We’re nearing the release of Kerkerkruip 9. (“We” being Mike Ciul, Erik Temple, Dannii Willis, Remko van der Pluijm and myself.)
I know, it’s about time; but in our defence I’ll point out that this is by far the biggest update of Kerkerkruip yet, with about 600 commits on the Github code repository. Among many other things, it brings you two new normal enemies and some undead opponents as well; a religion system that adds an entire new strategic dimension to Kerkerkruip’s central mechanic of soul absorption; the ability to throw grenades into adjacent rooms; sleeping monsters and dream sequences; as well as a completely redesigned reaction system, which now involves four commands – dodge, parry, roll and block – all of which have different tactical uses as you build up your offensive and defensive flow. O, and did I mention Wade Clark’s awesome music for the title menu?
There are still a couple of small bugs and other minor issues we’re working on, but the game is definitely ready for some beta testing. So please grab the latest beta – this link will always link to the latest beta – and give it some testing! Any bug reports or other comments can be posted in this topic.
http://lilith.cc/~victor/kerkerkruip/Kerkerkruip-beta.gblorb
Thanks!
Wow. I’ve been holding off on Kerkerkruip for a while, wanting to get other things out of the way first because it sounds like it’ll be time-consuming and addictive, but with every new update the learning curve seems to be getting steeper and more daunting for newcomers, with so many different things possible and happening on top of a central game mechanic that is already by itself unusual when compared to other RLs. Care to comment on that?
Oh, and PS - congrats!
Does the learning curve get steeper? Yes and no! It probably takes longer to become really good at the game, so the learning curve is longer. But I don’t think it’s that much steeper. You don’t need to use religion, or know the difference between dodging and rolling, or throw grenades into rooms, in order to get through Novice difficulty. Besides, as for all roguelikes, the goal for a new player isn’t so much to win, but to learn. And I certainly believe and hope that Kerkerkruip throws enough fun stuff at you to make learning it a rewarding experience.
(In this respect, Kerkerkruip is more akin to a hyper-complex but still accessible game like Civilization than to the kind of flight simulator where you have to understand 30 controls in order to be able to get off the ground. There’s lots and lots of things you can do, but you don’t need to learn all of them at the same time in order to enjoy the game.)
But if you have the time to maybe just start up the game and see whether it sounds and looks OK on your machine, that would already help. 
Right, thank you for succeeding in making it less daunting for me. 
After a very busy day which saw 29 commits, I’ve decided to upload a new beta version. So if you already downloaded it, you might want to re-download. (It’s not necessary: at this point in the development process, what we’re fixing generally aren’t major issues. Though the fixes can still be time consuming!)
If you’ve played Kerkerkruip before, you may want to go to the Options menu and “unlock everything.”