"Crawl" - Jesse Fillingham
"Crawl - a POV dungeon crawl about one being's quest for a holy relic" - Jesse Fillingham, Never Press, 2017
In 2010 the Dell desktop I inherited as a hand-me-down from my older brother died, and I was obsessed with the idea of getting a tiny computer. I was obsessed with the ultra portable computers like the Sony Vaio or the HTC shift, but what I wound up being able to afford from my job bussing tables at Friendly’s was an Acer Aspire 1 netbook. I knew nothing about computers at the time and so was really disappointed that I couldn’t really run any games on my lilliputian laptop.
What I wound up playing on my cute little computer were old emulated games, low requirement indie titles, and tons and tons of roguelikes like Angband, Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeons of Dredmor, Infra Arcana, Brogue and Cataclysm DDA. I sank hundreds of hours into these tile graphic’d, turn based games, staying up late to grind in games I still have never actually beat- and I’m glad I did, I still love these titles and turn to them when I’m bored. I find it so easy to get absorbed into the janky interface and command line style presentation, delving dungeons and slaying creatures for loot.
Jesse Fillingham’s “Crawl” immediately transports me back to my period of greatest fervor for this genre, it makes me very sentimental for the summer when I first learned about these games and the online communities surrounding them. It captures so perfectly the experience of getting sucked into one of these games. The nondescript, liminal, back rooms esque hallways the protagonist journeys through to reach a mystical artifact map to me the grid of play. I don’t know if the artist was cued into its existence or not, the time overlap is there, but the combination of sword and sorcery, gloopy slime, sprawling plant matter and weird high tech (a hospital lighting array or robotic arm descending from a ceiling, the artifact at the end of the dungeon being a pair of VR goggles, the dungeon crawlers minimap orb) are immediately evocative of Caves of Qud (the greatest roguelike ever!) If Qud had a graphic novel, this is what it would look like.
The image below, of an eviscerated corpse at the end of a blank hall, gesturing around the corner towards the final locked door, has maintained a sinister resonance for me. Genuinely chilling!
Crawl! --------> https://www.are.na/block/43641243