Highlights
- Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 offers classic action RPG gameplay with a Diablo -like twist, allowing players to dive into dungeons and gain experience points or loot alone or with friends.
- Boyfriend Dungeon combines dungeon crawling with dating sim elements, where players can go on dates with sentient weapons and uncover dark secrets in familiar areas.
- Darkest Dungeon is a brutal and challenging dungeon crawler that tests players' patience, with turn-based battles and the looming presence of dread, making victories all the more satisfying.
There's nothing better than getting home from work and relaxing with a good video game. It can be fun to get invested in an intricate story such as God of War Ragnarok, or motivated by solving some mind-bending puzzle like in Return of the Obra Dinn. However, sometimes all players want is to turn their minds off for some good old-fashioned dungeon crawling.
The genre can be straightforward with little standing in the way of players getting to the gameplay, or these games can involve more mechanics. The following examples will straddle the line between both of these concepts. All of them are available on PS5 and they should not be missed.
8 Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 was a classic action RPG from the PS2 generation of consoles. Now, it is back and better than ever before thanks to the somewhat recent port. This spinoff from the Baldur’s Gate series was a more Diablo-like take. Players could choose a class and run into dungeons alone to gain experience points or loot.
Co-op was also a big feature as was the ability to import characters across campaigns. The graphics may not look as good as the latest entry in the main series, Baldur's Gate 3, but Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 is still plenty of fun decades later.
7 Boyfriend Dungeon
Boyfriend Dungeon is the silly combination of a dungeon crawling and a dating sim. Players could customize their avatar and then start to go on dates with some characters around town. Go on dates, make some dialogue choices, and then dive into familiar areas like malls to find some dark secrets.
These love interests had a twist to their designs. They were sentient weapons that players could wield in the dungeons. It took the concept of getting attached to gear in an RPG and raised the bar to a whole new level.
6 Darkest Dungeon
Darkest Dungeon is easily the most brutal game on this list and it is a dungeon crawler not for the faint of heart. Darkest Dungeon players could round up a posse of randomized characters in town and then dive into dungeons to find glory. Battles were turn-based wherein positioning was important.
The tricky part about encounters was that there was a looming presence of dread. This could affect morale and cause characters to fear for their life. Patience is needed if players want to get into this indie dark horse, but it also makes those victories taste all the sweeter.
5 Diablo 4
The Diablo series is the ultimate dungeon crawler and looter RPG series. Diablo 4 is the latest entry and it has everything fans could have wanted in a sequel. The map is bigger than ever as a semi-open-world experience.
There are horses for fast traversal, tons of class tweaks, a story that is more cinematic than the past, functional multiplayer, and the list goes on. Plus Blizzard is issuing seasonal events sort of like mini DLC. This game is going to have staying power for at least five years if not more.
4 Hades
Diablo is not the only dungeon crawler on this list that is centered around a fiery demon. Hades is a roguelike that took the world by storm when it launched. What set it apart from others in the genre was the genre.
Death is never a fun thing to experience in a roguelike but there were things in death that helped keep morale up. From collaborating with Achilles over battle strategies to being charmed by Dusa, there was something new awaiting players in their HUB area every time they returned upon defeat. It also had a good upgrade system and fun combat to boot.
3 Nobody Saves The World
This title is an odd little gem from DrinkBox Studios who is known most widely for the Metroidvania wrestler series, Guacamelee. Nobody Saves the World stars a literal nobody, a white ghost of a man, who becomes something special upon receiving a wand. This wand allows players to transform.
For example, an early form is a rat which doesn’t have good attack power but it can sneak past enemies or crawl into holes. There is a skill tree with a quest system that unlocks new forms or powers old ones up. Plus the game has two-player co-op.
2 Persona 5 Royal
Persona 5 Royal is the expanded edition of the original game that continues things forward with a what-if scenario. Extras aside, the core Persona 5 game is similar to Boyfriend Dungeon except with school thrown in as well. Players are a seemingly average high school student in Japan by day who has to balance his school work, jobs, and relationships.
At night he becomes the leader of the Phantom Thieves whose sole goal is to rid the world of corrupt leaders. There are elaborate dungeons with well-constructed rooms, but there is also a randomized dungeon section known as Mementos.
1 Rogue Legacy 2
Rogue Legacy 2 expands upon the original in almost every way possible. Like Hades, Rogue Legacy was a huge deal for the roguelike community and in fact, can thank its existence to Rogue Legacy.
The story of both games revolves around a family cursed to go through generations of fighting evil in a castle. Every time players die in the castle dungeons, they are reborn as a new member of the family. Your kin is bestowed with special abilities, disabilities, and classes to make things interesting between runs.
