A couple of the guys here and myself got into Crawl for a couple of weeks but it was the same thing. Everything was great about the game but the learning curve. You could spend hours with a character and then be killed straight away with no chance to save yourself. With ASCII graphics there has to be a reason to come back and keep playing. Definitely a niche type of game.

To be fair the developers say that there is always usually a way to get out of any situation but I could not find the energy to keep playing to find out if that was true or not.