Looking for a good new dungeon crawler to play? Look no further!
Labyrinth of Touhou is a hardcore -- as in, brutal -- doujin (i.e., indie) japanese turn-based RPG/dungeon crawler for PC. It's quite challenging -- but not grind-ey if you play it in a smart way -- definitely more challenging than Etrian Odyssey, which is what this game is usually (not entirely correctly) compared to, and loads of fun. It's also extremely abstract, being all about numbers and party customization, the only downside being the typical wapanese anime art style.
If you can get past that, however, the game has a lot to offer. You navigate a multi-level dungeon, represented as simply a network of corridors with special symbols for "events", and fight in random and scripted encounters, during which the game switches to first person, meaning it's basically a blobber. It is, however, a very good blobber, with some fairly complex dungeons and a lot of skills, equipment items, and attributes to explore.
There are 40 player characters in toto, but you're supposed to build a team of 12 characters chosen from among those, with 4 of them active and 8 in reserve. Apart from the usual increase in a character's stats on a level-up, you also can collect and spend Skill points on fine-tuning a character with amazing results, a process in which a lot depends on this particular character's natural strengths and weaknesses. For each character, you must -- as in, bye-bye if you don't -- find out a role he or she will best fulfill in the party, depending on the overall composition of your party as well as your play style. There's no saving and no resurrection inside the dungeon, there're no healing items, only abilities requiring a lot of Spell points -- and healing spells are extremely rare so that you can't rely on them too thoughtlessly -- and there are many parameters you totally must take into account, such as a character's TP (basically the amount of time the character can spend inside a dungeon before going back to the base), a character's elemental affinities and resistances (there are six elements, which can be of vital importance in a battle), status effects (some of which are *very* nasty) and affliction resistances, as well as the usual things like Speed (the battle system is action gauge-based, so that if your characters' speed is not high enough or you can't find a way to reduce the enemy's speed, the party may get spammed to death by certain bosses), physical and magic defense, etc. The characters are very frail, and a couple of hits may more often than not kill them, especially in tougher encounters. You can actually switch characters in-battle, but that won't help you if you approach a tough encounter carelessly, and you're probably going to lose some progress, too. Positioning matters, as exposing a character with low defense to an enemy's attacks means certain one-hit death, and a character's death may often spell death for the entire party. So, in any case, prepare to die. A lot.
Overall, I've become really addicted to this game in the last few days, and you should, too. Despite being a blobber, it has much more strategy in it than most RPGs these days, or any days actually. Also, surprisingly enough, it has been pretty well-balanced so far, so that if you lose, you tend to feel like that's your own fault, not the game's.