DDoD
DDoD brings its Fog-swallowed roguelite to Xbox day and date
The Future Entertainment Company built a 60-square-kilometer sealed zone on real-world topography, the way S.T.A.L.K.E.R. leaned on Chernobyl.
roguelike
BREAKOUT BABY
A free demo turns Pac-Man into first-person baby horror
BREAKOUT BABY, from developer STH and publisher Assemble Entertainment, hands you an infant and a maze
POLYMORPH
The health packs in POLYMORPH have to die first
Intron Interactive's biological roguelike casts you as a cancerous pathogen; the comments immediately turned healing into a moral problem.
Blood Dungeon
Messhof's Blood Dungeon, a platforming autoshooter, arrives Aug. 25
Mark Essen drew it himself again: a weekend Game Maker sketch, animated on a $50 tablet in parked cars, grown over years into a bullet heaven you parkour through.
poker
Balatro and the expected value of wonder
Balatro transforms poker into a mathematical puzzle that reveals how optimization culture has replaced genuine play, turning casino aesthetics into pure sensation.
News
Release your inner hoarder with the roguelike Loot Rascals
Are you the type of player who thinks, man, RPGs like Skyrim and The Witcher 3 are great, but I wish all this lush fantasy storyelling didn’t get in the way of my iron casket and rare weapon collecting. Or maybe you were the rare voice among No Man’s Sky dissenters who criticized the game for not le
News
Roguelikes aren’t done with ASCII art yet
ASCII and the roguelike genre are practically inseparable. ASCII was there at the birth of the genre, bringing Rogue (1980) itself to life—and it’s stayed, with today’s most ambitious roguelikes such as Dwarf Fortress (2006), Ultima Ratio Regum (2012), and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (2013) crafting
News
GoNNER wants you to cheer up a sad whale by dying over and over
GoNNER creator Mattias Dittrich—who goes by Ditto—describes his game as “tough as hell,” and he’s not wrong. It’s one of those games where I ask myself just why I keep clicking continue; death after death, I am thrown back to the beginning of the game. That is, unless I have enough currency to buy m
News
Is there enough room for another pixel-art RPG?
There’s a close-knit cloud of terms frequently cropping up in the discussion of action role-playing games lately. “Atmospheric,” “minimalist,” “roguelike,” “pixel art,” et cetera. Hyper Light Drifter established its appeal almost entirely on the back of these signifiers. Titan Souls did the same las
News
Thank you, Ultima Ratio Regum, for making RPG dialogue less boring
Ultima Ratio Regum, Mark Johnson’s epic 10-year roguelike project, aims to do a lot of things, but first and foremost it aims to reinvent how we approach procedural generation in lore-heavy games. The traditional view of algorithm-based writing is that it hits roadblocks between expansive possibilit
News
The Final Station finds the rare beauty of zombie fiction
If we understand the “zombie movie” as a particular set of plot beats and characters, George A. Romero’s films are what brought that to the mainstream. There’s a mysterious disease, followed by lots of killing and running from zombies, then—in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), at l
News
Indirect combat is all you’ll have to tackle ENYO’s labyrinth monsters
In an industry that likes to stab stuff almost as much as it likes to shoot people, an “indirect combat” game might seem a little out of place. In fact, the concept has more in common with puzzles than fighting games, as the inability to directly attack your opponent means that the player is forced