Daniel (@dungeondive) looks at Devoured: Fallen Colossus, a small-box crawl from The Game Crafter’s crowd sale; the copy on the table is co-designer Craig Price’s own, lent while backers wait. He files it with Mini Rogue, Chainsaw Warrior, Escape the Dark Castle and Iron Helm: a stripped-down dungeon crawl that keeps only what matters. You are a lost traveller inside some vast organic beast, and everything is body horror — a skinned maiden, a tidal wave of bile, the blind cancer, and an enemy called the gag reflex, fought on camera.
Six chapters, each a deck dealt into a cross. Arrows on each card’s border dictate where you may explore next; you flip until you find both the exit and its key. Your journal tracks health, spirit flames (mystical candles that let you reset a level and decide which ending you read) and advanced knowledge that upgrades looted weapons. Combat means covering rounds with mind, body and spirit cubes from your Valor board; run dry and you either spend health or draw from the fate bag, where gold cubes dodge, black cubes wound and armour cubes are spent.
The core decision is evasion. Evade a bad card and you may face it before leaving the level — or skip it, and that evade cube becomes a black cube in your bag for good. Set up, it looks like a black-magic ritual, and the wet, pulsating cave reminds him of Elric fetching Stormbringer. Not deep, flip-and-see, and he digs it.
Devoured lets you dodge trouble now at the cost of a permanently worse fate bag. Which game’s press-your-luck penalty has stung you hardest?