It's all a bit Event Horizon meets Aliens in the demo for this sci-fi horror roguelike

Keep that shotgun close, kids, because Quasimorphosis is an upcoming roguelike survival horror game that blends tactical gun combat with space station dungeon exploration. Set in a post-cyberpunk corporate future, it's the kind of world you wouldn't want to have kids in: especially now that someone's discovered how to summon eldritch demons and all that.

It was first released as a complete, finished roguelike proof of concept earlier this year—for free. That's called Quasimorphosis: Exordium, and it's still free, but development team MgnmScrptmDvs have teamed up with HypeTrain Digital to publish a fuller version of their game.

In it, you'll take control of a private military contractor on the trail of dark secrets and "the unforgivable things humanity has committed in the deep, dark depths of space." That'll involve "creatures from a parallel dimension" that are a "threat to all life." Classic.

It's a cool sounding concept, where you'll travel around the solar system in your PMC's ship discovering things like "planetary bases, secret labs, spaceship wreckage, and other points of interest" in order to get sweet loot: new guns, new tech, new biological augmentations. Those bases are part of a politics system among corporations, where you need to balance how much the big dogs like you with your missions.

What's neat is that although it's a roguelike with dangerously high stakes and randomized hits, the tactical battles are balanced against the ability to copy your operatives' memories to a disk. Therefore, valuable characters, and their experience, can be recovered to clone bodies.

There are tantalizing hints at other systems, like ever-shifting battlefields and character specializations. You can find some of that in the demo slash proof of concept slash first game, Exordium. We'll see more when the proper Quasimorphosis releases "soon."

You can find the free game slash demo, Quasimorphosis: Exordium on Steam, and you can find the page for the sequel slash expanded release under the relatively simpler name Quasimorphosis.

If you feel like you've seen something similar before, that's because you kind of have. Jupiter Hell is a much simpler roguelike that mimics Doom rather than the complex structure Quasimorphosis is going for.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.