After having played a few hours of this game I can immediately say that this game has filled a very specific niche.

The default recommendation to give to someone for when they want to get into traditional roguelikes.

Currently no other modern traditional roguelike fits this niche. DCSS, ADoM, ToME, Qud, Cogmind, Elona ... none of them really provide a great entry point, they are all for people who already have some form of experience in the genre some way or another.

This game immediately teaches some common lingo from the get go. Typically players have to spend years before they learn this from various communities.

It immediately informs you how important information gathering is by giving it to you at the start, and automatically giving info to the player without needing any action on their part. Every other traditional roguelike has info gathering tied to a specific talent or ability of some sort that has to be learned so the player has to actively choose it over other things. This typically never happens because the player won't know its importance just from reading the description. But even if a player is granted it one of the biggest tediums of traditional roguelikes is just how often those scouting abilities need to be spammed every few tiles. Because otherwise something might catch you off guard and kill you. This game alleviates all of those issues.

The game also gives you higher than 100% speed at the very start of the game, letting players quickly learn just how important being faster than the opponent is. Most games start the player with 100% speed with the thinking "well they don't have anything why should they be faster than average" but this leaves a large majority of players to never truly understand just how important getting an extra turn over the enemy is. This extra turn, be it 1 in 7 turns or 1 in 50 turns, small as it may seem, gives the player complete control of the fight. They can choose when to fight back and when to retreat without ever worrying about dying. And this can finally be taught in one game from the very start, instead of having to try and drill it into a person who is stuck in their new player ways and refuses to learn to get better.

The game gives you an effing CAUTERIZE from the start. Cauterize, for those that don't know, is a prodigy in Tales of Maj'eyal. It is notorious for being the most absurdly powerful prodigy/talent/tool in the game. Nothing even comes close to its power. What does it do? If you would die, and Cauterize isn't on cooldown, instead you don't, negate all damage that would kill you, and Cauterize goes on cooldown. The thing with Cauterize is that new players never pick it because they don't understand how powerful not dying is. (That and it looks boring.) And many players that do pick it don't have the mobility or intuition to immediately retreat when it triggers to start the fight again when it is off cooldown, so they think it's bad. This game just ... gives you Cauterize. One that procs at what is effectively half your life total instead of 0 so even if it goes down you still have plenty of opportunity to retreat and let it refresh, truly teaching players the power of the defensive ability of completely negating the hit that would kill you. This effect allows players to be more reckless without having to constantly retreat around corners and always pick fights as 1v1s, it just lets players do what they are naturally wanting to do without punishing them for it.

This game understands that no, permadeath is not what defines a traditional roguelike. Permadeath is a difficulty option. Permadeath is a minor feature. If your traditional roguelike cannot stand its own without permadeath in the modern era, then you do not have a good traditional roguelike. It understands that the amount of actual randomness you need to make each run in a traditional roguelike feel fresh is surprisingly small, letting the designer of game have far more control in crafting a more refined experience.

This game understands that numpad or Vi keys or qweadzxc movement (8 directional movement), is unintuitive for new players and just says "no, it's not necessary, play with movement keys and wasd like you're used to".

All this topped with writing that competes with Qud.
All this topped with an atmosphere/timbre that competes with Qud.
All this topped with THY DUNGEONMAN/Peasant's Quest style dialogue inputs! I'm half expecting a "YE CANNOT GET YE FLASK" or "Throw, Baby" reference. NPC dialogue in traditional roguelikes has always been "button mash this out of my screen" once you've read it once. But this, this freshens up the experience by making it more interesting for multiple playthroughs. Who knows what people will say when you type in things that you've learned from other runs? Is it impervious to a hundred playthroughs? No. But it's a step in a direction that no other traditional roguelike has dared to take.

If my raving about how this game seems to have learned from the failures of the titans in its genre isn't enough to get you try a free game, I don't know what will. It's like if we got a new team based arena shooter that made a fool of TF2. It's like if we got a new MOBA that made us ask why we are even playing DOTA or League. It's like if we got a new card game that made Pokemon, YGO and MtG sit on the benches and rethink their life choices. Like yes this game probably won't ever compete with the sheer raw gameplay and build capacity of ToME. Probably won't compete with the well designed pacing and flow of the arcade like dungeon of DCSS. Probably won't compete with the roleplay capacity of Elona. Probably won't compete with the exploration of Qud. But it's not trying to. It's here to plant its flag as the game that learned from the wrongs of its titans.

Play this free game. And maybe, when you've got a good feel for this game, you can try out the other modern titans, and see just how well this game has prepared you for them.

I have so many issues with this game that I've surpassed the character limit for steam reviews twice over. Read further on into the comments for more info, remember to start with the last comment in the list as that is the first one made.

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DemonCrawl is a minesweeper roguelike. It uses an older variation of minesweeper that had the 50/50 chance to sometimes to just die to a guess and plays off that (and the fact that a lot of people don't fully know everything about minesweeper) for its roguelike features. It has a bunch of really interesting new ways to tackle and look at minesweeper, but cool new concept designs does not save a game.

DemonCrawl has excessive feature creep that turns into excessive bugs and not paying enough attention to item balance to facilitate good play patterns. Instead, the game relies on pay-to-win mechanics and progression systems using ingame currency (instead of real life currency) to make only the people who grind out the hardest difficulty through trial and error, be able to get access to features and mechanics that help mitigate the excessive negative nicknacks in the game. These nicknacks are created to punish people who are abusing broken item combinations without realizing that they are far more frustrating to newer players and don't stop the people who are already at the "I have gone infinite in this game" stage.

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Problem 1: Feature creep.
Every single update that does some sort of change be it a bug fix or a rebalance they add new items. There used to be only like 250 items. Now there's 950. Numerous other things increase dramatically like stage mods and classes, but those aren't really a problem in higher quality like the items. There's an achievement for finding every item, good luck getting that. You see, when you have so many knicknacks in your game you have to really curate every single moving piece by troubleshooting and playtesting all their combinations to make sure everything aligns with a play pattern that compliments the core concepts of your game. But does 950 items over 4 years for an indie dev team sound like something that has been extensively troubleshooted and playtested? It obviously has not. As...

Problem 2: BUGS.
With so many items in this game there are bugs upon bugs upon bugs. Many item interactions regularly break with each update, and with so many items coming out on a regular basis the devs have a compounding problem where every new item takes even longer to troubleshoot than the last. At some point, it'll become impossible to reasonably solve any bug and your user base will find bugs faster than you can fix them, and the more bugs you fix the more OTHER things break. At one point a new class that had just come out, Ghost, was so broken that you couldn't ever lose with it, you were literally invincible. DemonCrawl is fast on that path, but they simply won't stop, the majority of these items seem to come from user submissions on their discord or patreon. A patreon, yes, this has become a live service game. Which sure, gives the devs some consistent money but definitely results in this game heading in a path that will rapidly become unrecoverable. Your average user is not someone who understands ...

Problem 3: Item design.
See, the goal of designing items or other forms of plentiful knicknacks in a game (like class talents or cards, in this game it'd be passives that affect a stage, items in your inventory, or classes you can equip) is to be able to direct how you want players to play your game. Proper item design is how you change and encourage the different playstyles within your game, and helps direct the fundamental flow of play patterns. Basically how your game plays out due to interactions with these items. If players are doing something with your game that doesn't fit with some philosophy or actively encourages the player to play in a very boring way, then its probably a knicknack that is encouraging them to do so, be it an item or card or skill or talent. The devs of DemonCrawl don't seem to really appreciate the impact to gameplay that specific choices of item design leads to. As a result, most items in the game result in problematic ...

Problem 4: Play patterns.
The core of this game is minesweeper. It's a puzzle game that is very repetitive but has many moments for many players of challenge due to its randomness and that its repetitive nature is going to create some interesting scenarios. It's actions are also very simple, and have no downtime (animations or cutscenes or scene transitions) meaning its great for speed running. But DemonCrawl? The goal of DemonCrawl is to not play minesweeper. Minesweeper that still requires guessing to win is a great base for a roguelike as you can then create items to solve that guess for you, and indeed a lot of the first items were centered on this concept. The more guesses an item solved for you the better the item was. Leading to a result that you only ever wanted to use the stuff that solved the most tiles ... but with 950 items there's plenty of interactions that straight up just solve everything on the board in some form or way with no risk to yourself. The most prominent is a number of items that give specific status effects that would normally tick down with a class that makes status effects tick up. Those status effects basically would never go away, making you invincible. Instead of balancing these interactions that create play patterns that just make you stop playing minesweeper and play what eventually just turns into a poor clicker game the devs are ...

Problem 5: Trying to solve the solution with more knicknacks.
Knicknacks trying to solve other knicknacks is not a good thing, ESPECIALLY when the knicknacks are all randomized. Because what happens is that for the players who don't know these interactions exist or haven't unlocked them or haven't unlocked the things that make these specific interactions happen more often (because yes there are these mechanics too), those "solutions" needlessly punish those players. In DemonCrawl there are three things that do this: Items, Stage Mods and NPCs. A lot of these knicknacks are really hard to interact with, and can come in such rapid quantities that just game over a player who isn't already stabilized right from the start. Which is to say, anyone who doesn't have 100 hours in the game. All of this is compounded by the ...

Problem 6: Progression.
So there's a lot of end game stuff. That by the point you have beaten all the campaigns on hard you almost definitely haven't unlocked the stuff that actually makes you win consistently. I would say that beating hard means you've only beaten half the game. There's an additional difficulty called "The Beyond", which requires rare stage unique random drops "Artifacts" in abundance. A single beyond level requires 3 of these. Now beyond is for two different purposes, one to have a random chance, upon victory, to unlock a divine item. These items are super strong, and act as optional upgrades to existing items. There are currently 74 divine items, which would, at minimum, require 212 of these Artifacts to get all of them. Beyonds stages also have a rare chance of dropping T1 Emblems, which can be fed into Beyonds along with artifacts to get T2 Emblems, and then so on for T3. Problem is, T1 Emblems require 30 Artifacts to do one quest instead of three. T2 Emblems require 300. T3 Emblems require 3,000. Completing a Beyond with an Emblem gives Sigils, which are basically like, things you can equip to give you passive buffs. But they have a durability, and can break, and the sigils you get from T1 Emblems are useless. And does that 3,000 Artifacts sound unreasonable to you? Because it is. You do not get enough Artifacts in normal gameplay to reach that high. You might be lucky to get 1 artifact in any given stage.