Cardinal Quest is an arcade-style dungeon-crawler inspired by 1980s classics such as Gauntlet, Red-Box D&D and Golden Axe: Choose your champion and begin your quest to slay the Evil Minotaur!

Kitanode says

8/10 - Agree Disagree

This game can be surprisingly addictive as it is so easy to play and progress can be quickly made.

It's a turn based RPG dungeon crawler and uses a 2D top-down view.
The floor is made up of tiles and it takes one turn to move from one tile to the next, this means you can zip about fast by holding down the movement key and then take your time and move one tile at a time when you spot an enemy. It reminds me of maybe Nethack or Brogue without the Ascii graphics.

Players can concentrate on the looting and killing as there is little need to spend ages customizing your character. When you find a new weapon or armour your character immediately picks it up and will swap it for whatever you are currently using if it is better. If it's worse then it gets sold for some coins.
You can still go into your inventory to swap different types of weapons if you want to have more attack instead of speed for example but this won't need to happen often as your character usually has the best setup already.
Usually i prefer to spend ages looking at stats and choosing the best setup in my RPG games but in this particular game i think the developer made the right choice by keeping the need to leave the main screen to a minimum.

The game's three playable classes are the standard Fighter, Mage and Thief classes and it soon becomes apparant that each one requires a different playstyle to use them to their full potential.
The thief's style is particularily memorable and employs a 'hit and run' method made possible by his high speed stat.

Graphically the game is not going to win any prizes and each level's look and layout follows a similar simple template.

This however, in my opinion works in the games favour!
I have it installed on my little netbook and it runs great. It's perfect for playing in little spells of 30 mins or so when you need a break from whatever else you're doing and more often than not you will find yourself playing for longer