Slay the Spire 2 just released a major balance patch—and aside from forcing me into an update for my Silent Ascension 10 guide in the near future—it's delivered a whole heap of changes to the game, including one fascinating RNG bugfix discovered at the hands of a determined player.

RNG can always be a nightmare to figure out, mostly because human brains just don't perceive games of chance all that well. If you've ever missed on a 99% chance shot in XCOM, you know this feeling—a 1 in 100 chance is unlikely, but not impossible. And yet your brain tells you that some great and unforeseen injustice has visited you if it happens.

Anyway, one player spent about eight hours trying to prove they weren't crazy. User tckmn on the subreddit released a manifesto that's credited in the patch notes, an "eight-hour descent into madness", without which "we wouldn't have caught the issue."

The problem in question relates to Neow's Bones, a starting option that allows players to take on two starting relics in exchange for a curse—which could either be a non-event, giving you a curse that's just a dead card. Or you could get something like Debt, which could utterly spoil the economy of your run.

Turns out, you could tell if certain runs were more likely to give you Debt than others—specifically, if you started in the Underdocks, Neow's Curse was 54% likely to give you the Debt curse.

As the devs themselves explain it: "Most games, including STS2, use pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs). A PRNG is fed a seed value, and given the same seed value, a PRNG will always generate the same sequence of random numbers.

"Since we fed different seeds to each PRNG, we expected their results to be completely unrelated. But we were wrong, and it turns out that our strategy allowed players to predict outcomes given knowledge of unrelated parts of the game."

The issue was that the decimals which governed which Act 1 you got also happened to correlate to your Neow's Bones curse: "For example, if our act roll is >0.5 (we’re in the Underdocks), then it’s highly likely that our Neow’s Bones curse roll will be <0.5, which cuts the potential curses you can obtain in half."

But rest assured, "your suffering is now truly random!" Mega Crit's swapped to a system that's far less predictable.

The patch itself also has a ton of other changes—balance adjustments for instance, which impact the Regent most of all. It's swings and roundabouts, with some cards like Monarch's Gaze getting a bump, and others, like my darling Reflect, being nerfed slightly.

The Doormaker has also been laid low: "As we said in the patch notes of the beta patch that brought this change: while Doormaker had interesting micro decisions in the fight, he was over the complexity threshold of what we want and had lingering issues. We decided that starting over fresh will let us hit what we actually want for an Act 3 boss."

He's now been replaced by the Aeonglass, a fearsome boss that's a bit of a DPS race, pumping Wither curses into your hand that deal damage to you, ramping rapidly whenever the boss upgrades them. You can view the full patch notes on Steam.

Back in January, I wrote about From the Top, a roguelike designed for those of us who had experienced the unparalleled childhood thrill of detonating your older brother's Beyblade with an imported Japanese Driger V2 that your parents had given you earlier that day on Christmas morning of 2003. (Many such cases.) From the Top was a promising omen: a sign that a subgenre precision-targeted at a specific vintage of millennials might soon emerge.

Today, I am pleased to report that the dream of the burgeoning Beyblade-like space is alive and well in Slayblade, a top-battling roguelike with a demo in this month's Next Fest.

Compared to From the Top's darker vibe, Slayblade is leaning even harder into Y2K nostalgia. It's all airy Toonami-core soundtrack and pixelated overworld sprites, and the designs of its pseudo-Beyblades are right in line with the era's chunky, gratuitous plastic molding sensibilities. Except you might end up with a Wu Tang logo as one of your battle top components. Don't worry about it. It's for the children.

You play as a nameless Slayblade battler, aiming to secure the Slayblade World Championship title—an achievement which will, obviously, allow you to discover why your father disappeared after inventing perpetual motion Slayblade technology "that would have solved the energy crisis." To get there, you'll have to complete a days-long run of skating between cash prize Slayblade battles, exchanging your winnings for top parts and tournament entries.

You can also use your Slayblade to mow lawns for extra money and experience if you want. Or you can partake in "illegal," high-risk Slayblade battles. I don't know what would render a battle top match illegal, but I do know I'm too afraid to ask.

As you'd expect, each of the available Slayblade parts—divided between top heads, bodies, and tips—have their own attributes and effects. In addition to a weight stat that affects the Slayblade's impact, handling, and momentum, each part has an active effect that'll trigger if you fling your top into a "power up cube" during a match.

The combinations can be pretty potent. For example, that Wu Tang logo I mentioned will halve the time until the next power up cube appears when triggered. On its own, that might not seem like much—but pair it with a Buster body that summons a spin-draining ghost to chase your opponent when you collect a cube, and you could flood the Slayblade arena with vampiric phantoms that can quickly leave the other top lifeless.

In one of my runs, I matched a Slayblade body that placed a landmine in the arena with a "Flat Earth" tip that flattened the typically bowl-shaped arena into a level plane: When my opponents slid into my explosives, there was nothing keeping them from immediately skittering out of bounds, earning me an easy victory.

Slayblade's Next Fest demo is fairly short and rough around the edges: The available part selection isn't particularly deep, each run will abruptly cut off at the point you'd enter your initial Slayblade tournament, and there's a healthy amount of placeholder art and menu text waiting for another pass. But as an early playtest, it's another promising take on a proof of concept that I'm pleased to see.

Slayblade doesn't have a release date, but the demo is available on Steam now.

Now, you might be wondering why this isn't titled "the best builds for Ascension 10", and that's because while builds are still important at higher difficulties in Slay the Spire 2, they're also actually a lie—Ascension 10 isn't about getting the perfect synergy, it's about plugging leaks. Your starter deck is a problem, and you need to fix those problems as quickly and as soon as possible.

I'll get into what Silent's builds are at the end of this article, but really, you'll be better served at Ascension 10 by understanding which cards cover up which weaknesses. Or, as the title might suggest, the best Ascension 10 cards for Silent. Not the best cards overall, but rather, the ones that'll get your hiney out of the fire the fastest. Let's go.

Best Silent cards in Slay the Spire 2

By far, the most powerful mechanic the Silent has at her disposal is the Sly modifier—wherein if you discard a card with Sly, it'll play anyway. However, this comes with a huge asterisk: You generally don't want to pick most Sly cards before you have a reliable set of discard options, since they usually aren't worth their energy cost alone.

If you get too many Sly cards too early on without ways to get rid of them, you'll have essentially created curses for yourself—and you'll lose in Act 1 to terrible hands that see you eating huge damage.

Other than that, the general priority for Ascension 10 stays true: Get early damage and 1-2 AoE cards, get good defensive/block options, then go for card draw and discard so you can both improve your hands on a turn-by-turn basis and set yourself up for Sly synergies.

Early Picks

These cards aren't necessarily run-winners in their own right—some of them might stay put in your deck for the whole run, while others might be less useful as time goes on. But again, this is A10—you need to cover for your weaknesses as soon as possible, regardless of whether or not these cards fit into your imagined build.

It's all about early value. In the first few floors of any run, your job is to grab cards that are just better than a strike—because strikes don't give you nearly enough damage to get past A10's scarier, tankier fights.

• AoE - Echoing Slash/Flick-Flack/Dagger Spray: You'll want at least one of these early on. STS2 has a lot of nasty multi-target fights.

• Poisoned Stab/Bubble Bubble: Poisoned Stab is decent damage, and Bubble Bubble is a natural combo to it—nine whole poison for just one energy is a good deal, as long as you can set it up properly, which is what Poisoned Stab will always do for you.
• Backstab/Assassinate: These cards get stronger with good turn-one draw, but they're never a bad idea in Act 1 where you're starving for energy and quick, easy damage. Just don't take too many, since they don't scale well on their own.

• Strangle: This card doesn't scale too well, but if you're able to pick up a couple of shiv cards to supplement it, the early damage value it offers can be massive.
• Ricochet: Ricochet stays useful until the endgame thanks to its Sly property, and it's not a disastrous card to play early on even without discard, given it's the equivalent of two non-upgrade strikes.
• Flechettes: This thing's better than it seems, especially if you're able to get fat hands with card draw. It'll usually be doing 10 damage for 1 energy even on a sub-par hand—but if you can draw a few skills, Flechettes is excellent.

• Snakebite (No, really): This card gets memed on a lot, but Snakebite is actually fine—it has Retain, which means once you draw it, it's basically out of your deck until you have a chance to use it. It combos nicely with Flechettes, and some enemies or bosses will have turns where throwing 7 poison at them is valuable. You probably don't want more than one, but Snakebite is just fine.
• Dagger Throw: Better damage than a strike, card draw, and potential synergies with Sly—if you see this in Act 1's early fights, just get it.
• Dash: Dash is kinda garbage late game, but good early game just because of its value—you're blocking and attacking for two energy, meaning you can play a defensive turn without falling too far behind on tempo.

Defense

Once you've got some early value under your belt, you'll want to figure out your defensive game, too. Damage in A10 is severe, and chances are high you'll be taking chip damage at least every fight—and resting at campfires more than you can upgrade your cards. Snagging an early defensive plan doesn't just help you dodge damage, it also makes you stronger in the long run.

• Footwork: Dexterity is so good, and Footwork is a cost-effective power that, on its own, can prevent dozens of points of chip damage over the course of several fights. One Dexterity is solid, two is amazing. Three is probably too much, but if you've got relics or energy gain to support it, you can grab more of those, too.
• Abrasive: A touch situational, and only worth playing if you've got good discard options, Abrasive is still great for the reasons Footwork is great. Dexterity's super valuable, and the thorns are a nice bonus.
• Blur: Blur's extremely useful not necessarily because of its value (though that is good), but because it can help bail you out of nothing turns where you draw a bunch of defence but the enemy isn't attacking. A blur can transform a wasted turn into a lovely bit of setup for the next one.

• Leg Sweep: This almost made the "Early Picks" list, because Weak in A10 is an incredibly useful status effect, and the Silent only has a few ways to apply it. Almost always worth having one of these in your hand.
• Blade of Ink: Similar to Leg Sweep, Blade of Ink is a nice, fuss-free way to cause Weak in your deck—it also synergises with the Mystic Lighter relic, so it's a must-pick if you've got that knocking about.
• Untouchable: If you have good discard, you should always grab an Untouchable or two. It's a free block.

• Afterimage: Again, chip damage in Ascension 10 is the enemy—no matter your deck, having one Afterimage in it is useful. Having two, albeit harder in A10, is excellent. This plays especially nice with Shiv cards, so make sure to grab a few if you get it.
• Escape Plan: Save for a few specific enemies, Escape Plan is basically free. If you play it and don't draw a skill, you haven't wasted any energy. If you play it and do draw a skill, you just got 3 block for nothing. See it, click it.

Draw, Discard, and Retain

Once you're all set up, the Silent wants to figure out its draw/discard game—Sly is your friend, which means that discard is your friend, and card draw is just good insurance on any character playing any deck, as having good draw reduces your chances of having wasted turns—which, in A10, can be fatal.

• Prepared: Prepared is solid, baseline, but if you can upgrade this bad boy it can be responsible for winning your run—it might even be worth forgoing a rest at a campfire if you've got the Sly cards to support it. No Sly cards in your hand? Prepare might draw them for you. Sly cards in your hand? Prepared will let you play them. You cannot lose.
• Tools of the Trade: This is basically a Prepared that auto-plays at the start of your turn, and it's good for all the same reasons.
• Well-Laid Plans: Never underestimate Retain—a Well-Laid Plans means you can keep a hold of useful cards for synergies, or remove crappy cards from your draw pool, allowing you to have more effective turns.

• Reflex: Reflex plays nicely with all of the other cards on this list, boosting their draw to give you even bigger hands—which usually means better turns.
• Acrobatics: Never a bad card to grab. Fish for Sly cards in your deck, or draw some cards and play a Sly card already in your hand.
• Backflip: Card draw with a little block. What's not to love?

• Calculated Gamble: You want one of these in your deck, especially if it's upgraded—bad turns kill A10 runs, and being able to simply go "no, I'd like to do something else" is always useful. Bonus points if you're getting rid of (and auto-playing) a bunch of Sly cards, too.
• Hidden Daggers: The Discard plays nicely with Sly, and the two extra shivs are just a sexy bonus.

Ramp/Scaling

Last in your priorities is ramp and scaling—for the non-card game folks among you, that basically means "things that let you play more cards earlier in the fight" and "things that multiply your existing damage, or let you get more powerful over time".

• Adrenaline: This is a "see it, pick it" card. Card draw and extra energy to play with? Get it. Get it yesterday.
• Accelerant: If you've got a poison deck and you're offered this, get it. A measly one energy to effectively double your poison damage is a great way to make you scale into the later acts.
• Tactician: If you've got a good amount of discard going, Tactician helps your discard turns go further, helping to solve your energy problems.

• Noxious Fumes: If you're building any sort of poison deck, Noxious Fumes is worth getting—it might be worth getting even if you aren't. This also counts as an AoE damage card, so it's super valuable.
• Shadow Step: Plays nicely with Sly cards, and increases the damage of your next turn.
• Tracking: If you've got good ways to cause Weak in your deck, tracking is monstrously powerful. It also plays nicely with shiv archetypes, as well as cards like Flechettes and Ricochet.

• Accuracy/Phantom Blades: If you're building a Shiv deck, you'll want to start grabbing these cards—but not before you've got a few Shiv creators in your pocket.
• Corrosive Wave: If you've got a bunch of card draw, Corrosive Wave is a no-brainer. It's a cheap, effective way to potentially throw a whole bunch of poison on your enemies—and it makes poison decks play much faster under the right circumstances.

Situationals

I'd hesitate to call any of these cards bad; most cards are useful in Slay the Spire 2. But they're so situational that you want to make sure you pick them only when you've already got the other cards or relics that make them work.

• Envenom: On its own, Envenom just isn't worth playing—but if you've got a decent shiv deck going or ways to get free powers like a mummified hand, it's a nice supplement to certain decks that improves your scaling.
• Bullet Time: Combos well with high-draw decks. Get a big, nasty hand and then drop a bullet time to play everything in it. Otherwise, skip it.
• Speedster: Similar to Envenom, the energy cost of Speedster is just too high to make it worth playing—unless you've got a deck with an obscene amount of draw and the energy to back it up, in which case, Speedster can win you runs. It's a feast or famine card.

• Serpent Form: More often than not, Serpent Form just doesn't work. Three-energy powers are way too costly at Ascension 10—but again, if you've got the relics and/or energy generation for it? It might be worth taking.
• Fan of Knives: A very good card. However, because of how little you can find Rare cards in Ascension 10, you're unlikely to get this before you've got a couple AoE cards in your deck; Snag it if you're still somehow lacking in AoE, if it's offered to you early, or if you're building Shiv.

Best builds for Silent in Slay the Spire 2

Again, I must emphasise—if you wanna win Ascension 10 runs in Slay the Spire 2, you should be building for solutions, not builds. Stubbornly trying to stick to a certain archetype is a great way to get killed. However, it's good to keep them in mind, given you'll more or less be trying to steer into one of these versions of Silent whenever you play.

Shiv

• (+) Good to build for if you find a Kunai, Shuriken, or Ornamental Fan.
• (+) Mystic Lighter + Blade of Ink combo is very strong, as Blade of Ink counts as an enchanted attack.
• (-) Most reliant on synergy cards.

Worth building into if you get an early Kunai or Shuriken relic, as both give you in-built Strength and Dexterity, scaling that the Silent's particularly good at taking advantage of. Shiv decks primarily rely on cards like Fan of Knives, Accuracy, Phantom Blades, Blade of Ink, and Afterimage. And, naturally, cards that generate shivs themselves, such as Hidden Daggers.

Still, given the amount of supplementary cards you need, it's only really worth building for Shiv if you've been given the aforementioned relics or if you're given no real other synergistic option.

Poison

• (+) Poison scales well.
• (+) Good to build if you get lots of defensive relics and good block cards.
• (-) Very slow tempo.

The second-strongest archetype, poison is just pretty good. It deals its damage right before the enemy's turn, and by its nature has in-built scaling. Poison decks only really struggle with AoE damage, and they can be a little slow to start off with.

You'll want to build for Poison if you get certain key cards like Corrosive Wave, Accelerant, Bouncing Flask, or an early Bubble Bubble—or if you find yourself with a lot of relics that provide you block, allowing you to survive long enough to start ramping up those poison stacks.

Sly (Draw/Discard)

• (+) The strongest Silent archetype.
• (+) Builds out of cards you want to be getting in Shiv and Poison builds, anyway.
• (-) Getting Sly cards before you get discard options can brick a run.

By far the strongest out of the Silent's current archetype, Sly is just busted—and this archetype's already empowered by things you want to be building for any way, namely card draw and discard.

Even if you're building for Shiv or Poison, chances are you'll have some Sly cards in your deck, and a lot of the best cards for Silent—Adrenaline, Calculated Gamble, Tools of the Trade, Hidden Daggers, and so on—are naturally Sly enablers, as well.

A dozen roguelike action RPGs show up on Steam every month, but none of them have grabbed me like Cursemark. I play plenty of these games and know how long of a grind it usually takes to feel like you have a satisfying combination of skills that you could call a build. In Cursemark, I was wiping the screen clean of monsters in just 15 minutes.

That's impressive for a game that's not even finished yet. The early access version of Cursemark—which dropped today—already has enough in it to keep me replaying its first few levels, and developer Clyde Games plans on adding a lot more over the next several months.

The studio's previous game, Into the Necrovale, shares some DNA with Cursemark: Pixel art, skeletons, and hundreds of unique items that combine into devastating builds. Action RPG fans who like mowing down waves of monsters without much difficulty seem to love it. From what I can tell, Cursemark is more akin to a soulslike with dodge rolls and tanky enemies, which means it takes a little longer to ramp up your character into a monster-slaying god.

Every run of Cursemark is about surviving long enough to tip the scales in your favor. Basic spells, like a fireball, can be upgraded with runes that increase their damage and size or weaken enemies with various status effects. I had enough runes stacked onto my fireball in one run that I could barely see what I was fighting behind the trails of fire covering the battlefield.

The longer your run goes on, the tougher the enemies get. It's not always possible to keep up with them depending on how lucky you are with drops. I tried to protect myself from enemies I couldn't see through all the flames with a spell that coated my character in defensive ice, but eventually got shredded by massive sword swipes I couldn't anticipate. If there's anything I hope to see ironed out during early access it's the lack of visual clarity as you accumulate more and more power.

Even though it can be tough with so much on your screen, it's still fun to see how ridiculous all the effects get once you're deep into a run. While you don't need to manage your gear, you can swap around your runes at any point to experiment with different combinations. In my last run, I was saving up some currency to unlock an ultimate ability that summons a cloud of hornets that chase after enemies. The woman in the game's main hub offers an assortment of different elemental spell schools to permanently unlock, like a list of spells that shock enemies and have a higher chance to deal big critical hits.

Much like other action RPGs, Cursemark has a dictionary of keywords to help you understand all the effects to play with. People with a buildcrafting brain will probably catch onto the synergies even faster than me. But even if you're not an expert, you'll start to see how the pieces fit together as you familiarize yourself with the different effects runes provide. It didn't take me very long to realize how broken it is to increase the size of your spells so they repeatedly apply DoTs on everything in the room—which then sets you up to clear them out with spells that deal bonus damage to anything affected by those DoTs.

The depth of Cursemark's systems on top of a world filled with secret passages, shortcuts, and optional challenges, changes how you approach each run. And even if you die—and you definitely will—you always have something to bring into your next attempt, be it permanent upgrades or the knowledge of a smarter route to your destination.

Cursemark is the perfect kind of little roguelike action RPG to play on a lunch break or when it's late and all you want to do is smash monsters while chatting with some friends. I'm excited to see what kinds of spells and areas get added over time because it's already a blast.

There's a free demo you can play right now on Steam, or you can pick up the game on sale for $12.74 (from $14.99) until June 22.

To Kill a God knows just how to pique my interest. A cursed realm trapped in a cycle of life and death. The aesthetic of a polished survivors-like but with action-oriented combat and movement. Cults and tyrannical demigods to carve through. Oh yeah, it's got the juice.

What compels me most is its skill tree that also doubles up as a map and route planner. You see, each stop on your journey through the Death Spiral both powers you up and gets you closer to that titular act of god killing.

Coined the SkillMap, it combines the buildcrafting of a skill tree with the choice of where to actually go. Now, instead of simply levelling up to get the powers you want, you'll need to traverse the world of the Death Spiral and fight your way to your abilities. It makes the trek into a part of your progression in a way I think is really intriguing.

Will you take a shorter route with fewer skills or a longer route with more? A safe route with weak abilities, or a risky one that gets you better build synergy? It's a mechanic that centres choice, the core of a videogame. I also like that it feels less random than upgrades in some rougelites are.

In a new trailer debuted at the PC Gaming Show, we saw a new character in action: Talorim the mage. Rather than the up close and personal sword strikes of the warrior or the ranged attacks of the archer, Talorim uses magic to deal area of effect damage. It's a tactic that makes To Kill a God seem even more like Vampire Survivors, as it becomes beneficial to be surrounded by enemies.

If you want to try them out for yourself, there's a new To Kill a God demo you can download on Steam, right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I don't know what was in the air a few years ago, but climbing games are all the rage now. As soon as you reach the summit of one peak, another looms tantalisingly on the horizon. I may be 31, but I have absolutely no desire to go mountain climbing in real life, unlike my peers. But give me a game where the goal is to go up a big rock and I'm all in—eyes closed, head first, can't lose.

At the PC Gaming Show, we just got an explainer of Ascenders: Beyond the Peak from the creative director of developer Ludogram. Build a team and plan a route up a deadly mountain. Sounds simple, right? Well, actually, no it doesn't, and it's only going to get more tricky. Lovecraftian horrors await you, and monsters and the mountain itself will try to stop you reaching the goodies at the top.

You'll have nine different classes to choose from, each with different levels of mobility and abilities to utilise on your ascent. The catch is, you're all connected by a single rope, so if one team member is lagging behind, you may have to cut them loose and send them to their death. Brutal.

You can also use gravity as a weapon, though. Drop rocks or weapons on enemies to bonk them on the noggin and send them hurtling below. If you can position everything right, you might get a two-for-one kill.

Aesthetically, the game reminds me of Into the Breach, just vertical instead of horizontal. You move your team along a grid and can see warnings about environmental hazards such as avalanches and your own explosives' radius.

And, for the aspiring alpinists out there (that's a new word I just learned, it's a mountain climber who does high, difficult ascents), there's a whole base camp feature where you'll plan which mountains to climb, who to take on the expedition, and what gear you'll need. There are also rest stops up the mountains that will help you reset and recover, but not all of the classes get better at the same rate, so you may still end up taking weakened teammates on the climbs and have to make tough calls later on.

If that all sounds like your cup of tea, check out the Ascenders demo on Steam, and don't forget to wishlist the game ahead of its Q3 early access launch.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

We just got our first look at Maximum Thunderness during today's PC Gaming Show, and this shoot-em-up roguelike looks just as chaotic as it sounds—with giant green goop aliens, tanks, and more explosions than a Michael Bay film.

Maximum Thunderness is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up roguelike that its developer, Berzerk Studios, promises will deliver "the energy and aesthetic of a Saturday morning cartoon—sugary cereal-induced fever dream." Something that, by the looks of this trailer it almost certainly delivers on.

It's been a good couple of decades since I watched Saturday morning cartoons, but I have to say this does kind of remind me of that feeling of sitting down at the weekend and seeing what's on Cartoon Network, Toonami, or Kix—good times.

But this roguelike isn't just a tornado of colours and bullets, it's also a co-op game, so you can enjoy all of this with your friends. You all work together, killing green alien monsters and blowing up every single thing in your path as you make your way across the 2D map.

But it's not just one straight road. The map has multiple branches as players can take different routes across the city and gain different buffs as they go along, such as Super Defender which gives you +4 shield and +1 shield regen, Incendiary Bullet which gives each bullet a +2% chance to create a fireball (that must be where all those explosions are coming from), and Chain Reaction which increases the Lazrifle damage by +4 for the rest of that stage when overheating.

Then with each stage you complete you can get more cash and an upgrade booster pack with different kinds of perks, like the ones above, to choose from. Which will hopefully make your run a little easier.

But as is the case with roguelike, if you die then all that progress and the perks are lost. You'll need to start again from square one with a fresh slate, which means new perks,and maybe some of your old favourites—if you're lucky.

Berzerk Studios has been bringing "creative, polished, and most of all, fun games filled with humour, headbanging tunes and sometimes, gallons of gratuitous violence" for over a decade now. With 30 games published, Maximum Thunderness is its next venture into the bloody foray of action games yet again and it's set to release this autumn, and there's a Steam demo you can try out now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I love a deckbuilder, me—something about carefully putting together an engine of collapsing game mechanics to run over whatever roguelike challenge awaits me really scratches an itch. Shroom and Gloom intrigues me, because it's asked: What if we scratched two itches?

An upcoming deckbuilding roguelike by Team Lazerbeam, Shroom and Gloom sees you plunging into the depths of a fungal "under-realm" that cannot be safe to breathe in. But hey, some plucky adventurer's gotta do it, and there's cards down there!

The real intrigue is the fact you're putting together two different decks. One for exploration, and one for combat. It's akin to one of my under-appreciated favourite roguelikes, Griftlands. Griftland's not a game I'd call perfect by any means (it very clearly wears the skin of the open-world RPG it was meant to be) but it asked you to build two decks—one for combat, and one for social encounters.

The way Shroom and Gloom takes that concept and tweaks it from social combat to exploration seems to me a more natural expansion of the genre—transplanting the choices you typically make in, say, Slay the Spire's event rooms and instead making them a part of your hand. Trading in health for bashing down locks, resting up, digging for weapons, and so on.

One thing that also intrigues me is the fact there aren't any block cards—having played the demo (albeit an older version, not the one dropped at the show), Shroom and Gloom is more concerned with stacking max HP and healing items in your deck.

You'll inevitably take damage, the question is whether you're grown beefy enough to shrug it off, and whether you can heal it, usually by generating food cards via certain attacks or by applying the "Seasoned" debuff. It's a refreshing take on the genre—and one that incentivises taking more risks.

The exploration deck's interesting, too, essentially dictating what between-room buffs you have access to. For instance, in the demo I've played, you could grab a training dummy to upgrade your cards or a frog statue to forget them—you can also get powerful passives that encourage you to, say, overeat as much as you can to improve your max HP.

Either way, Shroom and Gloom feels like a novel take on a relatively well-done genre and, as of the PC Gaming show, has a new demo available now. You won't have to wait long to play more, as it's launching into early access later this year.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

It must be stressful to be Dracula. Not only do you have to pay what must be extortionate taxes on your big stonking castle, but you also have to decide where all those confounding metroidvania rooms go to thwart the prospective vampire hunters who want to take a crack at the big D. Well, ReVamp is finally giving voice to that administrative stress.

Developed by Digital Sun (the folks who made Moonlighter and Cataclismo), ReVamp is a castle defence roguelike where you need to craft your own castle from assembled pieces to make it as hard to invade as (in)humanly possible.

You won't just be sitting idly by while your meticulously-placed forces of the damned whack knights upside the helm, though—ReVamp'll also have you leading from the front rather than the throne, dropping boots into your castle to fight in it yourself. As the Steam page puts it, "You are not just the ruler of the castle. You are its final defense."

And, as announced during the PC Gaming show, ReVamp will be entering playtesting soon—you can scan the QR code in the trailer above to sign up yourself via Discord, or click that link.

Honestly, ReVamp looks sick as hell—not only is it looking gorgeous, with animation and artwork that reminds me, appropriately, of the Castlevania Netflix series—it's also from a studio that knows their roguelikes from haunted basement to parapet, but it's also a really fun spin on a handful of genres.

I'm always a fan, conceptually, of games that spin the duties of hero and villain on their head—and a tower defence roguelike where you're also designing the layout of a castle you'll be fighting in is a real novel concept. Also, I just like a good roguelike. Give me a repeatable gameplay loop and one of three upgrade options to choose from, and I'm a happy little camper.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

There's just something so cool about using melee weapons in a cyberpunk setting. The katana in Ghostrunner—sublime. The mantis blades in Cyberpunk 2077—inspired. SlashZero, as the name suggests, lets you slice and dice enemies across various timelines. Oh, and you can juggle them in the air with sick combos, too. I haven't seen this much off-the-ground action since my housemate battered me at Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

In SlashZero, you take on the role of a Timehacker. Their mission is to take down the Lord of the Void, Hieros, who seems to have thrown the whole world into disarray. There are also scattered Authority Keys, Codes, and Blessings all over the place. You'll collect these on your forays into the disparate timelines to upgrade your build on the fly.

The different builds shown off in a new PC Gaming Show trailer look pretty cool. As a fan of Dead Cells, I'm excited to get stuck in and see what synergies I can come up with. The game's 3D anime style lends itself perfectly to the frenetic combat, which sees the characters darting around enemies as they slice, shoot, and summon tornadoes and fiery explosions with elemental powers.

You can freeze enemies in place and go to town on them, racking up huge damage while they're immobile, or you can summon lightning bolts that chain onto multiple foes if you're surrounded. The fire looks like my go-to, though. Burning columns of it rise up from the ground, and hot circles form outward from your Timehacker. I like to control space and get that burn-over-time damage so I'm still getting rid of my opponents even while repositioning.

The trailer shows two of the Timehackers in action—a guy with two swords and a woman with guns that can rapid fire or blast like shotguns—and a third is coming soon. If you want to see more, wishlist SlashZero on Steam and sign up for the playtest here.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Videogames are all about choice. But does that mean your decisions should be seen by everyone? What if your choice is to screw over your "friend"? What then? Another Door dares to ask, and answer, that question.

In a world premiere trailer at the PC Gaming Show, we just saw the spooky roguelike in action. The way it works is this: You and your buddies are presented with a series of choices. One example in the trailer has you pick between two cards—take 15 damage, or, if multiple people pick the other card, take 75 damage.

The no-brainer is for everyone to pick the first, but you don't know what anyone else will do until the die is cast. In the trailer, everyone goes for the latter card and takes a heavy hit, showing being selfish doesn't pay off. But it might, and that's where the gambling aspect of Another Door kicks in.

One card offers 30 HP, but another will give you 60 HP if only you choose it. Double or nothing, baby. Other effects are a bit more nebulous right now. You can either receive five gems from a grazing beast or get some plague. I don't know why you'd opt for plague, maybe it's a good plague and not the bad kind that decimated Europe. I guess we'll know for sure when the game (developed by Indieklem and published by No More Robots) launches.

It's all a bit like Among Us. You have to convince everyone else what to do, but can you trust them, and can they trust you? The answer is a resounding no. This is a game for the liars and cheats of the world, not an innocent little goody two shoes.

If you want to ruin some friendships, then you can jump into the Another Door online demo on Steam right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I've got a big soft spot for Serious Sam. Back in the day, a young Josh really marvelled at that one bit—you know the one—where what-felt-like-a-million Beheaded Kamikazes pour over the sand dunes and begin charging directly at your position. It was probably the first game I played that made fun of games, that mucked about with familiar tropes to create something that felt like a long piece of affectionate mockery.

All this to say I am glad Sam is still here and still Serious, and we just got a glimpse of his latest adventure—Serious Sam: Shatterverse—at the PC Gaming Show. This is Behaviour Digital's co-op roguelite take on the Sam Saga. Samga. Anyway, the point is you'll be charging into runs over and over, creating different builds through modifiers, and generally dying a fair bit until you crack 'em. You know, a roguelite.

From the PCGS trailer, Shatterverse is an appropriately blood-speckled affair filled with myriad recognisable enemies from Sam's many other games. Gnaars? Check. Kamikazes? Check. Did I see a Walker in there? Entirely possible! It was hard to see through the sheets of gore.

Shatterverse also looks like, uh, a 'verse. That is to say, it's bringing together all manner of Sams and art styles to render you and your pals' playable characters. There's polygonal Sam, lizard Sam, portly dad Sam. A lot of Sams, in essence. I rather like it. This is a series that's now been going for (I'm sorry) a quarter of a century. It's fun to mix and mash its legacy like this.

We didn't get a full release date at PCGS, save a wink that the game is due out this year, but there is a Steam playtest upcoming in the relatively near future. If you're interested in shattering Sam's 'verse, you can sign up to check it out over on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Cooking sims and deckbuilders have both evolved a lot over the years, but the two genres weren't combined until Arcane Eats debuted at last year's PC Gaming Show. In it, you run a fantasy-themed restaurant and feed your hungry diners, from goblins and orcs to fairies and dwarves. Now, the game has another new demo for you to sink your teeth into, and a trailer narrated by none other than celebrity chef Gorgon Ramsey.

As someone who grew up on Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, I recognised the intonation and blue language in the voice over immediately—it's a solid impression. You'll have to put your cooking skills to the test to impress the likes of Gorgon Ramsey, Guy Fairy, Wolfman Puck, as well as newly introduced Jewelia Crag-Child—I'm a sucker for pun names.

You play by creating dishes out of cards in your deck. You'll have ingredients like star potatoes or a giant eagle egg that you use to form the base; upgrades in the form of kitchen tools, such as twin cleavers that allow you to double your next ingredient; and garnishes like black abyss pepper which add a spicy kick to your meals. Just like real life, there are a lot of combos to try.

You've got to pick and choose the dishes customers get, which may lead to some upset diners. You'll learn the tastes of regulars and even try to impress the legendary chefs mentioned above—if you do, you'll get the coveted three Mythril Star rating. You'll also be able to climb the ranks of three guilds that each reward different types of cards. Go hearty and heavy with the Hearth, turn up the heat with the Grove's elemental spices, and become a mise-en-place master with the Order.

Arcane Eats, developed by the very appropriately named Wonderbelly Games, has a new demo that you can try out today; download it on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

So there I am, a regular console cowboy jamming through the hyperfractals of cyberspace, siphoning some choice credits from those lamebrain corpos, when a modem link threw me over to a real nightmare: a webbed out, vibe-coded server from the Basilisk Corp crawling with transmitted viruses. And even worse, they’d managed some hot new dimensional display tech to really make the steal feel real. These megacorps, man. Always find some evil new way to surprise me.

Talking about 868-Back, the latest puzzler roguelike from Michael Brough, makes me feel like a parody of what Hollywood used to think hackers are.

With its bizarre visual mishmash of pixel art and notebook doodling and 1980s digital futurism, groovy bass-heavy jams rolling along in the background, text dunked in a vat of cool technobabble, every second of my scrounging through backdoor servers has the air of classic cyberpunk hacking. I’m Hugh Jackman in Swordfish, I’m the Lawnmower Man, I’m Julia Stiles in that one episode of Ghostwriter ranting about the new wave, next wave, and dream wave.

Pop culture loved to make hacking into the world’s highest security computer systems seem like the easiest (and sexiest) thing in the world, and at a glance 868-Back looks similarly simple. Peek at a few screenshots and you’d be forgiven for thinking beating The System requires little more than clicking around a souped up Minesweeper board. But just as hacking is a bit more complex than the movies make it out to be, I realized hard and fast that Back is a whole lot more than it lets on.

The rules are deceptively simple: taking place on randomly generated 6x6 square grids, you’ve got to turn-based crawl through eight floors of constantly spawning enemies, using a limited resource to snatch weapons, the currency needed to use them, and score points at the same time.The cyberpunk yin-yang is strong though: every item or point gained means instantly spawning more enemies across the already small map, resulting in an endless cavalcade of tricky catch-22s. You need tools to survive, but you’re gonna have to survive to get them, and every button you press, every square you step on, could save or destroy you.

It's a game defined by high stakes, one where you’re constantly betraying yourself in acts of digital hubris. Every single run I've failed (and I’ve failed a lot—BACK does not play gentle) has been from me seeing a bunch of points ripe for the taking and knowingly biting off more than I can chew because "yeah, I'm a cool guy, I can probably handle 10 more baddies."

I can almost never handle 10 more baddies.

For a while this intense single-screen game of tactical maneuvering felt positively claustrophobic, the small arena eliminating downtime and severely limiting my own options. But the more I played, the more I started pushing against BACK’s on-the-surface simplicity, stretching its limitations into all sorts of surprising ways. I was pushing myself and enemies through walls, hopping around the screen like a busted chess piece, and even purposefully calling up that army of foes only to confidently cheat death and make out like a bandit. After a few hours, what once was suffocating had become liberating, that tiny grid of 36 squares now an entire world to play in.

In a way, 868-BACK feels less like any roguelike it visually resembles and more like playing a game of Go—the learning curve not so much from any challenge in the game itself and more from having to rewrite the way you consider playable space.

Back the planet

Fans of 2013's 868-Hack will already be intimately familiar with all of this. Everything from that masterpiece of game design—its brilliantly constructed play space and ruleset, its evolving sense of understanding and discovery, its devious temptations to screw yourself over with the promise of a few more points—can be found here in the sequel. But where Hack was spartan—and gosh, 2013 was a long time ago—Back is determined to explode the concept out as far as it can possibly go.

I noticed something was radically different the second I started. Where the original involved hacking through servers and absolutely nothing else, Back turns a run into a more expansive experience with a broader game played out on top of the server crawling, having you uncover and map out a path through various locations you can choose between. On higher levels that aim for score (while you’ll initially be playing just to survive, both 868 games are ultimately oddball high-score chasers), this "world map" and the more involved hacking start feeding into each other in increasingly complex ways. But even before you've gone all Neo and seen through the code, surprises abound to help and hinder you once you dive into a server.

'Surprised' definitely described me when I uncovered a new server that seemed innocent enough on the outside, hopped on in, and suddenly found myself… in 3D?

Plenty of roguelikes have embraced large scale modifiers, those typically optional systems that shift everything against you for an extra challenge. Take Slay the Spire’s ascensions, with their ever-expanding enemy buffs forcing you to tighten up your strategy more and more. 868-Hack was no different, offering a host of effects once you’d manage to chain enough successive runs together.

868-Back takes the concept to new extremes.

Not only are they more deeply ingrained into the roguelike loop—higher level servers grant score multipliers but also start stacking modifiers against you—nearly every one is dedicated to deeply altering how I play, dozens on dozens of effects forcing me to completely reconsider the space I’d just become confident in.

When I found myself playing in a new dimension, the 6x6 grid now like something out of Wizardry, my overwhelming thought was "Is this even allowed?" When I later got stuck in true Silicon Valley hell, vibed code started stymying my agency while pop-up ads undercut any triumph by forcing me to throw away precious resources. "Is this even possible?" I despaired.

The answer, both times, was somehow yes. I just had to learn how to look at my little cyber-world in a new way, from a different angle. I just had to hack my own brain.

868-Back feels bottomless. A solid dozen hours in and despite the seemingly simple design of it, there are still mysteries big and small waiting for me (and you, on Steam), still surprises at every corner, still constant moments where what I thought I knew is unraveled and rebuilt in an instant. It’s a marvel, a game that constantly feels like the whole world is insurmountable and like you’re cheat-coding your way past it at the same time.

And best of all, when I’m not failing horribly, it makes me feel like the smartest, coolest (and maybe even sexiest) hacker on planet earth. Gotta love a game that lets me lie to myself like that.

Terrible news! The Fractured Kingdom has been chosen to host the Horrific Games, the “world's most boring and expensive international sporting event”. I have two options: pretend to be pleased, or desperately try and find a joint host—a nearby country which might help bear some of the financial strain. I plump for the latter. “Thank goodness,” says Sir Blandolph, the head of the Snivel Service. “Our dreadful neighbours are willing to host some of the really dire events.” Even so, there's a decent chance the ordeal might end my premiership.

The prospect of the Horrific Games looms ever larger during my term as Prime Monster. I find myself hastily confirming impossible deadlines and injecting more cash. At a certain point, I'm informed the Games will require the construction of 12 new stadiums. “Apparently,” says Blandolph, “one of them has to be dedicated entirely to Synchronised Falconry!”

When I refuse, it doesn't go over so well with the voters. “Prime Monster, I am afraid you have underestimated the public's ravenous desire for watching strange monsters indulging in niche activities that stretch the definition of sport to its utmost degree.”

Before long, I find myself in parliament, trying to explain away the collapse of a shoddily-constructed arena. In the chamber, I emphasise the number of humans killed in the accident—a silver lining for the MPs in my own party, who are all zombies.

Eventually, the dreaded day comes. I attend the Horrific Games as a guest of honour, and receive a three-point reduction in the public polls for my trouble. “The papers are saying we humiliated ourselves with tens of millions watching all over the world,” says Blandolph, “but I don't agree. I'd be shocked if viewing figures were that high.”

If I've learned anything this past week, it's that being Prime Monster is truly thankless. It's enough to make me pity Keir Starmer—the real life British PM who, at the time of writing, is peddling hard to keep his own leadership on track after disastrous results in the local elections. Vultures are circling, and right now, few would bet on Starmer making it to the end of his first term.

Running the UK is clearly a form of roguelike—a truth that Prime Monster recognises by applying a Slay the Spire-style structure to its warped political simulation. Once you're elected as leader of the Fractured Kingdom, your job is to pass bills in parliament—and to do so, you'll need to win over your MPs during turn-based card battles. Attacks represent biting comments that undermine the power of the opposition leader. And when you're not on the offensive, you're trying to increase the unity of your own party through persuasive pontificating.

The fact that you can't actually tell what anybody's saying only sharpens Prime Monster's satirical edge; in this chamber it's only the strategic moves that matter, not the pledges made or issues debated.

Win enough bill battles—while safely navigating the dilemmas that pop up inbetween—and you might just get through the next general election. Or not, and watch your leader wind up as a half-forgotten portrait on the wall of Number 13.

A general election in Prime Monster is a hands-off affair: by that point, it's too late to make a difference to the outcome. But it's an enjoyable spectacle nonetheless, full of knowing nods to British political culture. On television, the results are declared by the Abominable Peter Snowman—a white-furred take on the real-life Peter Snow, a broadcasting legend who presented UK election analysis for three and a half decades.

“Make your voice heard for exactly one day, then be quiet,” reads the cover of the Daily Wail, the Fractured Kingdom's favourite and only broadsheet newspaper. It reports that the country's borders have been closed in an effort to increase voter participation—a wry joke that couldn't feel more relevant right now. In England, the average voter turnout in local elections over the past decade has been 30-35%. In my own council ward this year, things were a little better, with turnout reaching 49%—but it's fair to say the fate of the country is often decided by the minority.

Prime Monster definitely offers some explanations as to why voters in the Fractured Kingdom might be disillusioned. Every so often, you'll be given the option to grant peerages to unpopular figures with deep pockets—or to bring up a particular issue in parliament, and paint your donors in a favourable light. In the context of the game, these offers are very tempting. More cash means you can buy powerful permanent abilities, enabling you to draw an extra card every turn in battle, or handicap your opponent before the fight's even begun. Corruption very often pays.

But the tone of Prime Monster tends to veer towards farce, and that's what makes it such entertaining and cathartic company. At one point, my ghoulish avatar stayed up all night to invent new policies because the old ones had been accidentally shredded—only to find that the public preferred the rushed drafts. A scene straight from The Thick of It.

Elsewhere, I found myself bolting the door after one of the Queen's horses had trampled yet another citizen to death. And answering a question about my favourite biscuit in an interview—attempting to name something well-loved and controversial without tripping over my own tongue.

In my latest run, I played as the creaky Thatcher-esque Rotilda De Cay of the Zombified People's Movement (“Opening minds across the nation”). And my most regular opponent was the bumbling, baffoonish Bonar Straw—a cartoonish take on the UK's own straw-haired political poltergeist, Boris Johnson. My nemesis waffled and cringed through all his speeches, but I dared not underestimate him. I could all-too-easily waste my time and resources rebuffing his poorly constructed points, while his hot air filled the room.

What did all this conversational combat achieve? Well: my MPs voted through the 'Lend a Hand' scheme, aimed at tackling the premature limb loss that affects one in five zombies. The bill relies on mandatory arm donation from humans, on a monitored 'use it or lose it' basis. On top of that, I'm pretty sure I legalised arson. Oh well: it'll save on winter fuel costs.

If I'm honest, the issues themselves faded into the background as I fought for my political life at the highest levels of power. And in that sense—despite its roster of vampires, werewolves and animated scarecrows—Prime Monster very much reflects reality.

For those who haven't seen the light, Deep Rock Galactic is a cooperative horde shooter involving a bunch of dwarves mining a planet for an uncaring mega corp. It's basically Left 4 Dead but instead of zombies, you're shooting bugs, and you've also got to collect materials. Dare I say it: DRG is the best co-op horde shooter.

But Deep Rock Galactic was just ground zero. Since then, these dwarves have gone on to infiltrate other genres and take their thrones too. This takeover started with Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, which is, you guessed it, DRG if it were Vampire Survivors. Like the main game, you can still dig paths through the environment and collect resources for upgrades, firmly setting itself apart from the rest of the genre. Plus, it's the perfect game for my ROG Ally, so I can play Deep Rock on the move (or, more commonly, in bed).

And now Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core has released into early access. Again, the name gives it away, but it's DRG if it were a roguelike. As Wes Fenlon explains in our first impressions, it's not quite hitting the peaks of the main game (yet, at least), but it's a reverse-engineered roguelike twist on one of my favourite games of all time. In other words: I'm doomed.

The basic gist is that you pick a class (they're more like hero characters), load into a mission to race to the bottom of a monster-infested mine, and grab various upgrades along the way. Much like in the main game, it's how these characters interact with each other that's the star of the show. After accidentally picking the Guardian one match, I think it might actually be my favourite of the bunch. I can fire a shotgun blast of orbs that stun enemies or use that energy to create a creature-repelling field. And my ultimate ability places a bubble shield that restores armour to allies.

This plays into various builds you have to scrounge up on the fly, like faster ability regeneration when standing still, firing lightning when you have armour, and so on. And in typical DRG fashion, you're encouraged to problem-solve with your team, which is oddly rare for co-op games in my experience, not least because each player gets to bagsy an upgrade.

Rogue Core is admittedly a bit barebones right now, but developer Ghost Ship Games has proven with Deep Rock Galactic that it's able to massively expand and iterate on projects over years. I'm dying to sink more hours into Rogue Core's early access as my current roguelike obsession. And I'll no doubt dive back in when it's almost unrecognisable further down the line.

Most impressive of all, Ghost Ship has proven just how malleable its dwarves are. So much so that you'd have thought Deep Rock was always a survivor-like (sorry, "bullet heaven") or a roguelike.

I'm curious where the series will go next. Perhaps a rhythm game? Racing? Honestly, it could be a life sim aboard the mining rig and I'd still be down for it. You know what? That's actually not a bad idea. I might be a tad biased though, given my work profile picture is the Scout and my Steam name is literally Deep Rock Propagandist.

In the dwarven caste system of Deep Rock Galactic, the Reclaimers are the elite of the elite, too skilled to waste their talents and training on mining. Except, well, they're still dwarves, which means any trip into the depths of new Deep Rock spin-off Rogue Core will still see you breaking out the pickaxe to chip away at minerals here and there between shooting waves of monsters.

Being the mining company's equivalent of a Navy SEALs actually seems like kind of a bad deal. Shooting monsters is fun and all, but humans, Protoss, every species has a squad of gun-toting toughs who've raced against the clock to take down a boss before time runs out. It's the miner dwarves doing an honest day's work who really have it made. Who else gets to pop into the mines for a 10-minute egg hunt one day, then on the next establish a mining facility with a network of pipes snaking through tunnels dug by their own hand? When that gets stale, there's always a drilldozer to escort or mining robots to find and repair.

That's my roundabout way of saying that the real treat of Deep Rock Galactic, still going strong after eight years, is that it looks like a conventional co-op shooter but doesn't really play like one. Exploration and collaborative problem-solving using each dwarven class's unique utilities (a zipline, a platform gun, a big ol' set of drills) take priority over killing enemies, and its many updates over the years cemented it as the co-op FPS to play if you always fancied capture the flag over team deathmatch.

With Rogue Core, Deep Rock's developers have reverse-engineered their one-of-a-kind co-op game into a far more conventional shooter. Rogue Core is polished, competent, and a good time with a couple buddies in a Discord chat, but samey runs and a drip feed of modest upgrades don't give it the dramatic peaks of my favorite roguelikes.

Here's the gist of Rogue Core's structure:

• Pick one of five classes and fill in your unlockable enhancement slots with perks like "+25 base health" and "+5% reload speed"
• Pick a mission, which at least from what I've seen so far is always the same mission: race through a mine, call the elevator, defend it, and repeat until you reach the same boss fight at the end
• Mine the resource that allows you to level up your gear mid-run as efficiently as possible, while occasionally veering off to a side objective that will probably reward you more of that resource, or an upgrade that ends up feeling a bit more substantial
• Return to the hub, collect your bonus points for achievements like "downloading data from six terminals" and use those to unlock more minor upgrades

In theory, I like the ways Rogue Core's developers have tried to encourage teamwork. When you collectively mine enough of the neon green upgrade crystal, expenite, everyone has to gather together to take turns picking from a random array of perks, jockeying over who should get a rare or epic option. A few classes have abilities that deploy around them—I've mostly been playing as the Falconer, who can pop down a bubble that makes my allies deal electric damage for 15 seconds. The Guardian can drop a zone that restores armor, critical for surviving big enemy waves.

Using those abilities effectively requires being more locked in to exactly where your teammates are and what they're doing than I think this style of hangout co-op game is really geared towards, which is why I had the most fun with Rogue Core's Retcon class. Her main ability lets you rewind time for yourself, reversing damage you've recently accrued, with a complementary ability that makes you hit harder the more damage you take. At no point does this require me asking my teammates to come stand inside a circle.

More expenite, more problems

The process of picking upgrades as a team is also not entirely a slam dunk, both because it feels like it slows down the game—everything pauses once you launch the upgrade menu together—and because the upgrades are often a bit underwhelming. A buff to crit chance, 10% improved cooldown, that sort of thing. There are more exciting ones, but so far the Rogue Core runs that have handed me a gun that chains electric damage from one enemy to another, and a random upgrade that makes electrified enemies explode, feel more like the exception than the expectation.

The power scaling (both of the upgrades Rogue Core throws at you in a run and in its meta progression) seem geared around the fear that players will run out of things to do too quickly and start pounding the Steam review score in frustration. Each class has a "bio booster deck"—because every roguelite is required by law to use cards somehow!—but they aren't customizable until you've "ascended" two max level classes, which will take many hours of play.

There are a bunch of guns, but unlike in loot-based games like Darktide, you don't get to build up a specialized arsenal in Rogue Core and dedicate resources to speccing it out, or choose to shape a build around it. You just pick a random gun from the equipment locker at the start of a run. The guns that are there are quite fun to shoot, some chunky and some pingy with hit feedback refined from years of Deep Rock development. There are a bunch of elemental attributes that are as exciting as they are in any game—I love freezing a whole pile of skittering monsters with a perfectly lobbed cryo grenade.

Moment-to-moment it's pleasant, and sometimes even hectic and exciting when you run up against the mission timer and have to race to the elevator. But Rogue Core seems to take it for granted that I'll want to play the same exact mission dozens and dozens of times, and is using the structure of a roguelite to simply dole out tiny incremental rewards for doing so. It locks down many of the interactive side objectives in the mines until your character is higher level, denying early runs from the spice a little extra variety would give them.

The other way to design a roguelite, the Risk of Rain 2 way, is to shower the player with power-ups that embrace the chaotic potential of wildly imbalanced builds. You stack and you stack and you stack. You rarely slow down to pick between three, because you'll likely end a run with so many items that you're playing your character in an entirely different way by the end of a run than when you began it.

Deep Rock Galactic doesn't need that sort of exponential power fantasy, because the missions are short, each dwarf has a distinct role to fill, and fending off enemies is more about survival than sadism. Rogue Core, at least in its early access launch, doesn't have that clarity of purpose, leaving its Reclaimers stuck with a bit of a ho-hum life.

If they're really the elite of the elite, they deserve an arsenal with the child safety locks turned off.

Game developers are burning through genres, high concepts, and even annoying machines that scammed you on the boardwalk as a child to fuel quick-hit Balatro-likes or Vampire Survivors-likes at the same rate the smartphone industry's sucking down rare earth minerals. I get why: compulsive play is core to the design, they can be made relatively fast and relatively cheap, and a day or two on the Steam charts (or a viral Twitch stream or YouTube video) can drive 100,000 sales at a time when just surviving to make another game feels like a real win.

But good lord are there a lot of them. 257 new roguelites have dropped on Steam in the last 30 days, according to SteamDB, and even discounting the shovelware there are too many to keep track of. There are the deckbuilders, the action games, the… Minesweeper-likes? That tag doesn't even cover games like Far Far West that prioritize weightier descriptions—FPS, online co-op, loot—perhaps because that combination of words carries an innate implication with it. Of course a co-op horde shooter with randomized loot is a roguelite. Duh.

Perhaps this bite-sized style of repetitive play (with soothing metaprogression!) is what our fractured psyches are best suited to at the moment. They're the game equivalent of doomscrolling without looking up for four straight hours, most of that time wasted on glazed-over unblinking eyes except for the one really funny video that will stick in the mind (the game equivalent of a truly sick Balatro hand). At least we're playing "gambling" games instead of pouring the last dregs of our inflation-ravaged checking accounts into prediction markets, right?

I was ready to declare that I'm fully worn out on the format—that I hope we're nearing the bottom of the barrel for ideas that can be crammed like Play-Doh through the deckbuilder or Survivor mold—and then some jerk went and announced Pin-Crawl, "a dungeon crawling pinball rogue-lite."

Ah damn. Ah hell. As translator Stephen Meyerink posted on Bluesky where I first saw the game: I'm in danger. You're killing me here, Eddy.

Pinball is my kryptonite, or maybe more accurately the cheese you can bait a trap with to make me go all Monterey Jack. Is its pull diminished slightly by not being an actual, physical pinball machine? Sure! Nothing beats the real thing.

But in the same way that Balatrofying mahjong was a grave threat to my friend Baxter, the compulsive nature of crafting wildly multiplicative roguelite builds but with the trappings of pinball is like a lab-grown block of cheese bioengineered to my exact olfactory wavelength.

Pin-Crawl, which has a page on Steam but currently no release date, doesn't at a glance have the same pixel art and particle oomph as Xenotilt or Demon's Tilt, which are great (but more conventional) digital pinball tables. But Pin-Crawl has the roguelite twist, where upgrades start doing crazy shit like bombarding the screen with stars or triggering frenzied multiballs and "spells to give you a unique advantage against the dungeon's inhabitants." It has stats! Bosses! Meta progression, no doubt, that will make more exciting things happen the longer I play, even if I don't get any better at the actual pinball!

I want to say no thanks, I don't need any of that. But I can't. I do need it. I need it because I played Sonic Spinball as a child and haven't been entirely right since.

This is not the first game to put a twist of this sort on pinball: there's another one coming out this year, even. But more common, somehow, is the pinball metroidvania, which requires a bit more commitment and I think is a tougher sell. Pinball is better in short sessions, and metroidvanias need a bit more narrative pull to keep you engaged over the long term, a tricky marriage that in my experience only Yoku's Island Express has pulled off brilliantly.

Despite being a metroidvania, Yoku's Island Express is a breezy game, easy to polish off in a single weekend. I assume that whenever I play Pin-Crawl the weekend will instead evaporate, leaving me wondering where the hell 48 hours of my life just went—but at least I'll have one 3.6-billion point multiball combo to show for it.

Slay the Spire 2 has—among some of my coworkers—been a bit of a contentious little game. Back when it first came out, my fellow writer Robin Valentine wrote that Slay the Spire 2 felt more like a remake than a sequel after beating it with an eight year old deck, calling it "a really impressive late expansion pack." Still good, but treading over old ground.

Here are my creds: I've since been consumed by Slay the Spire 2, I've put nearly 140 hours into it (a number that shocked me when I went to check it for this article), and I've currently squeaked out Ascension 10 wins on Ironclad, Silent, and Regent (and am working on my wins with the Necrobinder and Defect now).

And while I do agree with Robin that a lot of the same decks can win those earlier ascensions, the more I play, the more I'm deeply taken by Slay the Spire 2 in a way that I was never absorbed by the original—which I went back and played a bit of before this and just didn't have the same zest for.

Slay the Spire 2 is samey, sure, but it's deceptively so. There have been several core, granular baseline level changes that have, in my estimation, made it feel very different.

Different energy

The first, the most obvious shift, is in the ancients—at the end of each act of STS2, you have a chance of rolling between a set of ancients, each of which will have their own trade-off boons. In STS1, beating one of the acts netted you a relic which almost always gave you one more energy per turn—and, because of how tempo worked, the non-energy relics were almost never worth taking.

Slay the Spire 2 has such a better variety in this regard. They can be completely run-defining. Getting one extra energy per turn is still incredibly valuable, but relics that offer that often come with major downsides.

Take Vaaku's Whispering Earring, for example. You get one extra energy, but you have zero control over your first turn, with Vaaku playing your cards from left to right—this is a massive gamble, but it's almost always possible to survive a bad first turn, right until it isn't.

Tezcatara's Seal of Gold is also majorly impactful, too. At first glance, losing five gold per turn for extra energy doesn't seem terrible—but I've had entire builds won with the right choice of relic from the merchant. Take my Ascension 10 Regent win, where I managed to snag a Mystic Lighter to buff a sharp-enchanted Seven Stars.

Suddenly I had a card that dealt 18 damage seven times (for a total of 127 damage) for a piddly one energy, with cards to help buffer the star cost and recycle it back into my draw pile. If I'd taken the Seal of Gold, I wouldn't have been able to afford it.

Nonupeipe's Glitter relic is a stand-out, giving all Act 3 card rewards a once-per-combat replay. This thing alone has completely steered my gameplan from a thin deck to a thick boy with lots of value.

Speaking of, the card enchantment system's great, too—I want to shout out Clone, which is absolutely absurd in some runs, letting you get potentially dozens of the same card type if you're able to finesse rest sites enough to use it. Momentum turns every card into the Ironclad's Rampage, Royally Approved can make any card a core component of your deck. The possibilities make my roguelike heart giddy.

Enemies close

Then there's the enemy design, too—I just like STS2's encounters a whole lot more. Yes, even the absolute bullshit ones. I'm looking at you, Hunter-Killer.

STS2's rogues gallery is flooded with brutal encounters that scale quickly and, at higher ascensions, require you to cover your bases. Rather than trying to thin your deck to get an infinite loop, Act 1 becomes a make-or-break rush to make sure you've got defense, damage, draw, and energy generation all handled ASAP.

This is much better than the feeling I got from STS1, where I just felt as though I was trying to stumble into a synergy. All of my runs in STS2 feel more constructive—I'm building up a solid deck brick by brick, rather than just fishing for the right combo of cards. And that steadier pace makes it feel all the more exciting when I do stumble into something special.

It's a complete shift in design philosophy—one that extends to the bosses, too, which challenge your decks in far more interesting ways than in the first game. So often in STS1, the Timekeeper (screw that guy) would often just spell doom for my deck, and given the fact you only see who you're fighting in Act 3, it would almost always be too late to change course.

In STS2, though? There's not a boss I can't design around. Even the Doormaker (who will be taking a sabbatical soon, per the game's beta branch) can be prepped for simply by spending Act 3 making your deck just a little bit thicker.

Again, it's subtle, but STS2's pacing is completely different. You can see this in how some cards have fallen out of favour—the Ironclad's Demon Form, for instance, now just isn't very good, because opportunities to play a three-energy power are few and far between.

And yes, some of the old decks are still there, but there are new ways to play even the old guard, too—the Silent's Sly mechanic completely changes the feel of the character, for instance, and the Ironclad's old archetypes are actually more niche. I've won far more runs on Ironclad just by going for value and energy generation than I have with the Barricade + Body Slam or Whirlwind + Double Tap shtick.

All in all, I think STS2 feels markedly different—the tempo of fights has changed, the meta has been adjusted, its two new characters are big departures, and you've got far more interesting and diverse incentives to swap up your strats mid-run. There's a reason I'm going for A10 runs on every character here, but gave up my climb in STS1: I simply like this version a lot more.

Which is impressive, given the rock and a hard place developer Megacrit found itself in. Slay the Spire 2 was never meant to be a sequel, with Megacrit wanting to develop DLC for the first game. Alas, Humble Games shut down, making issuing major updates to other platforms a near-impossibility.

Megacrit has, in my estimation, made lemonade out of lemons here. I'm not glad it was forced into making a sequel, but I'm certainly happy it did.

Battlestar Galactica's resurgence in 2003 was a landmark moment in science fiction, taking a weirdly Mormon '70s sci-fi romp and turning it into a gloomy space thriller full of political and military drama. "Yes," it said, "sci-fi will have its prestige drama moment as well." We'd had DS9 and Babylon 5 years before, but Battlestar clawed its way out of its niche and became a mainstream phenomenon.

In comparison, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is a lot more understated. The static character art, pixelated bridge and cute polygonal ships do not scream "space opera", but beneath its slightly muddled presentation sits a game that elegantly captures the tension and chilling proximity of extinction that made for such an exceptional show.

The short pitch: It's FTL in a convincing Battlestar Galactica suit. It's probably the best sci-fi property to go down this route, too. Sure, Voyager is also a comfy fit, which is why we got Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, but I bounced off that quickly. It had the structure down, but it really dropped the ball when it came to space battles. In Scattered Hopes, like FTL, the space battles are the meat.

In your first run, you'll start with a small fleet of mostly civilian ships led by an outdated gunstar (smaller but faster than a battlestar), and you must jump across space to meet up with the titular vessel, managing constantly dwindling resources, ship armaments, squadrons and the humans onboard—both your crew, who can be assigned various roles and level up, and the factions that represent the last of humanity.

There's a fair amount to juggle, and plenty of pressure, but a relatively simple structure holds it all together and gives you room to focus.

Scattered Hopes is divided into two distinct phases: fleet management and combat. When you're safely inside a new system, you have a few turns to do a spot of management. Assigning squads, levelling up characters and picking their next ability, putting out fires—often literally. There are crises and opportunities, sometimes with multiple steps, and while the rewards can be tempting, there's always a cost: time, resources, health.

Systems have points of interest that you can spend resources to explore, or you can send one of your crew to investigate for greater rewards—if they have the energy. Maybe you'll send your pilot to explore a planet and pick up valuable resources, or ask your XO to bring a drifting civilian vessel into your fleet.

These civilian vessels can't fight, but they serve as support ships. By training their crew, you'll net bonuses that help the entire fleet, turning them into handy resource factories. Let's hope you don't get them blown up.

Unfortunately, Scattered Hopes really wants to blow them up.

After you've used up all your turns—sometimes leaving some problems unresolved, prioritising the most important problems—the Cylons will appear and battle commences, with the tattered remnants of the Twelve Colonies fighting simply to survive another day.

Survive is the key word here. You won't be blowing up massive Cylon capital ships. Your goal is just to stay alive until you can jump out of the system and into (fleeting) safety. Combat plays out in real time, but you're expected to make liberal use of the tactical pause feature, giving you breathing space to adjust your tactics and plan for the next assault wave.

The friction you'll experience in the fleet planning phase is echoed here in the combat phase, where you'll be dealing with mounting crises with limited resources. But this time the crises are nuclear warheads and Cylon ships, and the limited resources are your squadrons. The good news is that, for the most part, your wee ships (and the weapons attached to your flagship) are pretty bloody powerful. Unfortunately, that isn't quite the safety net it might seem, given the superior numbers fielded by your robotic foe.

While it is common for battles in tactics games to feel like discrete puzzles, it is so much more overt in Scattered Hopes. Each enemy fleet is its own conundrum, spitting out various complications—different enemy squadron classes, missiles, nukes and exotic guns, along with weird modifiers that will force you to make tactical adjustments, taking into account your own vessels' speed, manoeuvrability and damage potential.

And you've only got a small box of tricks to deal with this whole mess—which you naturally must use as efficiently as possible.

It's simple at first. Send your speedy Viper towards an area where you know a lot of lightly-armoured vessels are jumping in (you always get to see where enemies will appear) and it'll sit there waiting to strike. Using one of its abilities, you can make sure it hunts down and kills every last one of them. Meanwhile, you keep your Raptor closer to the fleet, where it can use its impressive range to take out enemies and missiles hurtling towards your vulnerable ships. It's slow and can't fire when moving, so it works best as a turret.

Should a bunch of new enemies appear while your squadrons are engaged, you can use your flagship's flak cannon to take out a large group, if they're lightly armoured. If they're not? Bring out the nukes!

The nuclear option is a risk, mind you. Specifically when it comes to friendly fire. But sometimes you need to make hard calls. If you've got enemies bearing down on you and there's no chance your nearby Viper will be able to take them out, it might be worth the cost to just annihilate everything, Viper included, if it saves the fleet.

Hard calls like this become increasingly common as the Cylons amp up the pressure, or when you encounter enemies with traits that are tricky to manage. Maybe you'll be fighting Cylons with the Tactical Jump mutation, which gives them an immediate speed boost when they jump in, potentially making it tough for your Viper to hunt them down and kill them. Or you might be unfortunate enough to jump into a system that's full of mines just waiting to blow up any squadrons that get near, necessitating a significant change in strategy.

You'll be able to unlock the ability to field more squadrons, and there are all sorts of enhancements you can choose for your ships, squadrons and characters, but the Cylon threat just keeps on escalating—you might be getting stronger, but it never gets easier.

While the main goal is simply surviving until you can jump, you still need to consider what you'll be left with when you get to that point. Scattered Hopes emphasises this in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most effective is the ship health system.

Your flagship and civilian ships can take a real beating, but you can't just wait until they're on the cusp of destruction to act. See, each ship has three thresholds, and once their health gets below them, you'll have to deal with a negative situation, from moderate to major, depending on which threshold you've passed. So the health of your ships matters long before it gets to zero.

I'm a big fan of how developer Alt Shift has handled the combat portion of Scattered Hopes, but the human element is what makes it a Battlestar Galactica game. Between brawls you'll have to deal with the opposing needs of the fleet's various factions, all the while realising that you can't please everyone. When factions are happy with you, you'll get opportunities that benefit the fleet, but when their respect for you drops, they'll only generate crises, costing you valuable time and resources.

You'll also need to manage the morale of your crew, and the health of the whole fleet. When people die, get injured, or become too sick to work, the fleet's health goes down, and when it drops to zero that's you done.

So you'll need to make deals, piss people off, go out for drinks with colleagues and do your best to hold everything together by whatever means you have available. Which will be a lot harder if a human-looking Cylon infiltrates the fleet. Paranoia, witch-hunts, all that tension from the show is present here too.

It's stressful! And great! It's got so much of what I love about FTL, but it's still charting its own course. The fleet management and scale of the combat phase change things up dramatically, making the FTL-like structure feel new again. So it's weird that it's not made much of a splash. Maybe BSG doesn't have the cultural cachet it once did (it definitely doesn't), but even if you never watched it, or simply have no fondness for the misadventurers of Adama and Starbuck, Scattered Hopes still has plenty going for it.

Darkest Dungeon is one of the best dungeon crawlers period, and a huge part of its appeal is the dour, gravely tones of a mysterious "ancestor" who narrates your every move. The man behind the musings, Wayne June, sadly died last year—and in the wake of news like this, a ghoulish question tends to arise: who, or what, could fill his shoes? Red Hook co-founder Chris Bourassa took to Reddit last week to clarify that it certainly won't be AI.

"In one of his last emails to me, Wayne gave us permission to train an AI on his voice, something he'd staunchly opposed prior to the end. We'd never asked to do it. I think he was trying to put the game/team/fans first—offer us a 'way forward,'" Bourassa wrote. "I declined, and we donated to his family anyway.

"I would never, ever erode his incredible and timeless performances by teaching a machine to sound like him. His voice and delivery was human, and I'm forever grateful I got to write for him."

Comments on the thread are elated by the stance. "It’s refreshing to hear yourself and the Red Hook team honour Wayne’s memory like this," commented user Figgymcslickback. "Bravo sir." User RiR_Crayon concurred: "Red Hook doing giga chad moves as always."

"So glad to hear it," wrote user Curnbabs. "You're never gonna be able to train an AI to do this properly. You guys are gonna find someone else. It's going to be different, but that is not a bad thing."

It speaks volumes to the potency of June's performances that he left such an impact on players, despite the fact that the Darkest Dungeon games are his only listed videogame credits (though he was also in Dota 2 in a Darkest Dungeon-themed announcer pack, and collaborated with PC Gamer on occasion). If you want to hear more of his voice work, he narrated a fair few audiobooks and has a YouTube channel with readings of stories by H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. He also used it to share this incredible shitpost where the Ancestor hosts a cooking show.

AI voice acting may have found a place in games like The Finals and Arc Raiders, but even Embark's CEO has conceded that real voice work is better than its artificial counterpart. Voice actors in the gaming industry have been outspoken about AI's inability to give a truly human performance, and even if the team at Red Hook were willing to take June up on his offer, the notion that the resulting line reads would compare to the man's actual work is farcical.

The roguelike genre is not only more crowded than it's ever been, it's more iterative too. The vast majority of games simply build on or remix an existing formula—whether walking in the footsteps of Slay the Spire, Hades, or Vampire Survivors. It's rare to find something truly unique.

So it's refreshing to be able to say that Everything is Crab is not quite like any other roguelike you can play right now. That's not to say it doesn't have its influences—the most obvious being the creature phase from controversial 2008 sim Spore—but its focus on ecosystem and evolution sends it down all sorts of fascinating avenues.

The premise, though, is simple. You play as a little blue blob, trying to survive in a world of weird animal hybrids. It's essentially a top-down action-RPG, with your attacks and dodges on cooldowns—but starting out, you're slow and weak with no real abilities to your name. You're not much of a threat to the land's various predators.

Food is the key. As you snatch meals here and there—from fallen fruits to the flesh of slain animals—you start to level up, which gains you new evolutionary traits. With extra eyes, a sharp beak, a developed brain, and six legs, you can become an agile, precision fighter, dodging around enemy strikes, while increased size, a set of horns, and a protective shell will let you charge into the fray as a tough brawler.

An impressive number of these evolutions are represented visually on your character. This is really Everything is Crab's coolest trick—animating whatever nightmarish mish-mash of body parts and organs you put together seamlessly, with details as subtle as which specific kind of snout you have or exactly how many legs and eyes you've thus far acquired.

The most interesting part, however, is that it's not just about creating the most powerful combat build you can. You're not clearing rooms in a dungeon, you're finding a niche in an ecosystem. Enemies don't just exist to fight you, they follow their own patterns of behaviour, including hunting smaller prey, foraging, and fleeing from danger.

Success isn't in how many of them you can defeat, it's in how much sustenance you can get, however you can get it. Being an apex predator, feasting on the meat of fallen beasts, is one way, but equally another is to live as a tiny scavenger, stealing meat from others' kills and dodging nimbly away when they retaliate to hide in a burrow. Or as a lumbering herbivore, eating fruit and mushrooms and trusting in natural defences like spikes and poison to keep you safe.

You can specialise in surviving in different environments—growing fur so you can range into snowy regions, scales to protect you from the desert heat, a prehensile tail for swinging between trees in the forest, or wings for flying over the sea. As you evolve, so do other animals, opening up even weirder niches. I'm fond, for example, of stacking up my poison resistance so I can keep preying on blobfish long after they've mutated to make everyone else who hunts them die a slow, painful death.

At regular intervals, your journey is interrupted by a boss fight, penning you in to face a huge monster. But brilliantly even these much more constrained encounters still offer wide open possibilities. If you're not equipped to battle, you don't have to—you can dodge, hide, or simply heal through their attacks until their patience is exhausted, at which point they'll wander off into the world to rampage through other creatures instead. Or you can slay them in a whole myriad of different ways, from brute force to poison to an army of hypnotised minions.

One of my favourite little features is that at the end of a run, you can click a button to make a record of the bizarre creature you ultimately became, saved as a set of screenshots of your build and even a little animated gif of you in action. Now that's a game understanding what it does best.

Everything is Crab is a really interesting, creative take on a genre that all too often takes elements for granted, and though nowhere near as ambitious as Spore, in some ways it does realise some of its goals in a much more fun and interactive way. But unfortunately it's not without a few recessive traits that grow increasingly difficult to ignore.

Level headed

The biggest problem is that you simply level up too much. Yes, I'm complaining that my lobster is too buttery, but the much too frequent acquisition of new evolutions diminishes the personality of each run, as you find yourself gathering many of the same traits over and over. The game is so eager to show you its best material that it burns through it too fast, and the thrill of trying out new mutations is quickly lost.

At its worst, it can totally disrupt the flow of a run. Many of the game's most effective strategies revolve around increasing the pace of level ups—through everything from upgrading your eating speed to increasing the spawn rate of vegetables to gaining passive progress from chewing the cud.

Given those extra level ups can also be used to purchase more traits that speed up your levelling even more, a snowball effect can quickly take hold that leads to constant interruptions in the action. At worst I've had runs where I can barely go a few seconds between just-slightly-too-slow evolution pop-ups, my time in the menus completely eclipsing the actual action.

Outside of runs, the game has something of the opposite problem. The overall meta-progression is disappointingly slow and unsatisfying. There are a few things to unlock, but fundamentally the main mode consists of just doing the same runs over and over through slowly increasing difficulty levels.

Variety is in theory provided by challenges—one-off runs with more extreme modifiers, such as turning the entire world into a desert or making every animal but you a giant. But it takes a long time to unlock new ones to try, and many of them simply feel more harsh than fun.

Too many are variations on partly or completely randomising your evolutions, which just removes the joy of build-crafting, and modifiers like "you cannot heal in any way" feel needlessly cruel. In such an interesting digital ecosystem, it feels like there should be more exciting variations to explore.

The result is that Everything is Crab makes a really wonderful first impression, but its long-term survival is a little more questionable. I've had fun with it for the 15 hours or so I've played so far, but really I'd probably already seen the majority of what it had to offer 10 hours ago. I'm certainly not feeling the kind of pull that can make the roguelike genre so all-consuming, to keep coming back for one more run.

That does make Everything is Crab feel more like a novelty than the next big thing—but I still love quite how novel it is. Even if some of its ideas need more refinement or more support around them, they are still really creative, fresh ideas, and well worth experiencing, especially at its agreeably low price. Hopefully with ongoing support, it may continue to evolve in the coming months, perhaps gaining the mutations it needs to lure me back for more.

September 14, 2000: That's the day Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, the second-worst iteration of Windows in its long history. It also marked the final release of MS-DOS, which for so many years had undergirded its operating systems. In 2006—two decades ago—Microsoft ceased long-term support for Windows 98 and Me, meaning that MS-DOS's life was truly over.

Two days ago the latest update for NetHack dropped, and you bet your ass it still supports MS-DOS, just like it did when it first released in 1987.

We already covered NetHack's surprise 5.0 release and some of its fun patch notes, but I had to dwell on this for just a minute. In the era of multimillion-dollar games releasing and shutting down within weeks, here's a game that's been steadily updated since 1987. It's only two years younger than Windows.

Microsoft supported MS-DOS for a total of 25 years, from 1981 to 2006. NetHack's closing in on 40.

Perhaps even more absurd is that the NetHack development team still maintains an official binary for the Amiga—you know, the personal computer line that went extinct in 1994.

While it's novel as all hell that you can play a still-being-updated-in-2026 game on a decades-old PC, perhaps more appealing to most players today is a very slick, recent client for NetHack, called NetHack 3D. The game has long been open source, and while it's gotten many 2D tilesets and one very ugly 3D adaptation over the years, NetHack has always been an ASCII game first and foremost, just like Rogue and Hack before it.

NetHack 3D is by far the nicest modern interface I've seen for the game—nice enough to tempt me away from playing in a terminal connected to nethack.alt.org. NetHack 3D adapts the game's incredibly complex controls into some quite intuitive context menus, with mouse support on PC and touch support on mobile. You can switch to ASCII mode if you want, but the default way to play is with a 2D tileset, and there are several options sourced from the NetHack community. I can't say I'm crazy about NetHack 3D's AI-generated logo, but at least the rest of the graphics are player-made tilesets.

NetHack 3D's layered-on-top configuration options and polished UI don't prevent you from typing in any of NetHack's more obscure interactions manually, just like you always could, but it simplifies all the basics. There's even a novel first-person mode, which is not going to be the ideal way to play in a game as deadly as NetHack, but still—it's surreal seeing it from a literal new perspective, 39 years into its life.

I'm not kidding when I call this the best roguelike ever made, either—well, perhaps Caves of Qud has supplanted it, but no other game really comes close to expanding on the original Rogue with so many interlocking interactions and systems that there's even a kitchen sink reference. Without NetHack, there probably never would've been a Dwarf Fortress. There's a reason the game's in the damn MOMA.

If you've never played NetHack, this is now by far the easiest way to ease into it. The tilesets are nice, but don't be scared to try the ASCII mode. Give it enough time to learn the symbols used for most monsters and items, and it'll start to feel like you can see the Matrix.

As roguelikes go, NetHack is a museum piece. I don't say that because it's old—though it is extremely old, originally released as it was in the same year that Lethal Weapon hit theaters—but because it is literally in the Museum of Modern Art alongside SimCity 2000 and Portal. It's a massively influential and historic game, and as of yesterday, it's new all over again.

That's thanks to a 5.0.0 release because, yes, the game is still in active development after nearly 40 years. It's an open-source project with the source code maintained by a pantheon of coders and community members called the DevTeam. The game itself is an immediate descendant of Rogue, the original ASCII-based dungeon crawler that we now use as shorthand when describing games like Balatro, Hades, and countless others.

You can check out the 5.0.0 release blog post for a brief intro, which notes that "a list of over 3100 fixes and changes" awaits players who dive into the new version. Old saves and "bones files" (dungeon floors that save when you die so you can load them into another game) won't work, so it's a great time to start fresh alongside everybody else. The main menu page of the NetHack website includes a download link to Windows, DOS, and Amiga versions.

If you want to read the changelog, which the release blog notes may contain spoilers, you can do so on the NetHack GitHub page. Like other games with detailed systems and procedural generation, the notes are a bunch of delightful nonsense: "pets avoid eating shapeshifter corpses unless starving or nearly feral," one line reads. "Demon lords hate Demonbane," reads another.

It may be a bit intimidating to charge face-first into a legendarily intricate game with ASCII graphics from the '80s, though, so I recommend checking out PC Gamer's let's play series, NetHack from aaaa to Zruty. In it, senior editor Wes Fenlon and NetHack guru Jeremy Nissen dig into why the game is so celebrated and how you might approach playing it yourself. The series just turned a decade old, but that's only around a quarter of NetHack's lifespan, so I'm sure it holds up fine.

There's an oddly momentous feeling to the idea of Deep Rock Galactic Survivor introducing a new class to the DRG universe. After all, the original four have been the only ones we needed for eight years now. What can you possibly add to a quartet that's stood the test of time for that long?

I love that developer Funday Games' answer is: "What if a dwarf had a car?"

Introduced in the new Heavy Duty expansion, the Demolisher class has a full complement of new weapons and three subclasses, just like the core four. But unlike them, he thought to bring an industrial vehicle that's basically like if you tried to turn a go-kart into a bulldozer.

Perhaps stupidly, even after seeing that this was the new guy's USP, I didn't actually expect him to control like a car. But nope, sure enough, instead of running around freely like the other dwarves, he has to accelerate, reverse, manage his turning radius, and in my experience do a lot of dodgy three point turns. (And yes, the car does do a little beeping noise like a truck when it reverses. Adorable.)

You really feel the weight and heft of the vehicle as you play—and that has its advantages too. Smaller enemies can be rammed out of the way with the front plow, for example, and it also mines through terrain faster than a pickaxe.

All together it completely changes the feel of Survivor's action. After 150 hours with the game, I'm suddenly having to retrain my muscle memory. No longer is survival about juking around the hordes, slipping through gaps in their formations and setting off explosive bugs with agile feints. The car's not only not nimble enough for that, it's too wide and bulky.

Instead, I'm looking for the parts of the swarm free enough of the bigger, tougher bugs that I can simply slam my way through, and planning out wide, circular routes through the level that avoid the dangers of sharp changes of direction and take advantage of faster digging.

I'm picking health and armour upgrades far more than I would normally, and artifacts that trigger on damage, so I can safely spend more time in the thick of it. That lets me get the most out of the Demolisher's new weapons, which largely focus on close-range damage and leaving a path of destruction behind you. Carving a path through the hordes laying elemental mines as I go and blasting a jet of flame out the back is a whole new kind of power fantasy for the game.

Also included in the expansion is a new biome, Glacial Strata. It isn't too revolutionary—slippery ice, falling icicles, and frost exploders mix things up a bit but feel like light touch features compared to the challenges you face in some of the existing zones. Retroactively adding a Glacial Strata level to every existing sector certainly gives you a lot of new levels to work through, though, which is very welcome.

Much more exciting is the new mode: Egg Hunt. The objective is to… well, hunt for eggs buried in each level, and bring them back one at a time to a containment cell in the centre of the map. It's a different rhythm to Elimination—rather than systematically clearing the map, I'm making repeat trips back and forth, encouraging me to carve out useful repeat routes.

My immediate instinct is to make things as easy for myself as possible by digging out all the eggs and a clear path in one big loop and then going back for each one. But that kind of min-maxing has its own drawbacks—every egg triggers a swarm event when uncovered, which can quickly get overwhelming if stacked up at once. There's definitely some nuanced strategy there to (ahem) dig into.

The best bit, though, is the final sprint. Once you've deposited three eggs in a level, the drop pod arrives—but instead of leaving right away, you can stick around to try to grab the last two remaining eggs for extra rewards. The pod does wait a bit longer than normal—two minutes rather than 30 seconds—but it's still a frantic dash to get them without being left behind that adds a fun burst of adrenaline to each level.

After three stages and a lot of eggs comes the finale: a giant worm monster bursts out of the ground and rudely demands you give them all back. It's another refreshing change of pace—while Elimination's dreadnoughts chase you around, making movement speed and mining bonuses a must, Egg Hunt's brood nexus boss is rooted to the ground, presenting a whole different kind of challenge.

If I simply circle it pumping shots into its fleshy body, I get quickly swamped by the swarm, especially as it summons its own extra bodyguards. Sneakier tactics are required. One method is to keep doing big loops, drawing the horde away before sprinting back to get some damage in, and then running off again.

Alternatively, I've had success focusing on weapons with enough range and piercing to penetrate through the swarm to the fleshy boss within, and then sticking close, weaving through the bugs and trusting to some health and armour upgrades to keep me alive.

As a veteran of so much time with the game already, it's thrilling to be in this kind of headspace again, trying to crack new strategies and playstyles. And for the price—$10 / £9—it's a huge amount of extra content for a game already bursting with reasons to replay.

Those of you pinching pennies aren't left out, though—alongside the DLC, a new patch has launched, adding a robust endless mode for true sickos, an expanded tag system for weapons that comes with new upgrades and overclocks, and new mastery milestones that allow you to earn yet more bonus stats to help you on your runs.

If anyone feared that coming out of early access would slow down the pace of support for gaming's best Vampire Survivors-like, they can certainly put those worries to rest this week. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another 150 hours to fit in somewhere.

Mewgenics is easily my favourite game of 2026 so far—in fact, I gave it 92% in our review. I love its emergent storytelling, its chaotic build-crafting, and its incredible depth. What I wouldn't claim, however, is that it's perfectly balanced.

It's always been clear that certain classes are behind the curve while others are endlessly reliable. Equally, a handful of the random events you can discover during runs had an outsized impact, potentially derailing your adventure with one unlucky moment.

The good news is, the upcoming 1.1 patch is taking a very serious look at these pain points—with a much more dramatic suite of changes than I expected. Though a date isn't set yet for when this update will go live on the main branch, it's already available as a beta, and the developers have put out a full set of patch notes.

It all looks like very welcome stuff to me. On the events side of things, the most problematic or unrewarding ones—such as those requiring you to sacrifice a cat for potentially no good outcome, and the one that doles out Blood Frenzy just when you least want it—have been substantially toned down.

The real meat of the update, though, is the class changes. The ever-reliable hunter has received a pretty substantial nerf, with less damage and scaling on key abilities, and the fighter's Merciless passive now no longer triggers from actions that cost movement, kneecapping a whole range of infinite combos that I certainly didn't exploit several times during the review process (ahem).

There's a lot more buffs than nerfs, however, with the mage and tinkerer in particular coming out smelling of roses. Mages now have a substantial increase in the range of their basic attack, meaning your squishy glass cannons don't have to rush up to the front lines anymore, and big improvements to the damage of a bunch of their spells. It's good to see that that includes the Forbidden spells, which previously never felt worth their debilitating side effects (which have also now been toned down).

Tinkerers, meanwhile, can now throw their weapons without it costing an action, and can enjoy reduced mana costs, more ways to gain the tech buff, and an inherent resistance to explosive damage on the various bomb-based passives. That should all add up to much more consistent damage, easier build-crafting, and much better survivability.

Beyond that are some quality of life fixes, and a few bosses have received a boost in health—particularly the Coven fight, which should pose much more of a challenge now. Some changes have been made to breeding, too, preventing the abuse of the mutation stat to avoid birth defects from inbreeding, though I think only the most min-max focused home owners should notice much of a difference there.

Oh, and shout out to my new favourite patch note ever: "Hitler's suicide can no longer miss." Not only a top-tier sentence out of context, but the implications make me laugh too—I had no idea you could cause that attack to miss, and I've no idea what would even happen next if you did. A perfect testament to Mewgenics' endless web of wildly overlapping systems.

The full patch notes are below, and you can also read them along with instructions for trying the beta branch on the game's Steam page.

Breeding/House Changes

• Fixed some issues with high amounts of negative Stimulation.
• Fixed Stimulation treating birth defects on parents the same as positive mutations. Higher stimulation now decreases the chance of birth defects on parents being inherited.
• The effects of Stimulation are now reduced the more inbred a kitten is.
• The chances of inheriting a parent's birth defect are significantly increased the more inbred the kitten is.
• "Mutation" stat will no longer reroll any existing mutations or birth defects.
• "Mutation" stat will now only roll simple mutations (+2/-1 stat ones) until >10 Mutation. More Mutation beyond this will increase the chance of rolling mutations with effects.
• Heads that have 1 eye/eyebrow/ear (ex. Cyclops) will no longer also count as the "Missing" birth defect for the other eye/eyebrow/ear.
• Chance of inheriting a voice from a parent is now 75% instead of 98%.

Events

• Baphomet: Removed bad outcomes from sacrifice and lose 10 HP options.
• Steven Fetus: Removed Deja Vu from bad event outcome and replaced with a new pool of disorders for it.
• Sacrificial Altar: Removed bad outcomes from sacrificing cats.
• Itchies or Wheezies: Itchies now also gives a forever flea familiar and Wheezies now also gives +2 LCK.
• Insatiable Rage tragedy no longer only gives Blood Frenzy.
• Infestation weather event:  Units now only spawn charmed maggots when killed.

Disorders/Parasites

• Hypersomnia: fixed order Sleep applies so that passives/items affecting sleep can trigger correctly.
• Malaria: Now only reduces CON.
• Naegleria Fowleri: Become AI controlled instead of dead at 0 INT.
• Schrodinger’s Syndrome: +1 to all stats and gain an extra turn at the start of battle.
• Sociopathy: -5 CHA, +5 INT.

Cleric

• Cleanse: Is now single-target. Range increased to compensate. Upgrade changed to make it hit a large area.
• Open Wounds: Now deals magic damage.

Druid

• Plant Mushroom: -2 mana cost.
• Summon Caterpillar: -1 mana cost.

Fighter

• Merciless: No longer triggers during actions that cost movement points.

Hunter

• Ball Of Spiders: No longer scales damage with DEX.
• Egg Sac Trap: -1 mana cost.
• Flea Shot: No longer scales damage with DEX.
• Heavy shot: -2 damage, 50% miss chance, +1 mana cost.
• Hunter's Boon: Now only triggers once per turn, but triggers off of any kill and not just enemies.
• Scattershot: +3 mana cost. Upgrade no longer exempts allies from its radius.

Mage

• Mage Basic attack: +2 range.
• Blizzard: Reworked to deal very high damage with 100% Freeze (and no Slow).
• Bolt: +2 range.
• Burning Paws: +1 Burn. (upgrade +2 Burn.)
• Fire Blast: +2 range.
• Firebolt: +2 range, +1 damage.
• Five: Trigger is now exactly 5 Mana or HP.
• Forbidden Spells: Now have 2 separate disorder pools, a basic pool (90% chance) and a crippling pool (10% chance). Psychosis is in the crippling pool. Luck affects which pool is chosen.
• Forbidden Flame: Burn increased.
• Forbidden Flood: Damage increased.
• Forbidden Frost: Damage/heal increased.
• Forbidden Fulmination: Damage increased.
• Four: Trigger is now exactly 4 Mana or HP.
• Freezerburn: +1 attack radius
• Ice Paws: +2 Slow, +5% freeze chance. You can damage frozen units. (upgrade +3 Slow.)
• Icicle Zapper: +1 damage.
• Jolt: +2 range.
• Inferno:  Now deals 8 damage, 8 Burn (upgrade 12 damage 10 Burn).
• Lightning Paws: +1 damage, +5% Stun chance. (upgrade +2 damage, +7% Stun chance.)
• Light up the Stage: +1 sparkle per turn. (upgrade +3 sparkles per turn)
• Long Cast: +2 range. (upgrade +5 range, +1 magic damage.)
• Overload: +2 damage. (upgrade +4 damage.)
• Shatter: -1 mana cost.
• Thunderburst: Now deals 12 damage, 50% Stun (upgrade 16 damage, 100% Stun)
• Tri-Attack: +2 range +1 damage.

Monk

• Fist of Fate+: repeat must hit different targets each time.
• Stance Switch: ai control now attempts to use this if it’s out of other actions.

Necromancer

• Evil Incarnate: -3 mana cost.
• Flesh Golem: -3 hp cost per cat to cast.

Psychic

• Shatter the Sky: -2 mana cost.

Tank

• Ass Blast: -1 mana cost, +2 Knockback.
• Clap: -1 mana cost.

Thief

• Caltrops: +1 movement. (upgrade +5 movement.)
• Nail Flurry+: Multi-hit amount is now locked in when the ability is cast instead of updating mid-ability if DEX is gained or lost.
• Poison Gas: +1 poison. (upgrade +2 poison)

Tinkerer

• Tinkerer Basic Craft/Throw: AI is slightly better at sequencing these now. (prefers to craft without wasting move first, prefers to use weapon before throwing it)
• Added "Blast Resistance" status effect. Blast resistance is added onto EMP, Mr. Mega, Napalm, and Demo Man tinkerer passives.
• Throw Weapon: no longer costs an action to use.
• Bombchu: -2 mana cost.
• Build Nuke: -2 mana cost.
• Conductor: now makes your weapon inflict electric damage if you are wearing metal.
• Electrolyze: -2 mana cost.
• EMP: +1 explosion damage. (upgrade +2 explosion damage.)
• Firecrackers: -2 mana cost.
• Lightning Rod: now grants Tech instead of Charge. Upgrade now grants Energized.
• Math!: now deals electric damage + stuns on prime numbers. Upgrade now gives you Tech on prime number instead of refunding mana.
• Mr. Mega: +1 blast radius, +2 explosion damage. (upgrade +4 explosion damage.)
• Napalm: +2 Burn. (upgrade +4 Burn.)
• Rocket Ride: -2 mana cost.

Misc

• Hitler's suicide can no longer miss. Increased the shield amount on his explosive phase.
• Added +4 HP to Führerfötuses.
• Final Boss & his Cat Clones are banned from rolling Depressing elite buff.
• Soahc's form change now ignores combat speed setting.
• Added +50 HP to The Coven and Tormentor.
• Added +50 HP to Dreadnoughtus’ head and +2 damage to its legs.
• Cursed Items and Parasites are no longer excluded from item degradation.
• Head mutation that gives you a bonus turn now has -2 speed.
• Spewer: HP nerfed to 100
• Stacy: base HP buffed to 125

Other Changes/Fixes

• Inventory "Slot" sort order now matches the order shown above the cat.
• Jester collar will always appear at the end of the class list, even if unlocked before Monk.
• Inventory/Furniture "Alphabetical" sort lists now use locales for sorting (change needed for some future language support).
• Backpack button added to shop screens.
• The tooltip for items with active abilities now shows the ability button in the tooltip.
• Added element indicators to item buttons.
• Misc tooltip fixes (Half-Rat, Robotic Arm).
• Misc localization fixes.
• Misc typos fixed.
• Fixed incorrect tiles in one level in The Rift.
• Fixed Rare Cat Tree C's art not matching collision.
• Loot cutscenes now all show a fallback cat for moral support if you loot with only one cat in the party.
• New cat vocal sound sets added.
• Fixed Champion Katzebot portrait not properly showing.
• Added tooltip icon for Temporary Item.
• Gave RiftKitten tooltip text.
• Added fallback behavior for another type of save file corruption
• Some random rolls with 0% or 100% odds will no longer advance the RNG.

Slay the Spire 2 has been one of those roguelike time vampires in recent weeks, for me—in between my usual binges of larger games, I tend to vanish into this genre for a bleary-eyed 80 hours because I can simply rinse and repeat, rather than having to worry about long-term narratives or complicated RPG systems.

Anyway, in my—oh my god, that can't be right. 118?—hours with Slay the Spire 2, I've come to feel like it's justified itself as a sequel. There's a lot of the same stuff going on, but there's also enough of a balance shift (and the inclusion of two new characters and co-op) to leave me satisfied.

But that wasn't originally the plan for MegaCrit. In Edge issue 423 (thanks, GamesRadar+), Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano says that "In a Reddit comment a long time ago, I was like 'we're not going to make a sequel! Why would we do that? We'll just update the first one'."

Given you are reading an article about Slay the Spire 2, that didn't pan out: "I guess we were a little naïve."

The main reason had a lot to do with Humble Games going under back in 2024. Humble helped Mega Crit publish the game on consoles and mobile—without them, those versions of the game couldn't be supported (per the studio's FAQ).

Basically, it gets real hard to justify updating the PC version of your game when every single other version of it is beyond your reach to do anything about—either you leave console and mobile players in the lurch, or you risk entering a publishing rights quagmire. "We couldn’t just work more on Slay the Spire 1, because its future was very murky," Yano explains.

Eventually, the studio decided that if it wanted to go ahead with its plans, "it would have to be a sequel." And, hey—judging by the amount of hours I've spent on it already (the equivalent of around 2.8 working weeks. I need to get other hobbies) it wasn't the worst move in the world.

Vampire Survivors continues to be a huge deal, and publisher poncle has grown massively since its release in 2022. In an interview with The Game Business, the studio's chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio talked about the smash hit that now has over 27 million players—and what it's planning to do with all that dough.

"Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies," Sapio said. "[Solo developer Luca Galante]'s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC [for Vampire Survivors] with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there.”

We've seen some of that growth pay off already in the form of Vampire Crawlers, the deckbuilding dungeon crawler spinoff, but more is on the way. "Our idea is to have little teams of people—five, 10, 15—working on different projects. The structure will be, we will have a designer, a bunch of producers, and this little team that’s agile and flexible," Sapio said, adding that the goal is to maintain an indie ethos on a bigger scale.

“We don’t want to be AAA or AA. We’re efficient with costs. We don’t take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that.” In this same talk, Sapio mentioned that the company is opening new studios in Italy and Japan and has plans to dole out its Survivors engine for even more licensed partnerships like Warhammer Survivors. While it's being developed by a different team and borrows a tabletop setting for its aesthetics, it's nonetheless "part of the official Survivors lineage."

Sapio hopes poncle just keeps on growing from there. When asked where he sees the company in five years, he said he'd like to see "40 projects in parallel development at all times everywhere in the world," adding to the notion that he'd rather see more small games rather than one monolithic game.

Enter the Gungeon celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this month. Having sold over 14 million copies in its lifetime, Enter the Gungeon was one of the early architects of the modern action roguelike, alongside games like Nuclear Throne, forging the path for the genre's modern phenomena like Hades, as well as variants of it such as Vampire Survivors.

It's a game with a heck of a legacy. But it's a legacy that its creators are ambivalent about. Speaking to Polygon, Dodge Roll designer Dave Crooks and composer Adam Kidd Drucker (better known by his stage name Doseone), have some concerns about where the genre is headed, and the tricks modern roguelikes use to keep people playing.

"So few people are trying to make something that is truly evocative of this experience of playing Rogue," Crooks explained. He cited the example of Minos, the game where you design a labyrinth and then defend it against attackers. "I watched a dev explanation of the game and he said (paraphrasing) 'But don't worry, this is a roguelike, so death is not the end!' And I'm like, that is the exact opposite of what 10 years ago somebody would've said a roguelike was!"

In particular, Crooks pointed to how the roguelike has become infiltrated by gambling mechanics. "The most obvious thing I see is a screen that pops up three choices every 45 seconds", he says. "The whole game, the way the power curve is designed is like you have to be interrupted by this serotonin blast of fanfare and three choices… It’s more relatable to a slot machine being popular.”

Crooks sees this as beginning with Vampire Survivors, and becoming more prominent in subsequent games like Balatro. "Especially on the back of Vampire Survivors and Balatro, I think it has gone a little bit … God, I don't want to be the person that says this, but a little cash-grabby," he observed. "What fundamentally makes those things fun is much more like a slot machine than the experience of playing Rogue. And literally developing a game that ticks the boxes of a slot machine in those ways is just easier to do."

I think part of the problem here is that nobody seems to bother distinguishing between roguelikes and roguelites anymore, because virtually all of them are roguelites, while more authentic roguelikes such as Caves of Qud are much thinner on the ground. It's a point that Drucker touches upon, noting that "I think we’re seeing it mutate to the version of itself that popularity obfuscates."

Nonetheless, I also think Crooks is accurate when he says that the games that followed in the wake of Vampire Survivors are becoming overly reliant on progression-based gimmickry rather than interesting game mechanics, possibly why the reception to games like CloverPit and Raccoin has been slightly cooler, though both are still popular.

Dodge Roll isn't finished stamping its own mark on the roguelike, though. The developer is currently working on Enter the Gungeon 2, which aims to stay true to the original game's blend of roguelike and bullet-hell, but with a 3D art-style. Based on Crooks and Drucker's comments, it'll be interesting to see if the sequel zags harder away from the current zeitgeist, and how that'll affect the final experience.

I think I broke Vampire Crawlers.

And I don't mean that in the tee-hee, I'm exaggerating just a little bit way. I know that Vampire Crawlers is all about making crazy builds with stacking stat buffs and strong synergies that can clear encounters in seconds, just like Vampire Survivors. But I think I've cracked the code with what may be the best build in the entire game.

Not only is this build ridiculously effective, but it also pretty much puts the game on autopilot. It's all thanks to one funny little skeleton guy.

Vampire Crawlers Mortaccio Build

Mortaccio is a skeletal Crawler that you can unlock by slaying a total of 444 skeletons. He starts with a set of Bone cards and a single armor card, and he boosts your Amount stat every time a blue card is played.

There's a really simple game plan to dominate with Mortaccio. All you need to do is overwhelm your opponents with a barrage of Bones by padding your Amount stat whenever you can. That means playing a lot of armor cards, and equipping the Your Shield My Liege Arcana (which makes armor persist between turns) will make Mortaccio unkillable.

Once you start a run, the most important goal is getting a Spellbinder card in your deck. Spellbinder cards cost 0 Mana and increase your Duration by 2. Once Mortaccio is active, you don't ever want him to leave. Duration-boosting gems can also help out here.

With Mortaccio active, you'll add even more Bones to the pile every time you apply armor. Bones cost 0 mana, and they can combo with Golden Armor to seriously strengthen your defenses. Add in some Duplicator cards—which also combo with Bones—and you'll crush anything in your path with a cascade of calcium.

This strategy needs upgrades to survive deeper dungeon floors, so seek out gems that increase Might, Area, and Amount to buff your Bones. If you can nab a Reverse Combo gem, apply it to Golden Armor so your Bone cards can benefit from combo bonuses and deal additional damage.

This build works best with plenty of re-rolls so you can specifically target what you need. The best overall gems for this setup are Decimate and Triple Damage, both of which can upgrade Bones to a serious threat. Triple Damage is self-explanatory, but Decimate makes a card deal a fixed 10% of the enemy's HP as damage.

You'll still need something for single-target encounters like bosses since your Bones won't be able to bounce as much in those situations. Ideally, you should chase something that costs two Mana so you can combo with Golden Armor. The Holy Wand is a personal favorite of mine.

Other than that, just keep stacking gems like Echo or Copy that will let you unleash a comical amount of Bones each turn. A Clover card is another thing to look out for since its repeated Luck buffs will help you find stronger gems.

Top things off with a Bracer to increase your hand size and more blue Armor or Pummarola cards to trigger Mortaccio's skill, and you'll breeze through even the hardest dungeons. There may be another build out there that's even better than this Mortaccio setup, but for now, I'm too bone-headed to try anything else.

Vampire Crawlers may be in a completely different genre than Vampire Survivors, but the progression path still has that signature Survivors DNA. With the right upgrades, you can become an unstoppable force of nature that shreds enemies like paper.

Picking the wrong upgrades can seriously slow you down in the early stages of Vampire Crawlers, though, so you should spend your hard-earned coins wisely. There's thankfully a refund button in the shop, but some of the game's best upgrades have to be unlocked the old-fashioned way. Here's what you should be chasing first as you dive into Vampire Crawlers' dungeons.

The best Crawlers to start with

Crawlers are the cornerstone of your build. Broken runs and crazy stats start with them, so filling the empty seats at the Inn should be your number one priority when starting out. You can have a great time with any of the game's characters, but there are two Crawlers in particular that you should rush toward.

Pasqualina Belpaese is the first truly broken Crawler you can recruit, increasing your hand size when purple cards are played and increasing your Area stat whenever her Crawler card is played.

To get Pasqualina, you need to reach level 20 with Imelda Belpaese on the Inlaid Library stage. You'll unlock Imelda after your first run in the Mad Forest—the very first stage—so you can get Pasqualina in under an hour if you're just starting out.

Pasqualina's whole kit is designed around crowd control, clearing huge waves of enemies with ever-increasing splash damage. Since she boosts your hand size when purple cards are played, you can stuff your deck with a bunch of cheap cards that you can spam to easily clear encounters. Add in a few stronger cards with combo potential to take out bosses and you've got a bulletproof plan of attack!

Next up on the priority list is Gennaro Belpaese, another broken Crawler who overwhelms enemies by increasing your Amount stat instead of Area. He also deals bonus damage whenever red cards are played, making Gennaro a very easy character to win with.

To unlock Gennaro, you have to defeat the Mantichana in the Mad Forest. The Mantichana is the final boss of the Mad Forest stage, so you have to win a full run to add Gennaro to your roster.

Gennaro is all about spamming low-cost cards and filling the screen with a bunch of random attacks. He gets Knife and Spinach cards in his starting deck, so spam Knives and combo with Spinach to boost your Might and make the Knives even stronger. Might also affects Gennaro's bonus damage from red cards, so all these little buffs start to add up fast. Slotting Gems onto those Knife cards will only ramp up the chaos, too.

Splurge on these upgrades at the shop

A returning feature from Vampire Survivors, the shop lets you spend coins to unlock permanent stat upgrades that'll help you survive harder stages. The same upgrades from Vampire Survivors are sold in Vampire Crawlers, but the best game plan is a bit different here.

The first thing you absolutely must buy in Vampire Crawlers is the Recovery upgrade, which restores one HP after every encounter for only 500 coins. The second and third upgrade levels get pretty expensive, so you can hold off on those for now.

The Reroll upgrade is just as important as Recovery—if not more. For only 250 coins, you can unlock the ability to reroll rewards so you can kickstart honing your build. The next upgrade levels are fairly cheap, but you should be fine with just one level at the start of the game.

Next up, you should buy one or two levels of the Duration upgrade. Crawler buffs are so important to the best builds, so you want to maximize the amount of time they're active. It's another cheap upgrade, so you can buy it after just a few runs.

After that, you should buy the first Might and Luck upgrades. They'll increase your stats by 20%, which is a huge boon when you're just starting out. These upgrades will carry you through the early stages of the game, letting you save up coins for the more expensive stuff like armor and Growth.

Add an Arcana to your kit

The Fortune Teller's Arcana tent is a huge upgrade that can drastically improve your builds, but you can easily miss it if you choose the wrong dungeons.

To unlock the Fortune Teller's tent, you need to find the Polentir Relic in the Furious Forest stage. It may seem tempting to go straight to the Inlaid Library after clearing the Mad Forest, but doubling down and trying to clear the harder Furious Forest is worth the effort. After exploring the Furious Forest for a while, the Polentir will eventually drop.

The Fortune Teller's tent lets you equip an Arcana, which provides a big passive buff of your choosing. These are unlocked just like weapons and items, and you can check the required challenges to unlock new Arcanas by hovering over each card.

One of the best Arcanas is Over the Top, which returns a Crawler to the top of your deck once they leave. You can unlock it by playing Crawler cards 100 times, so you'll end up with it sooner or later after a few runs. With Over the Top equipped, you can rack up constant bonus damage with a Crawler like Gennaro or gain a ton of XP with a character like Imelda.

Another strong early-game Arcana is Your Shield My Liege, which lets you keep armor between turns. It unlocks after you've gained 2,000 armor over the course of your adventures. With this Arcana, you can focus entirely on offense and build up armor across encounters over time. There's even a Gem that deals your armor value as damage, so slotting that into a cheap card is an easy path to victory.

Nab these Relics ASAP

Relics are game-changing passive upgrades that unlock new gameplay features in Vampire Crawlers. You'll get some great ones like the Combo Stack and Gem Hammer in the tutorial, but the best ones are hidden in harder dungeons.

As mentioned above, the Polentir should be your first priority once you're out of the Vampire Crawlers tutorial. You'll find it on the Furious Forest stage, accessible after clearing the Mad Forest for the first time. It unlocks the Fortune Teller's tent and the Arcana system.

The Grim Grimoire is another early-game priority. Found in the Library West Wing, it gives you a list of discovered weapon evolutions so you can keep track of the items you need in order to get the strongest cards. You can access the Library West Wing after clearing the Inlaid Library for the first time.

You should also try to clear the Teeny Bridge as soon as possible. It's a tough, combat-centric dungeon that pits you against a long line of enemies, but the reward is the Stardust Anvil. This Relic unlocks the Blacksmith's Shop, which lets you add gem slots to cards in your deck. This is the last major upgrade you'll get for the Village, so don't neglect this dungeon!

Little Tree Kingdom is about as instantly charming as games get. You want me to help a clan of cute little gnomes build a new town for themselves in a tree? Don't mind if I do! And may I add: "Awwww!"

As if to lull me further into a sense of security, it's also a bit of a deckbuilder—one of my favourite genres. Each turn, your hand of cards dictates what you can add to the colony. Some cards let you modify the tree, extending its roots or branches or adding leaves and flowers to it. Others will build little buildings for the gnomes, like houses to increase their population or mines to gather up underground resources.

The overall goal is to balance the "welfare" of the community across a number of different categories including happiness, security, and essence (whatever that is). Let any of those scores drop below zero, and you'll literally break the gnomes' hearts. Three broken hearts is game over.

At first, that threat seems pretty mild: just plonking down whatever comes into my hand each turn seems to keep my gnomes thriving. I find myself more focused on the shape of my tree than any worries about resources. The branch and root cards allow me to grow things out however I like, and then place objects on the new segments, allowing for some creative beautification of the town.

Every now and then, a festival is held and a trader comes along, allowing me to grab up some new cards. Having not worried too much about gnome capitalism thus far, I'm pretty light on gems to buy with, but scoop up a few basic cards to keep me going. I shouldn't need any more than that, right?

Wrong. You see, the problem is, I've been ignoring a pretty big looming issue: my resources are not infinite. Cards can only be played a certain number of times before they're destroyed, and outside of buying new ones, there's no other way to replenish or expand my options. It's not long before I'm ending up regularly drawing barely useful hands that can only give me slight bonuses rather than actually developing my town in significant ways. My whimsical little shopping trips have not really been enough to keep me stocked.

With weather events and other catastrophes always threatening to chip away at my welfare scores, that means I've dug myself a bit of a hole. I'm still just about scraping by, though, until all the ghosts start appearing.

It turns out this adorable forest is home to more than just cutesy gnomes—for reasons I should probably interrogate the little guys about later, it's also full of vengeful evil spirits, who are intent on tearing down everything I've built. Past a certain point they'll periodically spawn at the edges of the map, and begin their inexorable advance towards the tree.

Keeping them at bay means building up adorable little defences: spiked walls, arrow towers, even growing thorns on the tree. I guess this is also a tower defence game?

But, again, I can't simply build those things whenever I want—I need the cards, and that means I should have planned ahead about 5 days earlier. What makes things even trickier is that defences have a very small area of effectiveness. An arrow tower, for example, will only fire at the area directly around it, making it useless against a ghost on the other side of the tree or underground. Sculpting my tree purely for aesthetics was not wise after all—now I need a more defendable shape.

As the angry dead ravage Gnomeville, I'm afforded plenty of time to ponder my mistakes. Little Tree Kingdom is not, after all, a contemplative little cosy sim. Behind its cutesy smile works a devious mind, and really the way to approach it is as a sort of puzzle roguelike rather than a city builder.

The key to success is planning for disaster and aggressively grabbing at ways to compensate for your tree's current weaknesses. That humble little merchant is a lifeline—in later runs, I focus much more on cash generation so I can reroll his store for exactly the cards I desperately need to survive another nightmarish fairytale winter.

Relaxing it is not, but it is good fun. I've played a lot of roguelikes, but I don't think I've ever tried one quite like Little Tree Kingdom before, and even from a city builder perspective it's almost like the usual formula in reverse.

Normally in the genre you're always expanding and gaining more resources. You constantly unlock more options, and you're always equipped with the tools you need to progress. Instead, this is a game about using dwindling resources effectively, and trying to live with serious limitations on what you can do. That won't be for everyone, but it's a fascinating twist that I certainly didn't expect from the premise.

And you can find out for free whether that's your sort of thing or not—Little Tree Kingdom has a demo on Steam right now.

I won't claim to be a tactical genius, but when it comes to roguelikes, I've played more than my fair share. These days it doesn't usually take me long to mash enough synergies together to get my first few wins in pretty much any example you chuck my way.

Today though… I have met my nemesis. I am absolutely terrible at Gambonanza. It's embarrassing.

On the face of it, it's a very simple game. Each round, I'm able to deploy a small number of chess pieces on a little board (initially just three), and my goal is just to capture all the enemy pieces before losing all of mine. All the pieces simply move as they do in chess—so a pawn, for example, can only move forward one and capture diagonally forward one, a bishop can move or capture anywhere in a diagonal line, and so on.

In practice, that makes every round a tight puzzle. Bearing in mind every potentially threatened square while manoeuvring your own pieces into the right positions to capture the enemy without then leaving themselves vulnerable to counter-attack—it's enough to wrap my brain in knots.

And I can't afford to be sloppy about it, either. Gambonanza effectively has permadeath: every piece of mine that is captured is gone forever. I can get randomised replacements from the shop between rounds but it's costly, and one bad round is often enough to put me in a hole that I struggle to dig my way out of.

Normally, this is where I'd turn to cheap synergies to save my bacon, but I don't even know where to start in this game. I can try and stack my bench with particular pieces with selective shopping between rounds, but with a concept this abstract, it's hard to know what will be most effective. Is a board full of knights a good strategy? If so, how do I build around it?

The next layer is gambits I can buy to give myself permanent bonuses—this is where the roguelike skullduggery comes in, in theory, with things like earning free pawns whenever your queen is in check, or making bishops also able to move like kings. I can see the rough shape of how some of these things might come together into game-breaking combos, given time, but surviving long enough to get there, that's another question entirely.

Whenever I do manage to muddle through a few rounds, my reward is to face one of Gambonanza's surprisingly eldritch bosses, who in addition to freaking me out with their disturbing appearances each impose their own special power to make things even harder. That includes effects like making squares of the board fall away into the void, or not being able to see their deployment during the planning stage. Even worse, they often have elite pieces, with properties such as being uncapturable until they're the only one left.

It's at this point that my resolve usually starts to crumble entirely (along with a few squares of the board). This is simplicity wielded expertly as a weapon, creating intricate tactical puzzles out of straightforward, 1,500 year old rules, and I have to applaud its cleverness. If only I was anywhere near clever enough to stand up to it.

Now, this is the point where you all go try it and then come back and tell me it's actually a breeze and I'm a fool. The good news is, you can have that pleasure completely free: Gambonanza has a demo on Steam that you can play ahead of its full release on May 1 this year.

Casey Yano, co-creator of Slay the Spire and co-founder of studio Mega Crit Games, has given a new interview to Edge magazine about designing the sequel to a roguelike deckbuilder that, honestly, pretty much got it right first time. With some games it's obvious what a sequel could build on or improve, but when your starting point is so finely tuned that it's scooping PCG's Best Design award… well, where do you even start?

Dark Souls obviously. Yano says that elements of FromSoftware's series were one of the major starting points for where they wanted to take the sequel. The specific inspiration being how, across the Dark Souls games, players can essentially build the same character. But the difference is in what that specific build will be facing. Then the idea ran smack-bang into playtesters.

"We did mess around with, like, what percentage of the card pool should be different for returning characters," Yano tells Edge. "At first, it was less."

"If you say 'I'm going to make a katana build' you can make essentially the same exact character again in Dark Souls 2 and 3—you're just up against new challenges," Yano says. "I like that, personally."

But when Mega Crit started playtesting the early builds, players recoiled at the idea. "They were not jiving with that at all: 'We need new stuff!'" says Yano.

There's definitely something in Dark Souls whereby finding a particular style of weapon is almost like a comfort blanket: I was always delighted to find my first halberd-style weapon in any entry, because I adore the moveset and know how it works in different scenarios. Experimenting is great and all, but how about this one weapon that you know will always get the job done?

Slay the Spire 2 has ended up hewing closely to the formula of the original, though it does add a lot more new stuff than was maybe the case at an earlier stage. It's had a hugely successful launch, though with its most recent updates, many players are grumbling about the direction it's taking. But given that the original game had seven years of post-launch support, this clearly isn't the end of the road.

One thing that will stay, however, is the game having a definitive endpoint. In a post-launch Q&A, Yano addressed the idea of adding an 'infinite mode' of some kind to Slay the Spire 2, and in his reasoning references another classic deckbuilder of recent times.

"Probably not, the deckbuilding gets less exciting the longer a run goes on," says Yano. "I think games like Balatro do a better job due to infinite strategies being possible less often. The scaling of their game's mechanics feels more natural—whereas it's not really the case for us."

As far as I can tell Titanium Court is the first prestige match-three game ever made. It's also a roguelite, kind of a deckbuilder, a tower defense autobattler, and a lo-fi visual novel. Occasionally there are goofball electric folk performances, and its meditations on the byzantine hidden meanings of road signs are right up my alley. But in total, is Titanium Court any good? Absolutely—despite one of its central hooks, match-three tile sliding, proving an obstacle for me.

Due to a sudden mysterious shattering of her world, our nameless protagonist is whisked away to an alternate universe where two nondescript factions are locked in a forever war. Almost by accident she becomes queen of the Titanium court, a "royal faerie court" whose inhabitants speak "mostly in riddles and nonsense". They're a weird bunch, not least because the purpose of their lives—taking the fight to the opposing red court—is not undergirded by any of the halfway-compelling motives you'd normally expect of daily bloodshed. The war is, as far as I can tell, totally meaningless.

Yet they fight every single day. In the morning, at High Tide, I'm allowed to shape the battleground. This is where Titanium Court's match-three component comes into play: If I match three trees together they'll disappear, leaving me with wood. The same applies for water and rocks, which are also important resources. Crucially, I can also eliminate enemy blocks during this phase, so there's always a tension between whether I should gather resources for the fight, or destroy as many of my foes as possible. Hopefully I can do both.

During this phase various random complications can appear. A giant jar, for example, will prove so compelling to my faery soldiers that they'll focus on opening it rather than defending the court. Giant shoes can sell me real estate. Sometimes a goat will demand a toll; if I pay the toll it helps me but If I don't, the fierceness of its wrath usually guarantees death. If my map is strewn with enemy catapults, I need to either eliminate as many as possible or make sure my court is secured behind rock tiles ahead of the oncoming battle. If it's full of warships, I should try to landlock my court by eliminating rivers.

Since my "plans" are made in the randomised match-three format, I can work in the direction of goals and strategies but, crucially, pulling them off is never guaranteed. Shops can sell me various buffs and boons to help in the looming battle, but the items available are also subject to randomisation. Since most have fairly specific use cases, it's usually a risk to blow my hard-earned money on items instead of hoarding it in the hope for, say, a health-replenishing hospital later on. Experimentation is encouraged—I can undo moves within the bounds of a single high tide / low tide sequence—but it often feels too risky on a macro level.

Once the shape of the battlefield is set I move into Low Tide where, based on the resources I've gathered, I can send out soldiers, resource-gatherers, and various other offensive and defensive aides—presented, of course, as cards—to help in the ensuing autobattle. If I've chosen wisely and my court is not destroyed, I move up a notch in the overworld grid towards one of several final bosses. If I haven't the day is over and it's back to square one, though not all is lost: every death pours a tad more wine into my Comfort glass. Every time it fills I get a new point to spend on various buffs and advantages at the beginning of a run.

Court in-between

It's a conceptually smart commingling of genres, but Titanium Court's writing and presentation is what helps elevate it above a clever but sometimes tedious roguelite. The writing is abundant and, for the most part, gloriously funny. A bridge is described "as a door defined by its presence rather than its absence". The protagonist has misplaced their keys and their locks. The faery court keeps encountering road signs but, of course, has no knowledge of cars: what can a brash octagonal red sign with STOP printed on it mean without that context? Something quietly disturbing and charmingly stupid, of course.

It's also tonally askew in a way that's delightfully, endlessly surprising. When my faeries fell castles the screen is festooned with victorious baseball pixel art or a cat aloofly knocking a cup from a bench. The music sounds like something released direct to cassette by a drain-dwelling loon, and I mean that in the most admiring sense possible. It's gently dreamlike, but also features the best one-note charred guitar wig out I've heard in a game. There's even an item that swaps out a boss battle with a musical performance by creator AP Thomson, a performance so amusingly prolonged that it feels designed to punish you for conflict avoidance.

There's a lot I love and admire about this gorgeous and distinctive artefact, which is as tangential and—yes, sometimes as self-indulgent—as all good weirdo art. Wandering the court between battles, and interacting with its landmarks and characters is never boring if you have an appetite for eccentricity.

But none of this can paper over the fact that, at least 40 percent of the time, you're matching three. And Titanium Court taught me, among other things, that I kinda hate matching three. No matter how much strategic complexity is added via curiously interacting blocks, I'm still tasked with interacting with everything via this dull fundamental.

The combination of randomisation with an inherently imprecise gameplay system like match three is what ultimately bugged me. Titanium Court lets me choose between three randomised battle fields at the beginning of every fight; one might have a lot of trees but no water, for example, while hosting lots of knights and wormholes. Another might have no trees but a lot of rocks, and warships. But there's no guarantee any will offer much hope. There are times when I'm down on resources, low on health, and my best option is a map full of, I don't know, archer faeries and wormholes, right before a boss battle, where I think: can I have that 40 minutes back please?

I don't think Titanium Court wastes my time—I've chosen to play it—but I was too often annoyed that my best-laid plans, my canny strategising, was flippantly undermined by a randomness the gameplay systems are too cumbersome to counteract. Too often I knew how to solve a problem but the problem could not be match-three'd away, and there's a harsh limit to how much forward-planning can be done to accommodate for unfavourable RNG. So maybe this is secretly just a card game? (If so, that's me bamboozled: I don't like them either.)

Certainly, there's a strange friction between the simple precision of match-three and the tense imprecision of, well, everything else. Every time I match three tiles it's a hit of dopamine that eventually feels ill-gained once I learn how capricious and unmalleable the battlefield can be despite my inputs. The appeal of match-three in Bejewelled, or Candy Crush, is the simple tactile pleasure of—wait for it—matching three, but there's also the dazzling visual rewards and the pursuit of high scores. Wedded to a game demanding much more strategic thinking, it often just feels annoying.

And yet, I admire what Titanium Court achieves, and I want more games that are brazenly intellectual and funny like this. I adored it 60 percent of the time, and I daresay a lot of people will be fine or else smitten with the match-three stuff. It's testament to the brilliance of everything else that I feel like I'd recommend Titanium Court despite not loving one of its star attractions. It's the kind of thing that can only be made by one person when no one is around to vet or shout down its manifold weirdnesses. I can't help but love it for that.

Vampire Crawlers is a brave attempt to turn everyone’s favourite bullet heaven monster masher into a deckbuilder. An attempt that keeps threatening to actually work. There’s good ideas in here, but too often it’s about as fun as literally crawling through an actual dungeon.

Vampire Survivors, for the two of you who are uninitiated, is the popcorn chicken of 2D action games. You wander around a map auto-attacking while monsters bombard you from all sides. Every few seconds you level-up, pick between two death-dealing toys, and then you’re straight back into the action.

Vampire Crawlers attempts to squash that formula into a deckbuilder that’s entirely turn-based. The opening sees you approach a swarm of killer bats. You draw a hand of three cards, play one of the attacks, and watch the bats die instantly.

Blue XP gems pour out of their corpses and send your levelling up bar flying up until ding! You’ve just ‘earned’ your first level up reward. The same dopamine hit that made Vampire Survivors such a breakout smash seems to have translated over to this spin-off intact.

This tutorial also introduces the combo mechanic. Every card has a mana cost and you’ve got three mana to spend each turn. Whenever you play a card, the next number higher gets a boost if you play it immediately after. So if I play a whip card that costs zero mana, suddenly my fire wand that costs one mana hits much harder.

So comboing is a winning strategy. The problem is, for far too long, it’s the only logical strategy. Say I draw three cards and they cost one, two, and three mana respectively. Why would I possibly play them in any order but 1-2-3? There’s no punishment for doing so, nor any potentially superior reward for trying something else.

0-1-2, end turn. 1-2-3, end turn. Oooh, should I play 1-2-2 or 2-1-2? That’s the only ‘decision’ I’ve seen in ages and it literally doesn’t matter. The game was trapped in this dull loop for hours. I’d recommend buying the upgrade that expands your hand by up to two cards as quickly as possible, just to give yourself something to do. Even then it’s often all too obvious what the ‘correct’ hand is to play.

There’s more strategy in choosing what cards you add to your deck. Then which gems you slot into them, and—much later—which cards you add more slots to. This eventually becomes pretty compelling, but it’s not enough early on, because too much of the game’s first half is a pushover for any of this to feel truly necessary.

Difficulty is a mess. After a few upgrades or generous card drops, standard enemies become no threat whatsoever. That dopamine rush of experience gems quickly suffers from diminishing returns when I don’t feel like I’ve earned them. And since standard enemies aren’t putting up a fight, it’s hard to know what rewards to choose. More armor-giving cards? A "spicy damage" buff? What even is spicy damage? I’m guessing some sort of status effect, but everything's dying too fast for me to find out. Then when you do face a boss with actual teeth, you’re completely unprepared for it.

Later levels introduce more challenging cannon fodder, naturally, but sooner or later you’re going to hit a brick wall that no amount of skill will surpass. You simply haven’t bought enough increasingly expensive permanent upgrades from the village hub, like health restoration, extra mana, and bonus XP.

Money monster

Upgrades cynically gating your progress was true of Vampire Survivors, too, but that mattered less because replaying earlier levels was fun and still required skill. Crawlers is too rigid and willing to play itself to make replaying levels feel like anything but a chore. A successful run usually takes me around forty minutes. That’s a pretty large chunk of time to spend mostly bored.

I experimented for ages in the village hub trying to find a more satisfying combination of settings. I bought upgrades that make enemies hit harder but also drop more experience. I tried different heroes who all bring slight variations to the table. Fair play, there’s tons of options here, and some of the prizes get impressively granular. You can even manipulate the rarity of certain drops, if you’ve gained enough gold to pay the staggering costs to do so.

Perhaps you’ll chance upon the magic combination that turns this game into a perfectly-balanced masterpiece and then celebrate by screaming at me in the comments section. But is it really too much to ask for a game to craft a coherent difficulty curve for itself?

Each floor of a dungeon has a mini-map that tells you everything. The location of the floor’s boss, treasure chests, stuff that can be smashed for money, and all the standard enemies. There’s no incentive for any approach deviating from ‘collect all the prizes, clear out the standard enemies, then do the boss’. This feels more like admin than exploring a deadly dungeon. At one point a surprise boss ambush popped up, but that was literally the one break from the routine I saw in the eighteen hours it took me to see the credits.

Eventually, I unlocked enough interesting upgrades and reached deadly enough areas to see Vampire Crawlers at its best. I was drawing larger hands that offered more of a choice of combos and could play multiple heroes at once. It finally felt like I could really explore interesting synergies and make tactical decisions.

But this didn’t start happening until I was eleven hours in, and it honestly felt much longer. Besides which, the more permanent upgrades you have, the more frequently you're able to simply break the game, discovering a deck that turns the rest of a run into a dull pushover with no further surprises. Monster Train 2 had a similar taste for throwing OTT powers at the player, but also knew how to craft a terrific challenge for you to face them with.

It’s no small feat that the developer has managed to make a turn-based deckbuilder that feels like playing Vampire Survivors. Sadly it's also shown how crucial elements like being able to flee a failing fight or nailing the timing of an auto-attack apparently are to that game’s winning formula. There’s just too many better deckbuilders out there for me to recommend this interesting but deeply flawed genre mash-up.

Despite Hades 2 coming out of early access in September of last year, the developer's not rested on its laurels in the aftermath of what some fans felt was a subpar ending, issuing a patch back in October of the same year to fix the most pressing complaints.

But the dev hasn't stopped there—and another patch has dropped this week to help brush things up. As the patch notes on Steam read, Hades 2 now has a heap of new finishing touches to help round off the experience.

For starters, the list of Fated Prophecies has been updated with "narrated conclusion scenes"—five in total, with a sixth receiving an adjusted "priority of key events". In addition, the list will now have better instructions for some of its tasks, helping you complete the story beats a little easier.

There's been a bunch of new dialogue added, too—these are all small touches, but ones that did have a bit of an eerie, unfinished impact in the full game, such as making Nemesis "lighten up a little", or Hera not pretending like she's never met you if you snagged one of her boons before reaching the top of Mt. Olympus.

The most important of these, clearly, is the fact that "Poseidon now becomes increasingly enthusiastic as Sea Star activates more times". Very important to my immersion (ha, get it? Because you immerse yourself in water? Ah, whatever).

The game's romance routes have, in general, also been improved—for example, "Icarus now is less painstakingly reluctant when it comes to trying to forge a bond with him," and scenes with Moros and Nemesis should "occur under less-restrictive circumstances".

You can also infinitely gift items to NPCs even after maxing out their bond track, with "various brief new scenes" to help you feel like you haven't just finished clearing out a dialogue tree and now have to watch your beloved character go all glassy-eyed and quiet.

As far as mechanics go, there's been some adjustments to boons, but the most notable of them are a suite of buffs to Ares—it always felt a little strange that the god of war's boons were the least appealing, and that should now be fixed. Several boons now deal more damage, while Profuse Bleeding and Sanguinary Savor have been completely reworked.

Lastly, there's a few little touches—such as more decorations for the crossroads and familiar upgrades. As someone who has sunk a good 65 hours into Hades 2 (it was my personal pick for our Game of the Year awards in 2025) I'm very happy. I wasn't alone in thinking that the game's original ending was a little too neatly tied-off, and Supergiant continuing to apply a fine layer of polish is great to see.

Roguelikes are fun because of the random elements that vary from run to run, and the coin-pushing roguelike Raccoin is no exception. Still, sometimes you just want to have the best items handed to you on a silver platter.

That's where seeds come in. Every Raccoin run has a randomly generated seed tied to it, determining details like the coins carried in each round's shop. Whether you're struggling to beat a high-difficulty Ticket or just want to watch coin-based chaos unfold, these are the best Raccoin seeds.

Best Raccoin Seeds

The best seeds in Raccoin have great items for sale in the first few rounds so you can start building a strategy early on.

These seeds can vary a bit between players since you might not have every coin unlocked, but as long as you have a solid chunk of your collection filled out, you should be able to see the same coins for each specific seed. At the very least, make sure you have the coins and prizes mentioned in the table unlocked.

Difficulty levels can also make a difference, especially the ones that affect shop prices and re-roll costs. If you can't afford to re-roll for a specific item in an early round, some seeds won't be as fun for you. Plan ahead or bring a different Slot Card to compensate for those penalties.

Chummy Coin Army

Chummy Coins galore

Conversion Rate to the Moon!

Grow your Conversion Rate from the first round.

Returning Dividends

Keep dividing the target score into more manageable amounts.

Infinite Corncoin

Get a Corncoin from the shop and keep duplicating it for easy wins.

For Profit Farming

Set up giant plants with an all-in-one kit.

Jawbreaker Duplication

Jawbreakoin and Rain Badge in the first shop (after re-rolling).

Maximum Power

Lightning Coin and Bug modifier in the first shop!

Jupiter Loop

BOGO Jupiteroin early in the game.

Ascending Astrofalls

Stargazy Pie in the first shop.

Fridge Run

Early game Fridgeoin so you don't have to worry about cooking.

How to Use Seeds in Raccoin

You can apply a seed to your Raccoin run when selecting a Slot Card and Ticket difficulty level. After picking a character, you'll see two little dots underneath your chosen Ticket.

Clicking the first dot will let you enable or disable Stickers, and clicking the second dot will let you enter a custom seed code. There's even a handy paste button if you've copied a seed from somewhere online—like this page!

The adorably addictive coin pusher roguelike Raccoin features over a hundred special coins that can boost your earnings and propel you past each round's target score. Learning the effects of each special coin can help you make the most of re-rolls in the shop, set new high scores, and win higher difficulty Tickets.

You'll only start out with a few dozen special coins in Raccoin, but winning runs with each character and surpassing scoring milestones will grow your collection. These are all the special coins you can unlock in Raccoin.

Raccoin common coins

There are 26 common coins to collect in Raccoin. These won't dramatically boost your score, but they're a solid foundation that you can rely on in early rounds.

Raccoin uncommon coins

There are 51 uncommon coins in Raccoin. These are the bread and butter of most runs.

Raccoin rare coins

There are 45 rare coins in Raccoin. These won't show up in the shop very often, and they'll significantly boost your score when played.

Raccoin epic coins

There are 28 epic coins in Raccoin. These are the rarest coins in the entire game, and they'll carry you past the end of a run into endless mode where score requirements skyrocket.

Raccoin bad coins

There are 21 bad coins in Raccoin. These coins appear every few rounds, applying debuffs to the coins in play and disabling features like exchanges.

A necromancer's body betrays its own head, cutting it off and burying it underground before lumbering off to pursue immortality. Some time later, the skull rises from the earth and summons a skeletal army to take on its own headless corpse. As opening cutscenes go, it's certainly unique.

And it's pretty much all the setup I need to understand what I'm doing in Skull Horde. Gather skeleton warriors, fight weird fleshy monsters, and battle my way to my body. Simple.

The process of actually doing that basically looks like a hybrid between a roguelike in the style of Vampire Survivors, and an auto-battler like Teamfight Tactics. Progressing through the levels of a bleak dungeon, I'm floating around followed by minions who automatically attack nearby enemies. Along the way I'm hoovering up resources and upgrades, but also between floors I'm able to recruit more skeletons and organise my army.

With a wide range of unit types—from armoured warriors to ice mages to skeletal rat swarms—and various possible synergies between them, it makes for some tough choices, especially as an army can only host up to six different types at a time.

Three of the same kind of minion will also combine to make a veteran, a stronger form. Combine three veterans and you get a champion, which can unlock powerful set bonuses if they share a keyword (like Vanguard, Siege, or Horde) with two other champions in your force. But with limited choices in the shop, you're not always able to grab exactly what you want.

That's a lot to pick through, so I decide to keep things simple for my first run—a mostly Vanguard-based force of tough, tanky warriors, backed up by healing clerics and buff-dispensing bannermen. I can just outlast the enemy, right?

Well… probably not. You see, time is always of the essence in Skull Horde—the longer I spend on a floor, the more enemies spawn, and it's easy to get overwhelmed. Particularly with my endurance build, I'm forced to be as efficient and ruthless as possible.

Though I don't have direct control of my skeletons, I can command them to gather on my position, and I can cast a fury spell to enhance their combat stats for a short period. With those tools in hand, the best strategy seems to be to race between different priority targets—treasure chests, elite enemies, and other goodies—and then choose the right time to cut my losses and beeline for the portal that unlocks the next floor.

At the same time, though, my floating skull is vulnerable—if it gets hit, the damage is shared across all my minions, without taking into account their defences. That creates some interesting risk-reward choices. When is it best to charge ahead and save valuable time, and when do I need to be more cautious, hiding behind my boney pals?

In the end I lean a bit too hard on the latter side of that balance. Though they excel at keeping me alive, my cohort starts to flounder on a floor where I need to defeat a disgusting flesh tower creature to proceed. By the time I've hunted it down, I'm already up against it—and when it starts spawning its own minions at me to slow my army down, things go south fast. I am eventually overwhelmed, and flesh wins out against bone.

I'm left keen to take another shot at it, especially as that first attempt unlocked skill points that can allow me to specialise a bit more before a run. What is a little disappointing, however, is that where I should now be encouraged to try out other possible builds, I instead feel funneled into doing something similar again.

There are multiple unlockable characters, but as it stands I only have one, and his skill tree is focused on exactly what I was already doing—Vanguard units with high armour. I definitely have ideas for how I could build that more efficiently next time, but what I really want to do is spin off in some totally different direction.

I'm intrigued by the possibilities of horde builds that happily sacrifice waves of minions but compensate with buffs that trigger on death and a buffed respawn timer. Or wizards who can drop arcane debuffs on enemies, backed up by Troupe units that can enhance those effects with magical song and dance.

Not only will I feel like I'm at a disadvantage if I go down one of those paths, but the next character—the delightfully named Garg—is unlocked by getting a really high armour multiplier, which Vanguards are going to give me the best chance of doing.

At least being forced to be the tank takes me back to my old MMO guild days… and to be fair, I'm sure there is much more to explore in that archetype than just my crude sword-and-board build. I'll certainly be coming back for a few more attempts this week, anyway—I can't let the flesh win that easily, can I?

Skull Horde is available on Steam now, and currently 25% off until April 24.

Morbid Metal released into early access last week, and I finally got the chance to sit down and play it—and while developer Screen Juice's new roguelike needs some proper work on its secondary elements, the good news is that the bones are good. Really good, in fact.

Given their repetitive nature, the most important thing about a roguelike is how it feels to play. No-one's gonna try and achieve mastery when basic combat feels like pulling teeth: Luckily, Morbid Metal's already slick as oil, and I'm certainly not surprised it hooked fellow PCG writer Elie Gould when they played it at Gamescom last year.

Its potent character action fundamentals are underpinned by its "shapeshift" system. Basically, you've got three characters that you can shapeshift between at the press of a button—and given each character has two abilities (and an ultimate) which have their own respective cooldowns, you'll be hotswapping a lot just to make use of your attacks.

In terms of your defensive options, you can dodge, and that's about it—but a perfect dodge nets you a sick as hell counter, one that's distinct between characters. For example, heavy-hitter Ekku's dodge counter tosses enemies up into the air, letting you flow into a juggle.

Morbid Metal already feels very, very good. Chaining together your skills, shapeshifting between the trio of characters, and obliterating your enemies with ultimates all feels great and responsive. And while the shapeshifting itself is a mindbender to get around, it's an appealing skill ceiling. Ain't nothing wrong with a complex system that encourages mastery, especially in a genre built on repetition.

The runs themselves see you dashing in a distinctly Warframe-esque fashion through floating islands rife with technological overgrowth. If you've played a roguelike, you know what's in store here—you enter a room. There are enemies there. You get an upgrade, you rinse and repeat.

And this is the only glitch in Morbid Metal's present program—as far as this central loop goes, it's a little dry. Routines, which are the major modifiers to your abilities, just aren't all that game-changing in practice because they lack the variety to back each other up with the kind of synergies that make a game like Hades pop.

Other layers to this system don't help in their relative milquetoastness—Corporas mostly just apply flat stat boosts, for instance. Devil's Bargains seem slightly more interesting, insofar as they ask you to make a trade-off (as the name suggests), but they take a while to unlock.

There's also a bit of friction between the skills, too, which you can find upgraded versions of. Basically, if you've got a bunch of Routines that work off a specific skill, you can often find yourself in a situation where you've run into a powerful skill that you don't take because, well, it doesn't gel with your Routines.

Which is a problem, because even in roguelikes where you miss an opportunity for a synergy, you're usually given a lesser upgrade to be getting on with. It doesn't feel great to leave what's meant to be a reward on the ground entirely because it doesn't mesh with the choices I nabbed in previous rooms.

The good news is that this is all stuff that can be worked on—Morbid Metal is, after all, in early access, and it's entirely within the developer's power to add more impactful and wider-reaching abilities as the patches proceed apace. It's harder for a studio to make sure that the moment-to-moment feels good if it launches all janky, and fortunately, Morbid Metal is already there.

Helping my opinion is the price—Morbid Metal's very humbly costed at the moment, at £18/£16 on Steam (not including the current 25% discount, which'll be available until April 21). That's pretty reasonable for a game with bones this sturdy, and if Screen Juice is given the time it needs to expand on what's already there, I can see this game making its way comfortably into my roguelike rotation.

I've always been terrible at pool, snooker, billiards, and every other game involving a long stick and green felt. Thus far, though, the consequences of that have been pretty mild—some social ostracisation here, a bit of being laughed at in the pub there, you know. What I'm saying is, it's never sent me irreversibly insane.

But, of course, Lovecraft has to infiltrate everything these days, and so along comes Pool of Madness—a roguelike that dares to ask, "What if a game of pool was actually an elaborate ritual to please the dark gods of the abyss?"

How this particular ritual got started is not immediately clear. Starting up the demo, my character wakes up in what appears to be the hull of a ship at sea, with some ominous set dressing around me and a pool table in the middle, waiting to be played.

My first few minutes fumbling through a run are a little confusing. I am almost as bad at digital pool as I am in real life, though that's not helped by the odd twists Pool of Madness throws in. Fundamentally, I'm just hitting the white ball to try and pot (or "drown") a certain number of green ones and avoid hitting reds, but questions quickly arise.

What are these weird looking extra balls that explode when I hit them? What does it mean that the green balls sometimes get swapped out for black ones? And why do I have a literal gun I can fire at the table?

Of course, trying to understand things is the path to an early grave in a Lovecraft story, so in the early goings I focus simply on survival. There are two main threats I need to worry about. One is the turn counter—it ticks down every time I fail to drown a green, and if it hits 0 I'm done for. The other is the red balls—any time I hit them, they deplete my sanity, which essentially stands in as my health bar. And God knows I'm hanging on by a thread as it is.

There are some generous aids to the basic pool playing, at least, for the benefit of people like myself. While I'm lining up a shot, a visual indicator shows not only the line the ball will travel, but the specific spot on the other ball that it will hit, making it agreeably easy to see what direction I'll be propelling my target in. From there it's mostly a question of picking the right balls to go for, and getting used to choosing the power level of each shot.

It's just enough to keep me in the game. And the more I play, the weirder things get. Between rounds, a sort of aquarium vending machine with a tentacle lever dispenses power-ups, mostly with slightly confusing effects. I grow to regret picking the one that gives me a chance to vomit up a temporary buff or debuff every round—it certainly helps more than it hinders, but the animation is pretty upsetting.

At one point, dead fish get dropped on the table. It's half past two, there's fish on the pool. For a moment I'm sat there waiting for something else to happen, but no, they're just there now, and I guess I'm expected to play around them, which proves rather awkward.

Except… no, hold on, I've still got that gun, haven't I? And apparently I can just aim it at the table whenever I like, though ammo is fairly scarce. Can I just shoot the fish off the table?

Perhaps this is forbidden knowledge the likes of which Man Was Not Meant to Know, but thankfully the answer is "Yes". And this winds up being a bit of a turning point in the run. I may be bad at pool, but I'm at least a bit better at weird game logic, and I quickly find that the more I meet Pool of Madness on its own odd level, the more I start to thrive.

While it doesn't quite have the game-breaking synergies of something like Slay the Spire, there are certainly ways to twist the rules to my advantage in difficult rounds. One upgrade allows me to simply stop the white ball in its tracks with the click of a button, giving myself the best possible position for the next shot (or just avoiding accidentally potting it). Another lets me view the table from a top-down perspective for even easier lining up of shots. And the real magic begins when I discover new ways to generate and trigger explosive balls, allowing me to strategically clear awkward parts of the table.

Eventually, though, I blunder into one too many red balls, and I'm sent screaming away from the table, doomed to… well, start again next time I feel like it. I'm definitely left more intrigued than I expected to be in a concept that does sound like the product of a random videogame genre generator.

There's work to be done here —particularly in adding more powers and upgrades, and making the early going a little clearer—but Pool of Madness' demo is well worth checking out. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to my local pub with a blunderbuss and a shopping bag full of expired mackerel to find out how much I've really improved.

Some game premises are so wonderfully ridiculous you can't help but get on board. Wanderburg essentially asks the question: 'what if it was medieval times, but every building had wheels?' Perfect, no notes.

Into this world of rolling stonework trundles my little castle, equipped with a few archers at the battlements and some cannons jutting out each side. What ensues is reminiscent of Vampire Survivors and its many imitators—I roam the medieval countryside battling swarms of other mobile castles with my auto-firing weapons, scooping up gold for defeating them that lets me level up and gain new abilities.

But there's definitely enough quirks here to make it stand out. For one, there's an oddly organic feel to a run, despite the focus on rather inorganic buildings. As I roam the land chasing down defenceless mobile windmills and hoovering up farmhouses, then running scared when massive mega-castles appear ready to chomp me up, it feels more like an ecosystem of predators and prey than a war.

That's only reinforced by the way my castle evolves over time—as I progress through a run, it grows in size and gets tougher and faster. Before I know it I'm looming over castles that once felt like major threats, and my travelling fortress looks like something out of Mortal Engines.

And I love that it really handles like 100,000 tons of stone on wheels, too. There's a real weight and physicality to both my castle and the various enemies pursuing me as I careen around, trying to line up shots and dodge out of getting fired on in return. A limited boost meter gives me just enough fine control to pull off clever little maneuvers in between clumsy collisions and three point turns.

The more I get to grips with the steering, the more tactile combat gets. On one run I decide my only weapons will be a mine layer that drops explosive payloads in my wake, and a huge battering ram that gives me a tasty forward charge ability. Between the two of them I'm soon leading enemies on merry chases, making them follow me through trails of mines, charging out of the way of their shots, and ramming them backwards whenever they get too close.

Very fun, but a bit slow to actually finish the job—I can't just spend all my time running away. That's when it really clicks. While the mine layer's auto-fire ability just drops one bomb at a time every few seconds, its active ability lets me fire out a wide spread of them every 60 seconds or so. I start setting up little nests of death around the map, leading enemies near them… and then charging into them full speed to ram them across the screen into the mines, blowing them to pieces. I call it the Pinball Hustle.

Not a sophisticated strategy, perhaps, but dramatic enough to make it feel like I'm in some weird medieval Mad Max movie, explosively outsmarting my bigger, scarier opponents. That is, until I get blasted to pieces by a boss I can only describe as being Sauron's tower from Lord of the Rings on wheels. Fair play.

Wanderburg's current free demo is very limited—basically just one map with some upgrades to grind for—but it's enough of a preview to see the potential, and the indication of a full overworld map of zones to progress through in the final game is tantalising. Currently its ETA is just some time this year, but hopefully we don't have too long to wait before it rolls its way towards 1.0 and smashes headfirst into a release date.

Heavily systemic, decades-in-the-works roguelike RPG Caves of Qud belongs to a taxonomy of games that we, the experts at PC Gamer, professionally identify as "PC-ass PC games." Other PC-ass PC games include Deus Ex, Dwarf Fortress, and EVE Online. Notably, none of those games can be played on the Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 videogame consoles—but as of February 2026, Caves of Qud can.

It's a port that doesn't seem like it should work, given that Caves of Qud uses a healthy chunk of the keyboard by default. It also does not seem like Caves of Qud should run on the decade-old Switch at anything approaching a healthy framerate, considering how hard its systemic generation can push a CPU. And that's exactly why it exists.

"I'm not sure it's a rational decision," Qud co-creator Brian Bucklew said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "I think we are interested in solving impossible problems in general, and the idea of making Caves of Qud work on Switch—initially, making Caves of Qud work on gamepad—that doesn't seem like something that should happen. But the challenge entices me to do it."

As Bucklew is alluding to, Qud didn't make the jump from beefy desktop PCs to Switch overnight. In 2024, months before the game left early access after many many (many) years of development, Qud got a UI and control overhaul, which made it shockingly playable on the Steam Deck. It's still clearly a complex-as-hell game with a lot of information to convey, which can get a bit cramped on the Steam Deck's 1280x800 pixel display, but it works. And the gamepad binding scheme's savvy shortcuts and button combinations make actions that seem like they should require digging through several menus quite easy to pull off. Who knew examining the lethal geometry of the Chrome Pyramid could be so intuitive?

Bucklew clearly relishes a technical challenge, but the underlying motivation was the question why there aren't other PC-ass PC games on Switch.

"People think that there is not a market for systemic games on Switch," he said. "I think a lot of people might think a game like Caves of Qud would not succeed, but there aren't any, right? So on what basis are you making that claim, especially for a device that has as many users out there? If even a tiny amount of people want to play a deep systemic game, that is a lot of units for an indie studio. … And I think we've proven that there's a market for this kind of stuff on Switch."

Bucklew said that Caves of Qud's sales on Switch peaked in the top five of the 'Physical + Digital' category, aka "everything." Qud was only released digitally, but that actually makes its sales more impressive—that means at its best it was outselling 95 of the top 100 games across cartridges and the Nintendo eShop. He couldn't share specific sales numbers, but said the game has continued to do well even after leaving the Switch's most elite ranks.

Some of the design decisions in Qud that made it possible to play on a gamepad happened years ago, and they weren't necessarily intentional. "We accidentally made a choice to collapse [the way] older roguelikes would have 20 different keybinds on different letters, and one part of their appeal was puzzling out what keybinds even existed," he said. While designing Qud, he and Freehold Games co-founder Jason Grinblat decided to make its interactions more menu-driven than they would be in, say, pioneering roguelike NetHack.

"It's still quite complicated, and sufficiently interesting to discover things despite having a list of things you can do," he said. "That makes it very amenable to gamepad play, whereas if you had 70 keybinds, it just doesn't [work]. We barely fit onto gamepad, but we do, because of that decision."

The Qud team are now working on the next challenge: Fitting those controls and menus that barely work on the Switch onto a phone screen, translating the game to both portrait displays and touch inputs. "We don't know if we'll be able to pull off a nice Qud portrait design, but signs look pretty good," he said.

Performance, at least, may not be a huge challenge this time. Today's phones are monstrously capable, and Freehold already spent "many months" on performance optimizations to get the game running on the comparatively ancient Switch 1's CPU.

"People make claims like 'oh, people don't want to play big RPGs on their phone. Are there any actual examples of a phone-first design big RPG? Maybe single digits. Not very many, right? I think people make these claims because nobody takes the risk to do it, and it makes sense for big studios to avoid that risk. But for Qud we're building on a 20-year-old basis. We're paying our bills. We can take these risks."

After learning the singleplayer basics of cardslinging your way up the tower, it's time to learn how Slay the Spire 2 multiplayer works. It's not that complicated, really, but I didn't expect the deckbuilding roguelite to add co-op to begin with, so I had trouble seeing Mega Crit's initial vision. It's as clear as day now.

I've been having blast deckbuilding and doodling with friends, and am happy to report multiplayer isn't some unfamiliar departure from solo spire runs. If you're ready to team up and give it a go, I've got a breakdown on how Slay the Spire 2 multiplayer works, including how to start a co-op game and system changes.

How to start a Slay the Spire 2 co-op game

You start a Slay the Spire 2 co-op game by having one Host player create a multiplayer save, and then up to three other players can join through the main menu. The Host must be Steam friends with everyone joining; there are no password protected lobbies or matchmaking queues.

There's no local co-op either, but I'm trying to stay optimistic on that front since it's in early access. Anyway, setting up a Slay the Spire 2 multiplayer game takes just a few steps.

Setting up a co-op save

1. Choose a save profile with the character you would like to use unlocked
2. Select 'Multiplayer' from the main menu
3. One player will select 'Host' and setup a lobby; others click 'Join'
4. Everyone chooses a character to play (yes, you can all be The Silent)

That's all there is to it for getting started, but Slay the Spire 2 plays a tad different in co-op mode. It's not overly complicated, but there are a few details to keep in mind for maintaining your multiplayer saves and how some mechanics change.

How do Slay the Spire 2 co-op save files work?

Before starting a new climb to the top, I suggest a quick skim over how Slay the Spire 2 co-op save files work. Some are obvious details, sure, but I learned the hard way you can't sub other players in to fill an abandoned spot midway through a campaign.

Save files: Profiles, hosting, and parties

• Every player has (3) profiles, each can host (1) campaign at a time
• New profiles only have access to Ironclad and must unlock the rest again
• The Host owns the save; it's tied to their respective profile
• You'll have to abandon the save to host another game with new players
• All players must be present from the beginning; you cannot add a player later
• You can quit at any time, but all players must be present to continue playing

How does Slay the Spire 2 multiplayer work?

It's easiest to think of Slay the Spire 2 multiplayer campaigns in terms of any traditional RPG party: You're a group of individuals moving as a unit, a team. You'll have decisions to make together (like do we go right, or left?), but you'll all have your own inventory, gold stash, and personal choices to make.

That's the big picture, but here are more granular Slay the Spire 2 multiplayer rules:

Battle mechanics: Enemies, Energy, and rewards

• Enemy stats scale and change based on your party size
• Enemy attacks hit the entire party
• Energy is not shared between players; everyone has their own pool
• Players can spend their Energy at any time during the party's turn
• All players must select 'End Turn' for the match to continue
• On death, players are revived after the battle if the party wins
• Loot is (relics, items, gold, cards) not shared; everyone gets their own
• Special multiplayer cards also appear while playing in co-op

Map mechanics: Ancients, relics, and events

• Everyone has their own, separate inventory for relics, items, cards, and gold
• Players can agree on the same path, or disagree and let RNG decide
• Ancients give every player their own random options and let them choose
• Random events also let players make different choices with different outcomes
• Campfires add the option to Mend (restore 30% of one ally's HP)
• The Shopkeeper offers different items, cards, and prices to each player
• Treasure Chests have one reward per player; players pick which they want
  • If two players pick the same reward, RNG decides who gets what

How does Ascension work in Slay the Spire 2 multiplayer?

Slay the Spire 2's multiplayer Ascension progression is separate from any additional modifiers you've unlocked per character in singleplayer. You'll have to start from scratch, but unlocking Ascension levels in multiplayer works the same way: Beat all three acts (but in a team of 2-4).

Multiplayer Ascension

• Singleplayer and multiplayer Ascension levels are independent systems
• Multiplayer Ascension levels can be earned with separate groups
• Ascension levels are also unlocked for all characters in multiplayer
• The game uses the Ascension level of the lowest player in the party
  • If you want to play at Ascension Level 4, everyone must unlock it

Slay the Spire 2 was an immediate success, delivering a top-selling launch day performance. But as more data emerges, it's become increasingly clear that Slay the Spire 2's launch is a historic record-setter. According to Manu Rosier, director of market intelligence at Newzoo, PC Gamer's official data partner, StS 2 is the best-performing deckbuilder of all time—and it's leading by a massive margin.

Steam peak concurrent users, while a flawed metric for a game's ongoing health, provide the clearest image of how Slay the Spire 2 is separated from other card game heavy hitters by orders of magnitude. Balatro peaked at 44,000 concurrent users in January 2025, Slay the Spire 1 at 57,000 in December 2025, and Monster Train 2 at 18,500 shortly after its May 2025 launch. Three days after its early access launch, Slay the Spire 2 peaked at 575,000 concurrents.

"That is more than 13 times Balatro's peak, and this is a $24.99 paid Early Access title with no console version yet. Mega Crit confirmed 3 million copies sold in the first week. At that price point, that implies roughly $75M gross before Valve's cut," Newzoo analysts told PC Gamer.

Meanwhile, Newzoo's proprietary tracking of active users across PC and console shows Balatro leading other deckbuilders and card battlers with approximately 1.76 million monthly active users between January 2025 and February 2026. Early daily active user figures for Slay the Spire 2, however, "suggest it will lead the category by a substantial margin."

With only a Steam player base to work with, Slay the Spire 2 "averaged 1.08 million users per day across the first 11 days with no sign of decay" according to Newzoo data.

"On concurrent players and first-week sales, this is the best-performing deckbuilder on record," Newzoo says.

Newzoo attributes Slay the Spire 2's unprecedented launch to a number of factors—chief among them being the fact that it benefited from seven years of player anticipation. Slay the Spire "had no sequel, no spin-off, no dilution," which meant "every player who finished StS1 and wanted more was still waiting, with nowhere else to go."

And there were likely more of those players than anyone had ever realized. Newzoo notes that, as a purely solo game, StS1 "does not generate drama, discourse, or content creator spectacle proportional to its actual installed base." Collective hype is hard to quantify from a population of players content with quietly churning through dozens of hours of ascension runs.

Slay the Spire 2 is an interesting comparison to Silksong, which had already left a broad cultural footprint before it launched with roughly 2.4 million monthly active users on PC. "StS2, with a fraction of the noise, is tracking close to that," Newzoo said.

Mega Crit's reputation as a developer likely played a role, too. StS1 earned a high level of consumer trust: Its early access wasn't weighed down with microtransaction cruft, season passes, or development scandals, and Mega Crit was clear that players could expect the same with the sequel—despite whatever threats of cosmetic consumerism those players might make.

"In a market fatigued by monetization friction, that is a meaningful conversion driver," Newzoo said.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano said he suspects that StS2 has "broken past obscurity," and its reputation is drawing in challenge-oriented players who wouldn't typically choose a roguelike deckbuilder.

"As a very competitive person in videogames, I feel like if somebody says a game is hard, no matter what genre it is—this racing game has very interesting competitive chops, or there's all these cool records and ways to creatively express yourself in this driving game—I'd be interested, even though I don't really play racing games at all," Yano said. "I think we're starting to attract a different type of player."

The Peggle series may have long been lost to the free-to-play maelstrom that is mobile gaming, but PC gamers jonesing for a fantastical pachinko fix can at least console themselves with Peglin. The game takes the ball-bouncing, peg-busting fundamentals of Peggle, then smashes it together with a fantasy roguelike where a cute wee goblin batters enemies based on your pachinko performance.

Peglin released into Steam early access in 2022, hitting 1.0 two years later. It seemed like a neat and tidy project, garnering 'Very Positive' Steam reviews and seemingly shifting a fair old number of copies. But it turns out that developer Red Nexus Games wasn't done with Peglin. 18 months on from Peglin's launch, Red Nexus Games just fired an unexpectedly meaty update into the pachinko roguelike's peg hole.

"It's been a long time coming, but here's Peglin 2.0!" Red Nexus Games announced out of the blue in a Steam post, revealing that a whole new act has been bolted on to the end of your goblin's adventure. "Act 4 features both powerful new enemies and the chance to really make the finishing touches on your awesome Peglin run, so long as you survive the challenges required to get there."

The addition of Act 4 also has repercussions for your experience across the game. For starters, Red Nexus Games has added a second path for unlocking new playable classes. Alongside unlocking a class instantly via pulling off specific achievements, players can also work toward new classes over time. The aim, Red Nexus says, is to make progression more consistent overall.

On top of this, hitting Act 4 will also unlock a new type of item that leads to optional challenges for players to embark upon. Red Nexus is cryptic about what these challenges are, but states they are "only available for one act" while players who take them on "might just find their way to greater depths than ever before."

More broadly, the update adds new music and new achievements for act 4, several new relics to experiment with, and improved load times and battle framerates. Most importantly of all, it renames several status effects to "include a pun", thus automatically raising my opinion of it.

To coincide with the update, Peglin is also currently on a 40% discount, bringing the price down to $12 (£10). That discount ends March 26.

Yesterday, Slay the Spire 2 developer Mega Crit pushed its "first BIG post-launch patch" to the game's opt-in beta branch, giving players a chance to test the update's changes ahead of their eventual implementation on the main branch. The beta patch brought "a huge balance pass," retuning enemies, artifacts, and both the costs and effects of a number of cards from each StS 2 character—and in doing so, it unleashed a shitstorm.

It's been less than a day since the beta patch was deployed, and in that time, Slay the Spire 2 has received over 9,000 negative reviews on Steam from players outraged over a patch that hasn't even gone live on the game's main branch.

Drawing the most ire is a change the patch made to the Silent's Prepared card, a zero-cost skill that previously allowed the player to discard one card and draw a replacement. If your current hand won't get you out of a tough spot, Prepared might give you the tool you need.

The version 0.100.0 nerf changes Prepared to Prepare, which now costs one energy and discards two cards to gain two energy on your next turn. It's a pretty drastic change for Silent players, and alongside other nerfs and enemy buffs—like a surprisingly brutal new ability for the Doormaker—it's being perceived by critical players as continuing the sequel's habit of ramping up the dangers faced in a run while providing fewer options to escape them.

But why, when Slay the Spire 2 has both an in-game feedback feature and an official Discord with a feedback channel, have players instead opted for the nuclear option of expressing their disapproval with a review bombing campaign?

Well, while internet discourse doesn't need much of an excuse to turn toxic, there are some nuances that are likely contributing to the brigading: If you check the languages of the Slay the Spire 2 review activity from the last 24 hours, you'll find that players using Simplified Chinese have by far been leaving the most negative reviews.

While I can't speak to whether all those reviews are being left in good faith, it's worth noting that Steam users in China don't have another option for providing feedback through Steam itself, because community features are blocked on the Chinese version of Steam. That includes Steam discussion forums, which—while not exactly a venue for the most enlightened dialogue—are an option some of those users might have chosen if they'd been able.

Discord, too, is unusable in China, which makes the Slay the Spire 2 server's feedback channel inaccessible. Without circumventing the country's online platform restrictions through a VPN, Chinese players have two immediate options for expressing their frustrations with a beta patch: They can use the in-game option to leave feedback, which they might expect will suffer from the language barrier between them and the small Western studio, or they can leave negative Steam reviews that they know will at least get noticed.

Because Slay the Spire 2 is too new to have a separate "recent reviews" highlight on its Steam page, its overall score among English-speaking reviewers remains "overwhelmingly positive" at 96%. Switching languages to Simplified Chinese reveals the extent of the impact: out of some 31,000 reviews, its rating is down to "mixed" at 63% positive. Generally, review bombing is a tactic prone to dysfunction, but given the context in this case, I'm not surprised to see it.

The stream of post-launch patches for Mewgenics has been pretty constant since its release last month. With a game this big and full of overlapping systems, unleashing it on the general public was always going to reveal an explosion of bugs and issues, and it seems like developers Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel have been busy trying to catch them all.

The latest patch, 1.0.20870, is largely just more of the usual bug fixes and tweaks, but does have the honour of including one of the best patch notes of all time: "Fixed case where a non-binary cat with dwarfism would crash the game if playing in Brazilian Portugese [sic]."

According to Glaiel's recent posts on X, the crash was to do with the naming format. Cats with dwarfism get the modifier 'Little' added to their name, and in a language like Portuguese that's a gendered word, requiring variants for male and female cats. With no variant set for cats with the '?' gender, the game couldn't name them and (I believe this is the technical term) had a tantrum.

(Probably worth noting here that "non-binary" may be a questionable term to describe ?-gendered cats—given they can successfully breed with both male and female cats, it's probably more accurate to describe them as a sort of sci-fi version of intersex. But that's about as far as I'm willing to dig into the technicalities of cat gender expression, and I think we can probably forgive Glaiel the shorthand here.)

The other standout change in the patch is the addition of some limitations on which spells the miniboss Arthur can generate with his Metronome ability. Previously, bad RNG could lead to him throwing out attacks like Split the Atom (50 instant damage to all your cats) or We Are One (soul linking everyone in the battle, making it almost impossible to kill him without killing all your own cats at the same time) that could completely derail a run. Now, some of the worst offenders have been sensibly trimmed, making him a lot less risky to run into.

Certain abilities that self-damage your cat—including Itch and Chonkwalk—also now correctly count as such, where before the HP was simply deducted. That's important because it should mean they now trigger various synergies based around taking damage, such as the Fighter passives Dumb Muscle and Hulk Up, which opens up a lot of fun possibilities.

Beyond that, it's all bug fixes—though scrolling down the list, you're likely to find at least one that's troubled you on a run, so it's great to see them smoothed out.

For more fun with bizarre patch notes, why not give our 2025 patch note quiz a try below?

I've been enjoying Slay the Spire 2, even if I agree with PCG's Robin Valentine that it sometimes feels like more of a remake than a sequel. But there's plenty of time for that to change: the game has only just launched in early access, and developer Mega Crit says it expects to spend one to two years building it out before a full release. Nevertheless it's already a huge hit, selling over three million copies in the first week.

I had this little itch in my brain when I was looking through the game's credits and saw the Godot logo, and then the reason why hit me: the Unity debacle of 2023, which saw Mega Crit switch engines to Godot after two years of development. I don't even think I'd heard of Godot until this.

A quick refresher: Unity attempted to attach a flat per-install fee to games that use its engine, and did so by scrapping all its existing deals and making the change retroactive. It also added a "runtime fee" that would apply to games that pass certain installation and revenue thresholds. There were all sorts of other problems, and developers showed a remarkable degree of (*coughs*) unity in coming out with public statements condemning the change, with many saying they were done with Unity entirely.

Unity initially attempted to stand firm, but was soon enough forced into a partial U-turn. And it only took a few weeks before then-CEO John Riccitiello was forced to 'retire' from his various senior roles, including president, chief executive officer, chairman and a member of the company's board of directors.

Unity remains a hugely popular engine, and CEO Matthew Bromberg has done a decent job of righting the ship, but Slay the Spire 2 shows just how much damage the whole debacle caused the company. At the time Mega Crit hadn't yet announced Slay the Spire 2, but issued this statement:

"The Mega Crit team has been hard at work these past 2+ years on a new game. But unlike with Slay the Spire, the engine we have been developing it in is Unity.

"Despite the immense amount of time and effort our team has already poured into development on our new title, we will be migrating to a new engine unless the changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place.

"We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up."

Even though Unity would end up reversing the changes, it did so in a piecemeal fashion that was never going to satisfy developers, and many ended up leaving the engine behind permanently. In Mega Crit's case that was in favour of Godot, which is offered under the MIT license, and is free to use "for any purpose."

Mega Crit chose Godot after an internal three week game jam that ended up producing a fun little deck-battler called Dancing Duellists, which is a nice palate-cleanser if you're all Slayed out: it's available for free on Windows, Mac and Linux. Mega Crit says anyone who wants to make a donation should direct it towards the Godot engine's development fund: Mega Crit is one of its major sponsors, as is Terraria developer Re-Logic.

It's a small but telling piece of recent industry history: the entire thing took maybe a month to play out in the Autumn of 2023, but by the end of it Unity's CEO was gone, the company was backtracking as fast as it possibly could, and all the goodwill it had built up among indie developers over many years was gone. Many of the developers were soon gone too.

Almost three years later, we're seeing Mega Crit prove you can build one of the year's breakout hits with Godot: and you don't imagine they'll be looking back at Unity anytime soon. Among the many criticisms of Unity's attempted changes were that they simply represented a "cash grab" on what it thought was a captive audience. As Slay the Spire 2 shows, in the long run such things can cost you.

Oh and one other thing I noticed in the credits. The lead engineer on Slay the Spire 2 is called Jake Card. Nominative determinism in action or what?