Players have been diving into dungeons since the very earliest days of video games, slaying dragons, stealing treasure, and descending to ever-darker depths in search of fortune, glory, and fun. Today, we’re counting down the top 10 dungeon crawlers of all time.

For the purposes of this list, we're defining “dungeon crawler” as a game mostly confined to a multi-floor dungeon area, featuring plentiful loot and favoring combat and exploration over platforming or deep storytelling.

10. Wizardry

In 1981, Wizardry sent six-person parties into a huge maze to defeat an evil wizard. It helped define the home-computer archetype of the pure dungeon crawler: sinister traps, strange creatures, secret doors, fabulous treasures, labyrinthine passageways, character progression, and lots and lots of trying and dying.

9. Gauntlet 2

Gauntlet made dungeoneering a social affair by inviting four players to band together and take on endless series of haunted floors gathering treasure and food. Gauntlet 2 refined the formula by allowing players to double up on their favorite classes and troll their friends, and introduced the series’ iconic theme music.

8. Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer

Shiren distills the intimidating conventions of roguelikes like permadeath, item identification, and random level design into an easily-comprehensible form backed by a colorful, cartoonish aesthetic and wonderful monsters designs. The stages are viciously difficult, but the gameplay loop is so compelling you’ll find yourself coming back again and again, driven to complete that one perfect run.

7. Torchlight 2

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Torchlight 2 is a pure cycle of exploration, slaying, looting, powering-up, and repeating infinitum, fine tuned to near-perfection. It modernizes the template molded by Diablo with a more-forgiving respec structure and a light, minimal design that feels just about perfect.

6. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

Ultima Underworld brought a convincing illusion of true 3D to dungeon crawling, backed up by real-time combat and an absolutely extraordinary dungeon that promoted emergent gameplay. Its innovative design influenced generations of shooters, RPGs, and exploratory action games to follow.

5. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

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The sheer variety of The Binding of Isaac’s collectibles and skills is mind-boggling, and practically every technique is given a marvelous and unique visual presentation. The vast, randomly generated dungeons are stocked with dangerous, gorgeous, and grotesque foes.

4. Angband

Angband is deceptively simple: make your way to the bottom of a 200 floor dungeon and beat the big baddie at the bottom. But over a quarter century of development and evolution has molded this ASCII-art roguelike into one of the most grueling and compelling pure combat RPGs we’ve ever played. Don’t let the graphics fool you… Angband is as good as dungeon crawlers get.

3. Nethack

While Angband focuses on resource management and combat, its cousin Nethack is all about exploration and experimentation. The randomly-generated dungeons of Nethack contain elements that work together to allow an almost-incomprehensible variety of interactions. In continual development for almost thirty years, Nethack is actively updated and improved to this day.

2. Diablo 2

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It’s arguable that Diablo 2’s action-oriented approach to dungeon-crawling has never been surpassed. Almost every element feels lovingly-crafted, including a superbly-conceived multiplayer design, wonderful powers, and random loot drops that seem carefully tailored to inspire new character concepts.

1. Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard

Time to get out the graph paper: the number one dungeon-crawler of them all is an unapologetic homage to its D&D roots. The colorful corridors and cute characters of Etrian Odyssey 2’s vast dungeons belie a truly nerve-shattering difficulty. Every dungeon section adds new trap or puzzle mechanics to the twisting labyrinth. All this, plus a fantastic soundtrack from Yuzo Koshiro, makes Etrian Odyssey 2 one of the absolute best dungeon crawlers of all time.

Jared Petty is a Senior Editor at IGN and Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor at IGN. Though they both love dungeons, neither of them has a house with a basement. Chat with them on Twitter @pettycommajared and @_chloi.