Crypt of the NecroDancer

Crypt of the NecroDancer came out on Steam in April 2015, made by Brace Yourself Games. It plays like a grid-based dungeon crawler, except that you can only act on the beat of the soundtrack. Each enemy moves in its own pattern in time with the song, and moving in rhythm builds a coin multiplier that drops the moment you miss a beat or take a hit.

The Daily Challenge is reached by a staircase in the lobby, the hub you return to between runs. It is an All Zones run, so it covers every zone in a row rather than one at a time, and it is always played as Cadence, the starting character. The dungeon is randomly generated, but it is generated the same way for everyone on that day: the same rooms, shops and item drops. The aim is to finish with as much gold as possible, and that total is what the leaderboard ranks.

You only get one attempt per day, and the challenge moves to a new dungeon at midnight UTC. The mode needs an internet connection to start. A few details differ from a normal All Zones run: an unusual shrine can turn up in the very first level, and the blood shop early on is not guaranteed to sell a gold weapon.

The daily is a good fit for players who have learned the enemy patterns in the early zones and want a fair, single-try comparison with others. A full run is hard, so for many people the real contest is how far they get and how much gold they grab on the way. The game is also on Switch, PlayStation and Xbox, and on phones through a Crunchyroll membership.