What Is Dungeon Crawl 94?

Dungeon Crawl 94: What Was Taken is a retro-inspired dungeon-crawling RPG built around exploration, character progression, randomized discoveries, and a world that doesn't always tell you exactly where to go.

You create a character, choose a class, and set out from the town of Duskrest into a world filled with dungeons, merchants, enemies, equipment, spells, companions, secrets, and unusual encounters.

The game is tile-based at its core, but it doesn't look like a traditional flat tile-based RPG.

A TILE-BASED WORLD THAT CURVES TOWARD THE SKY

One of Dungeon Crawl 94: What Was Taken's most distinctive features is its custom rendering system.

The game combines a top-down, tile-based world with a visible sky and a landscape that appears to crest toward the horizon.

Under the Hood

The world still runs on a grid, keeping movement, combat, and terrain interactions tied to individual tiles. The renderer transforms how that grid appears on screen, using a custom perspective effect to make distant terrain appear to recede toward the skyline.

Terrain and upright objects receive different visual treatment. The ground forms the landscape's curved appearance, while objects such as characters and trees use separate positioning and scaling adjustments to sit naturally within that perspective.

The result blends the readability of a classic top-down dungeon crawler with a sense of distance beyond the immediate play area.

That landscape is interactive, too. Bombs can destroy terrain tiles, and the affected terrain mesh—the geometry used to draw the ground—is rebuilt to reflect those changes. The perspective therefore follows the changing world, including the damage you leave behind.

Players can also rotate the view, seeing the same tile-based environment from another direction while retaining the horizon effect.

An Unusual Perspective on Retro Adventure

Pixel art, grid-based exploration, a cresting landscape, and a visible sky come together to give Dungeon Crawl 94 its particular look.

It's a custom approach built in GameMaker to make a small, tile-based adventure feel like part of a much larger world.

BUILD YOUR CHARACTER

Dungeon Crawl 94 uses seven primary character stats:

Strength • Dexterity • Intelligence • Wisdom • Speed • Constitution • Luck

Instead of automatically deciding how your character develops, leveling gives you points that you can distribute yourself.

Different classes provide different starting advantages, but your class doesn't permanently lock you into one style of play.

Build around physical combat.

Focus on magic.

Invest in survivability.

Or put points into Luck and see what happens.

Some stats have effects that aren't immediately obvious.

Experimentation is part of the game.

FIVE DIFFERENT STARTING CLASSES

Choose from:

Warrior

Begins with additional Strength and Constitution.

Wizard

Begins with additional Intelligence and Wisdom.

Scout

Begins with additional Speed and Dexterity.

Adventurer

Starts with a small bonus across every stat.

Deprived

No starting statistical advantages.

Your starting class gives you a direction, but what your character eventually becomes is up to you.

COMBAT

Combat takes place directly within the tile-based world.

Positioning matters.

Your character's statistics interact with enemy defenses, weapons, magic, items, terrain, and other systems throughout the game.

Physical and magical characters work differently, and enemies aren't all vulnerable to the same approaches.

Sometimes the best answer isn't simply having a bigger weapon.

MAGIC

Magic has its own progression system.

As your Intelligence grows, increasingly powerful spells can become available.

Spells range through multiple levels of rarity, from Common through Legendary, and more powerful magic can reach farther across the battlefield.

Magic also has its own version of a critical hit: Arcane Surge.

The higher your Intelligence, the greater your chance of triggering one.

EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY

Dungeon Crawl 94 doesn't place every answer directly in front of you.

There are merchants to discover, Quest Items to locate, hidden mechanics, unusual encounters, optional areas, rare equipment, animals, Mimics, secrets, and things that may not seem important until much later.

You may walk past something on one playthrough and discover its significance on another.

That is intentional.

Exploration isn't something between the important parts of the game. Exploration is one of the important parts.

YOUR WORLD, YOUR SEED

Each new adventure can use a randomly generated seed, changing elements of the experience from one run to another.

Players who want a particular world can also manually enter a seed.

This eventually became an important part of the design of the Dungeon Crawl 94 $1,000 Challenge, where contestants must face a randomly generated world rather than selecting a favorable one.

MERCHANTS AND THE WORLD

Not every merchant is conveniently standing in the starting town.

There are 11 merchants scattered throughout the game, offering different specialties and services.

Finding them is part of exploring the world.

Shops include weapons, armor, magic, potions, jewelry, books, general supplies, and some considerably stranger services.

ITEMS, CRAFTING AND INVENTORY

Inventory space matters.

You'll have to decide what is worth carrying, what should be used, what can be crafted, and what should be left behind.

Potions, bombs, supplies, equipment, Quest Items and other discoveries all compete for your attention as you travel farther from safety.

Inventory capacity can be expanded—but you'll have to earn those upgrades.

COMPANIONS

Not everything you encounter wants to kill you.

Certain animals can become companions if you earn their trust.

Feed them, keep them alive, and they can travel alongside you and contribute to your character in different ways.

Their loyalty can grow the longer they remain with you.

DEATH IS PART OF THE ADVENTURE

Dungeon Crawl 94 isn't designed around every run going perfectly.

You can die.

You can get lost.

You can make a terrible decision.

You can spend resources you later wish you had.

And sometimes you can discover a ridiculous solution that works far better than it probably should.

Save, reload, learn, and try something different.

EXPLOITS ARE PART OF THE FUN

Because Dungeon Crawl 94 contains interacting systems, players sometimes discover strategies that weren't originally anticipated.

I made a deliberate decision not to treat every unintended interaction as something that needs to be removed.

If something can be accomplished through the normal, unmodified game, experimenting with it is part of the experience.

That philosophy became important enough that even the $1,000 Challenge is designed to permit in-game glitches, exploits, shortcuts and sequence breaks, subject to its Official Rules and Gameplay Rule Book.

HOW DUNGEON CRAWL 94 BEGAN

Dungeon Crawl 94 didn't begin as a large studio project.

It was built by one person.

I'm Devon Underwood, a plumber and small business owner from Tennessee. I've always been interested in computers and games, but game development wasn't my full-time career.

Dungeon Crawl 94 started as an attempt to finally build the kind of game I had wanted to make for years.

Most of its development happened a few hours at a time—after work, after taking care of family responsibilities, and whenever I could find time to sit down at the computer.

Over roughly six months, a small experiment became a complete RPG.

WHY IT LOOKS THE WAY IT DOES

The visual style wasn't simply an attempt to recreate one particular retro game.

I wanted Dungeon Crawl 94 to feel old and new at the same time.

The grid, pixel art, statistics, secrets, and exploration are deliberately reminiscent of older games.

The cresting-horizon renderer was an experiment in taking that familiar structure and presenting it differently.

Instead of looking straight down on a flat collection of tiles, I wanted the player to feel as though there was a world continuing beyond them.

That experiment eventually became one of the defining features of the game.

BUILT TO LET YOU FIGURE THINGS OUT

Modern games often work very hard to prevent the player from becoming confused.

Dungeon Crawl 94 sometimes does the opposite.

There are tutorials and information to get you started, but the game doesn't explain every system, reveal every secret, or tell you the optimal way to play.

Some things are meant to be discovered.

Some are meant to be missed.

And some may still be waiting for players to figure them out.

THE ADVENTURE IS YOURS

There isn't one correct character.

There isn't one correct strategy.

There isn't necessarily one correct path.

Explore the world.

Build something strange.

Break something.

Find something you weren't looking for.

And eventually, if you're ready—

go find the Demon King.