Gauntlet Crawler
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Gauntlet Crawler is a love letter to the 1985 arcade dungeon crawler: four heroes descend into a maze of rooms, fighting off hordes of ghosts and grunts that pour endlessly out of generators, hunting for keys to open doors, and grabbing food they must not shoot — all while a health bar ticks down every second and a narrator reminds you, as ever, that the Elf needs food badly. The graphics are deliberately simple: every sprite is 8x8 pixel art drawn in code, with no image asset pipeline at all.
Up to four players can descend together online, choosing from the classic archetypes — Thor the Warrior (strongest shot and armor), Thyra the Valkyrie (balanced), Merlin the Wizard (best magic), and Questor the Elf (fastest, with rapid fire) — or building a custom hero from scratch. A pre-game room screen shows the roster and ready state before the host starts (or the room auto-starts once everyone readies up), late joiners can drop in, and a disconnected player gets a 30-second reconnect window before being marked away. Runs are scored with modern trappings the original never had: persistent accounts, dozens of achievements, hero progression and ranks, and a player dashboard tracking it all.
The dungeon itself never runs out. Level 1 is hand-built, but every level after that is procedurally generated from the room's seed, growing bigger and nastier the deeper the party goes. Players who want to build their own layouts can use the in-browser Level Builder, including an AI-assisted generator for laying out new levels, and a Hero Builder for crafting a fully custom character — stats, weapon, traits, and hand-painted 8x8 sprite.
Rules
Your health drains one point per second, so eating food restores it (+100). Generators spawn monsters continuously and must be shot down before they flood a room. Keys open doors, and every door tile connected to that key opens together. Secret walls crumble when touched. Stepping on a level's exit moves the whole party to the next one.
There's also a Death mode, selectable from the room screen before a run starts: every level becomes a randomly generated arena with its exit sealed shut (and pulsing red) until that level's timed waves of monsters are cleared. Clear enough levels to beat the mode's level cap and the party gets a victory screen; get wiped out for too long instead, and the run ends there. Either way, the room returns to the lobby afterward.
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