You know when you’re munching through your tuna niçoise salad, gazing vacantly at a YouTube video with half an hour of your lunch break to go, when the urge to have a mini roguelike adventure seizes you? No, we don’t know this feeling either. At least we didn’t, until we encountered Pawleyscape’s Fastcrawl.

As the name suggests, it’s a quick hit of turn-based Dungeons and Dragons-esque fantasy that easily fits into those duller moments of the day when you can’t really do anything else. There’s no character creation screen, your team of up to five heroes with rogue, warrior, cleric or mage professions are randomly generated each game. In fact, by the time you’ve rolled for attributes and sculpted your features in other RPGs, you could have completed several adventures in Fastcrawl.

The way it achieves this is by automating the most time-consuming areas of a dungeon crawl. Character creation is one example, but battles, quests and even movement have been streamlined. This means nothing has been lost in this process; it’s just economised upon. Theoretically, being a turn-based game, you can take as long as you want about it, but moving at a similar pace to most roguelikes, you shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours from start to finish if you choose the longest game setting.
 

As Fastcrawl is such a short game experience, randomisation plays a crucial part in its longevity, so the goals for completing each level, the entire dungeon itself and even your main quest and plot description vary dramatically from one game to the next. It adds up to a thoroughly accessible and addictive game, especially tailored for anyone who’s short on time or attention span.

There’s only one feature we’d like to add to Fastcrawl, and that’s an online leader board for the score you get at the end of each game. As it stands, it’s a compulsive way of killing a boring lunch break.