Last updated on December 17th, 2025 at 07:26 am
Crossword Dungeon – Roleplaying Game Review
Crossword Dungeon is a Roleplaying/Word game from Nolithius, first launched in 23rd October 2012.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 6+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Crossword Dungeon Stand Out
Descend into the Crossword Dungeon, where every level is made up of a procedurally-generated crossword, and each letter guarded by a vile monster you must best!
Guess the correct letter to instantly dispatch the monster, or risk combat damage if incorrect.
Test your wits against crosswords of increasing complexity and monsters with deadly abilities with one of three classes with their own unique skills:
The Barbarian, a muscled berserker who lives for the thrill of battle and feeds his rage with the blood of his enemies.
The Ranger, a feared hunter who uses a deadly combination of marksmanship and tracking instincts.
And the Scoundrel, a ne'er-do-well who makes the best of limited resources and subverts enemies' defenses with stealth attacks.
…each in search of riches and glory beneath the Crossword Dungeon.
This Roleplaying game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Crossword Dungeon is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 23rd November 2022
Recent improvements include:
iPhone 13 support.
Over 100 new words!
Download & Availability
Crossword Dungeon is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Crossword Dungeon on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Just discovered this little gem! On the iPhone and iPad works great! Fun in bite size pieces or chunks.
Great game, well made, interesting concept, very enjoyable. We would definitely recommend picking this one up. You will not regret it.
The game, it's premise and execution are great fun. Unfortunately, it suffers from a bug that causes permanent freezes to your current playthrough, forcing you to start a new one. No matter how far into the game you are, the deleted character simply ceases to have ever existed. In a game that is based on leveling up your character and striving for a high score, this is a pretty crushing bug. Would rate it five stars except for this game-breaking issue.
We really enjoy this game. A little more word or class a variety would be cool but it's great just as it is. However it has a show stopping bug. It will frequently go to a black screen when you progress to the next level and when that happens there's nothing you can do to fix it except start a new game. We could easily give this game five stars if it were possible to continue progressing.
This would be a great game if it wasn't for the game breaking bug that doesn't let you continue your game. What happens is that you boot the game up and then a black screen appears and stays. That's it. So every time you want to play, after your first game, you have to delete the app and redownload it in order to play.
This game is fun and unique. It's great that there are no IAP and doesn't waste our data with crappy advertisements. Please keep up the great work.
The update is sound. It plays well as a rogue crossword game. Get it! Request for next update: we would still like to see the word bank be connected to a larger word database. Just a request to increase replay value. NY Times crossword, for example.
Difficulty scales as well and it just has fun ideas like your stealth rating randomly revealing letters in the dungeon.
This is a really clever and fun game.
Just memorize all the European capitals and you have about 90% of the hard words solved for you.
Our only gripe with this game is once you get to the mid to high 30s in dungeon or puzzle level all the words are repeated and furthermore it doesn't really matter what letter you guess since usually any guess will kill the enemy and yield no damage to you. Before you get to this point however, it's a pretty fun and novel game.
We love the game and hope to see it get more updates.
We're enjoying this quite a bit. This is a nerdy little crossword puzzle with roguelike elements (permadeth, randomized levels). Each cell is a potential battlefield where your character might fight an enemy; you fight by choosing from a selection of letters. Some of these letters have special effects (extra XP, HP restoration, extra damage), so you are not always interested in choosing the correct letter for the clue. Also, if you don't know the answer –say you are bad with recognizing actor names– you have something to do other than guess blindly. As you gather XP from tiles and battles, you can give your character status upgrades, allowing you to battle more effectively — useful, as the "dungeons" (groups of clues) get increasingly more difficult. We think we have finally hit our stride with the Barbarian; next game we'll play with one of the other two classes. There are some problems with the game. First, it crashes a great deal. Fortunately the game autosaves at the beginning of a dungeon so you don't lose your whole game. Still, if the game crashes when you are at the end of, say, dungeon 50, you lose a lot of progress. Also, we had our game crash as we simultaneously leveled up and finished a level; the end result was that we did not get to distribute our stat point. :[ There's is an specific clue that does not appear; its answer is "fjordfutile". We appreciate the nerdy flavor of the clues and answers, but there really need to be more of them. We've only played a few hours and we rarely see anything new any more. You could probably crowdsource this. It'd be really nice to see some Game Center leaderboards! All in all, we're very happy with our purchase. We definitely recommend.
With this update we can now wholeheartedly recommend this unique take on puzzles and roguelikes. Different classes and with that, strategies and choices. The number of words could use some more work but the developer has been adding more and we are fine with that.
We wish entering words was faster. Also stinks to lose a game when you didn't type any words wrong.
Fun but loses saves and crashes too often fix and it would get 5 stars IMO.
IPhone 4S, iOS 6, not jailbroken, and the game is good – but just resumed on level 38 and it said 'Level 1' with 'question' for down and 'question' for across and a totally black screen. Have experienced a few crashes as well. Game resumes at beginning of level when this happens. Good game – just poor game save/resume capability (and a few bad crashes).
Potentially good idea with horrible implementation. The game is boring and pointless. Reroll.
This game has little in the way of charm, which it desperately needs to distract the player from the fact it's very dull as an "RPG" (it presents nothing in the way of interesting story, character options, or atmosphere), nor does it satisfy as a puzzle game (there is little tangible award for completing words aside from extra experience points, which is just dull grinding after a few stages). Cheap deaths are common due to unavoidable enemies with first strike and ranged attacks. We really want our money back.
This game is great. Easy then difficult. Some class balance could make it better. The barb seems like the only class we can get farthest with. IPad version would be rad too. Also, Game Center support! Thanks for a well made game.
Great concept! As a young game designer we applaud you. However, we would recommend tons of new words, new monsters, and a few more classes as well (Valkyrie, knight, paladin, sorcerer), also maybe upgradable items as well. We know this is a lot to ask but we would like to see these implemented over time! Thanks for your time and great job! Please pass this on fellow consumers so that it shall be heard across the land! Jk.
Cool idea for a game. Had fun playing it and found ourselves wanting to keep playing even after game over. That's a good sign coming from us. Haven't run into the bugs/crashes others have experienced but we're sure they will be addressed quickly. We think we'll actually invest in a mac and finally develop an app of our own. Keep up the good work.
This is the way portable gaming must go, with fresh new ideas like this nobody is gonna get bored anytime soon. This game has it all crosswords in a rogue like environment with supercool rpg elements! Cant put it away, plus the Dev is planning lots of updates and its going universal soon.
We like the rpg setup with the crosswords. You explore the letters one at a time and sometimes have to spell things backwards while you battle monsters with correct letters in the crossword spaces. The abilities with some letters are pretty cool too.
But Stanley Kubrick directed 2001, not Ridley Scott.
The game idea is a decent one- solve crosswords and level a rogue like hero. However the game needs a lot of work most importantly increasing the database of clues by a ton. At its current state you'll complete all the words in two or three hours of gameplay. Things need to get more challenging too, for example boss fights would be a fun break from the grind. Integrating items in this would be a great way to expand the gameplay. We do really enjoy the types of clues given. In most cases a trivia level knowledge of basic history, geography, chemistry, physics and literature. This is great as you don't need a superb vocabulary to enjoy this game, just general knowledge. We hope the devs will update this game and make it worth what we spent.
Get about 80% of the puzzle done then crashes on a random square. Extremely frustrating when getting that far takes a lot of time at higher levels. Fun otherwise.
Playing on the 4s . Certain tiles crash our game when we clear it even after we reboot the same tile is bugged… Ruins it for us but other than that it needs more words and we would be happy to give it 5.
Its "crosswords" aren't very good, and its clues need a lot of work. There aren't nearly enough words — we've had a case where we've gotten a duplicate word on the same level. The game gets repetitive around the 20 level mark; around that time new monsters stop showing up, and if you've chosen the right stats, namely Intelligence and Strength, you can tear through levels without paying much attention to whether you're picking the right letters or not. The fact that your health is refilled every experience level makes Intelligence overpowered in the early game (especially if you're sure to always pick the bonus experience spaces), while in the late game all that bonus experience means you can rapidly boost the other stats. The game would be much improved if the developer made a study of newspaper crossword puzzle clues. The ones included overuse chemical symbols, Greek gods and national capitals, sure signs that little work has been put into the writing. Crossword Dungeon has potential, but the game's not there yet.
This should have been free but the concept had us excited enough to pay. While this is a good game the words are limited and the classes are boring. We'd say if this developer keeps it up they could really have a hit. Please refund us money until then.
We do enjoy this game, there is much room for improvement though (what's a dungeon without hidden treasure and loot or big nasty boss creatures!!) not to mention there are a few game breaking glitches. We got our archer up to level 37 yesterday!!!! Only to have the game glitch and not load our progress correctly, forcing our to start all over. Another nice feature would be to have multiple save for each class. We hope some improvements are made, it would be in the game designers best interest.
The basic idea is absolutely great, but there are some major problems. When replaying dungeons there needs to be different words every time. This seems like a pretty simple implementation. Also we've had repeated problems with crashing. Finally, there needs to be some sort of tutorial to teach the player what's going on. We really think all of these things can be fixed fairly easily but right now they are holding back the game from being a true breakthrough hit.
But the bugs are a tad frustrating. Anywhere from not progressing to the next dungeon, save file becoming corrupted, and sometimes a class' upgrades not working. Even with these issues we still continue to play it and load up a new character, good job guys.
Very cool idea and overall a fun game to play! Adds strategy elements to the classic puzzle game. Haven't seen the spelling errors others mentioned. The biggest problem we've had is that the game can't be continued after a certain (seemingly random) point. When we resume, our character's data remains intact but the level he was on has been corrupted somehow. The clues repeat after awhile, and they're not terribly difficult to begin with. We'd rate 4 stars with the continue problem fixed and 5 with harder/more clues added.
We would give 5 stars but some of the words or a lot are misspelled, 5 so fare.
Great fun at first, it's a good mix of crosswords and levelling up your character…but the crosswords are pretty easy and the clues start to repeat themselves very quickly. After about 3 times through we had seen every clue, and they do nothing but repeat themselves level after level. Once you know all the clues it's a snooze.
For some reason, in the few times we played this game, we received the same clues multiple times. Some clues do not make sense (possibly a translation error?). We decided to completely obliterate the dungeon and therefore deleted the game. NOT RECOMMENDED.
… You get to the 10th dungeon. Things were moving along fine with this unique blend of RPG and word game until we reached the 10th dungeon. We completed all of the words and should have been able to complete the level, but the game wouldn't let us progress. After giving up with trying to find a way to end the level, we tried to restart the game multiple times. The game would start and then kick us back out to the iOS home screen. We'd love to be able to play more of this game we purchased.
We really liked the idea of a rogue/crossword hybrid but unfortunately this is far to much average crossword and very little rogue. You'll wander around small crossword boards that slowly get bigger as you descend levels. We noticed the clues repeated in the few games we played. The clues aren't particularly taxing but since free movement isn't allowed unless you kill the monsters in your path you probably won't be doing much back-solving if you get stumped. Killing a mob consists of picking one of a selection of letters. The correct letter is a crit and fills in the square, the wrong letter is a swing which allows the mob to attack back. If this sounds fun then we described it wrong. From an RPG perspective the game is weaker. You level, choose something like strength or constitution or stun resistance and keep going. There are 3 classes but they didn't seem to change the pace of the game. We would recommend avoiding this. We personally think Bookworm Adventures is still the best word/RPG hybrid you can play. On a price note we found 1.99 to be far too expensive after playing this and regretted not having gotten a neuroshima hex army or some other expansion for a better game. Even at .99 we would avoid this unless the devs due some serious work on improving this.
Cool concept but released before it was ready. The game doesn't really flow, documentation is horrible to non existent, abilities are often poorly thought out or useless and there aren't that many possible crossword clues so you will constantly encounter the same ones. With a few more months of work this could have been a classic, but as it is, we would stay away from it.
Super repetitive. Appears much more deep than it actually is. This is little more than a crossword puzzle. Also many of the clues are flat out wrong. Ridley Scott was NOT the director of 2001, Kubrick was. Much room for improvement.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.1.7
- Size: 14.25 MB
- iOS: 9.0 or later
- Languages: CS, DA, NL, EN, FI, FR, DE, EL, HE, ID, IT, JA, KO, MS, NB, PL, PT, RU, ZH, ES, SV, TH, ZH, TR, VI
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: Nolithius
Last updated: 23rd November 2022 | Genre: Roleplaying, Word | Developer: Nolithius