experience and loot. Each session is roughly thirty minutes, and the players are accumulating XP and gear toward a final encounter against a hulking boss controlled by everyone except the current hero. Whoever happens to be in the hero seat when the boss fight triggers has to face the combined flailing limbs of their friends working in concert. Builds matter: weapons, spells and items stack into surprising combinations, and a vicious single-player AI mode lets you challenge yourself against the same systems alone if you can't gather enough humans.

The game supports two to four players in local multiplayer with controllers, keyboard or mouse. Over sixty unique monsters can be evolved from mere vermin into powerful demons and undead warriors as the run progresses, and the resulting party-game-meets-dungeon-crawler combination produces the kind of session where the loudest moments aren't the hero's victories but the moment one of the dungeon players figures out exactly how to ruin everything for them.