APPENDIX N(EW DUNGEON CRAWL)
Modern Media For Delving Deep Down
Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu Nihei
I was trying to get together some other new posts, but those are slow going so here is something that has been rattling around in my brain- how much recent media there is that is based in a dungeon.
I listed a chunk of it in the Why Megadungeons post, but at the risk of repeating myself, I did want to separate it out into its own thing. I also tried to limit the media to roughly the last ~10 years. I think benchmarking the last decade also helps illustrate how much new popular media there is that will be most people’s first contact with the genre.
Worth noting that none of these give a 1:1 experience of playing an RPG dungeon, of course, but most include scenes which match common elements in good pen & paper dungeons.
Anything missing?
Appendix N(ew Dungeon Crawl)
Video Games
Darkest Dungeon (2016)
Hollow Knight (2017)
Dead Cells (2018)
Minecraft Dungeons (2020)
Hades (2020)
Hollow Knight: Silk Song (2025)
Marathon (2026)
Movies, TV, & Animation
Dungeon Meshi (2024, manga 2014-2023)
Backrooms (2026)
Fiction & Manga
Piranesi (2020)
Scholomance (2020)
Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020)
Tower Dungeon (2023)
The West Passage (2024)
Art & Installations
MeowWolf (2016)
Meow Wolf, Santa Fe
Gideon the Ninth has a bit of a dungeon crawl vibe to it, if I recall!
So I'm a Spider, So What. Moves out of the mega dungeon eventually, but most of it is in Elroe, which is quite an interesting mega dungeon.
The Seven Geases, by Clark Ashton Smith. Guy gets cursed to travel through the realms of seven different factions of a larger than a whole mountain mega dungeon. Others get the dynamic of the dungeon better, but this one, short though it is, does the best I've seen on the factions and how they adapt to their region and deeper gets weirder and more dangerous, and each knows only so much about the neighbors and less and less about the more distant regions. I really wish he had revisited it.
It is sci-fi mega dungeon stuff, but the 40k black library has a lot set in hive cities about descending the levels, navigating different factions and how no one actually knows the true scale in terms other than "more than ten miles deep", etc. some is just generic grim sci-fi, but some is really good mega dungeon meat for a traveller or gamma world game.