Rush Grotto is a cute, fast-paced, free dungeon crawler

When you want to raid a dungeon but you only have a few minutes to spare, consider Rush Grotto: an extremely fast-paced, perhaps the fastest-paced roguey dungeon crawler you can play, for free, in your browser.

Rush is an appropriate term, as there's an alarming timer that counts down between every action. If it empties, you die, so you only have a few seconds to pick between your available actions. These are dealt out, seemingly randomly, as action cards at the bottom of the screen, and include walking, attacking, blocking and gobbling down health potions. Yes it is a bit weird to have to walk, walk, walk, walk, walk between enemy encounters and traps, but the game picks up steam quickly, throwing more complicated arrangements at you, every time you advance a dungeon floor.

It's a game with a simple art style, but one that pops as you play thanks to the pleasingly boingy visual effects. How far can you get before your flustered decision-making, or poor time-management skills, unravel you? Poke your head into Rush Grotto and find out.

For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the best free PC games.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.