One of the main design principles of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is to avoid this while still keeping the game random, complex and difficult. To achieve this, the developers made Crawl almost completely free of instant deaths or difficult puzzles.

On the other hand, they're actively fighting against any sort of grinding and disproportionately powerful tactics – even going so far as to remove the ability to sell items in shops. In addition to trying to make the game fall into the “hard but fair” category, Crawl developers are also making their game as user-friendly as possible by including graphical tiles and full mouse support (old-fashioned fans can still opt to play the game in ASCII mode. There's even an automatic exploration mode supposed to reduce the tedium of uncovering everything on the map.

Crawl is generally considered to fall into the “hack-like” tradition of roguelike games: it's inspired by NetHack's persistent levels with special rooms, multiple dungeon branches, focus on preparation rather than levelling up, etc. However, it also features large, scrolling levels reminiscent of Moria or Angband and its complexity is not in the interactions between items but in countless possible character builds.

There's a large variety of races to choose from – 26 to be precise – and, while the standard ones differ mostly in stats, the more outlandish ones play completely differently, such as Ghouls who must devour corpses to avoid rotting or Formicid, humanoid ants that can dig through walls. There's even a race of sentient housecats that can't use weapons and armour but get additional lives after levelling up.

There's also a choice of class, although that affects only starting skills and equipment – different skills can be learned by using them and what started out as a warrior might end up being a mage.