Crowntrick

Where most dungeon crawlers let enemies act on their own clock, Crown Trick freezes the entire labyrinth until the player moves — enemies, traps, and terrain effects all wait. Developed by NEXT Studios and released on October 16, 2020, it is a turn-based roguelike RPG set inside a procedurally generated nightmare dungeon that presents itself in contained room-by-room encounters rather than an open sprawling map, forcing every engagement to be a small tactical puzzle.

Combat revolves around elemental terrain interactions: oil ignites when fire contacts it, water conducts lightning, and the dungeon floors across different biomes carry different elemental properties that become weapons when combined with the right skills. Rather than arriving at a run fully formed, the character’s arsenal grows by defeating elite monsters called Familiars and absorbing their abilities. The breadth is considerable — over forty active skills, sixty passive abilities, thirty usable items, and more than one hundred seventy relics combine into builds that shift significantly between runs. Nine weapon types expand further into over one hundred twenty individual weapons, and more than one hundred monster varieties and ten bosses populate the floors. Sixty puzzles and challenges are woven throughout, adding problem-solving pressure alongside the combat.

Crown Trick’s post-launch arc moved quickly. Within the first two weeks of release in October 2020, NEXT Studios pushed a series of rapid patches addressing stability and balance. A dungeon design developer blog followed in November. The game was nominated for a 2021 SXSW Game Award. The most substantial content addition came in May 2021 with the Requiem of Elements DLC, which had been announced and detailed via FAQ earlier that February alongside a Lunar New Year sale. A save-game loading fix arrived in June 2021. Activity in the update feed since then has been light, consisting of promotional bundles and sales, with a technical update flagged as required in October 2025.

For players familiar with Hades, Crown Trick trades that game’s action fluidity and narrative momentum for deliberate, pause-at-every-step tactical calculation where a single misjudged move compounds across an entire room.