Dungeon crawler is a genre of games where the main objective, or at least main gameplay element, is the completion of a tiered dungeon. The word dungeon itself is misleading as it may refer to any path-laden grid arrangement that contains enemies and treasure. For example, in Lord of Arcana, many of the stages are set on tropical islands and lush forests (albeit taken in part from Crisis Core).

The first dungeon crawlers were ASCII adventure games and chose fast gameplay over the detailed stories of the point-and-click adventure genre. The genre today has come so far as to have games about dungeon crawler games (.hack//), and some titles feature them as bonus or subsiduary content (Ehrgiez, Recettear).

The dungeon crawler genre recently had a return to its roots in PC gaming with new-old-school games like 8bitMMO, the Mighty Quest for Epic Loot and (to a lesser extent of old-school) Warframe.

Examples of dungeon crawlers include Crimson Tears, Dungeon Runners and Realm of the Mad God.