14 DAY TRIAL // Crawl, a local multiplayer dungeon crawler that lets users control monsters, has been released on Steam for Linux by a studio called Powerhoof.
Crawl is still in the Early Access Game program and the 0.6 version was made available just a week ago. This is an old school game, with graphics to match the feelings you might have had a couple of decades ago.
"One player is the hero, exploring a randomly generated dungeon full of traps and monsters - all controlled by the other players. If you slay the hero you take their place and it’s your turn to crawl! Then it's a race to gain enough XP and loot to reach the final battle, where it's all on one as the other players collectively control the hulking final boss!" reads the Steam synopsis.
This makes the game a lot harder than it would normally be with enemies controlled by the AI. The fact that your friends are controlling the monsters makes this game as difficult as it is fun.
The system requirements for the game are very low. Users will need a Linux distro that has glibc 2.15, a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor or equivalent, 2 GB of RAM, a video card with OpenGL 3.0+ support, and 300MB of HDD space. It's playable with a mouse and keyboard, but a gamepad is highly recommended.
The game also comes with a 20% discount that will expire in about three hours.