In Crawl, you attempt to harvest your friends' blood, which you can turn into money and purchase weapons with which to stab their hideous, Lovecraftian forms.
That should tell you everything you need to know about Crawl, which launches on Steam this week. It's a four-player competitive dungeon crawler, in which one player is in control of a human explorer, and the other players control the traps and monsters that populate the world. If you manage to kill the hero, you become the hero, although that reversal of fortune probably won't last especially long. It's a game where you literally live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
In this Overview, Russ and I take a trip through the catacombs of Crawl, hacking and slashing our way to an uncommon victory. We also debate our in-game initials, threading the needle between the tame and puerile. I think we pretty much nailed it.
