I’ve been on a big roguelike kick lately (well, more than usual).

These are largely three subgenres — 2D bullet heavens, twin-stick dungeon crawlers, and roguelike deckbuilders. These are the three genders, actually.

These are gameplay-first, not narrative, largely because I’ve been very, very tired but also because sometimes you just want games to be fun.

Inside: Dogpile, Army of Ruin, Pesticide Not Required, Machick, DunHero, Juicy Realm

This is an aside, but I’m really over modern 3D games, especially fantasy ones. The push for ‘realism’ has created hordes of games in greyscale and sepia with little if any sense of the relationship between visuals and storytelling, and as such no apparently art direction. “Make it look gritty” is apparently the beginning and end of the attention paid to everything from framing to color theory. Art is stupid, model a whole bunch of individual hairs, that’s the same thing as style, right? Just looking at modern 3D games makes me bored.

Anyway, that’s all the yelling at clouds, I promise.

Dogpile
(Studio Folly, Toot Games 2025)

This game had no right to be as good as it was.

I got this game because pups, and it said it was a roguelike deckbuilder, so why not. The premise is that you have a tretris-style game area you drop dogs into. The dogs are numbered Ace-King, and when two dogs of the same size touch, they merge up into a higher-number dog. You can purchse new dogs as well as permanent modifiers at the shop, and the goal is to get a King in the play area.

This was actually a really clever, well-made and interesting roguelike deckbuilder, so much so I’d call it a general rec for fans of the genre. I was surprised as how strategic it was and how much strategizing it required, as well as how many different possibilities there were for successful builds. There are more than a dozen ‘decks’ you can play with with different sets of rules and modifiers, and some of them are fiendishly difficult (oh man, it took forever to beat the random one, but it was so satisfying when I did!).

And of course, the art is incredible. Every time I got to see a new dog I’d go “Ha!” out loud. Incredibly, the dev just released an enormous update about a week ago that includes new traits, tags, decks, AND a whole new suite of dogs with different shapes and physics. It’s an enormous free update and I hope it means they’re doing well because this is a great game.

Army of Ruin
(Milkstone Studios, 2023)

Sometimes you play a game that just makes you go, “These people really understand game design.” Army of Ruin is one of those.

The central premise of this game seems to have been, “What if Vampire Survivors had every single quality-of-life update you could possibly imagine?” Unlike almost every other VS clone I’ve played, this is a VS clone that’s better than the original pretty much across the board. The UI is better, the menus are clearer, everything is beautifully organized, there are tooltips everywhere, it’s great.

But the real treasure here is just how deliberately and well-designed all the weapons and classes are. This game was clearly playtested to hell and back, and every single weapon was meaningfully different and interesting, every class had bespoke stat growth, an ult, and certain buffs and debuffs. Even the classes that were the same type were meaningfully different from each other, and they all played in unique ways. Every one of the five levels had unique enemies and mechanics, and they all felt meaningfully different. It was honestly so impressive. This is a developer that understands gameplay.

I absolutely loved this game. I enjoyed it so much not only did I get all the achievements, I kept going and completed everything there was to complete in it, and then when there was nothing left to do I was so sad to put it down. It’s just a fun, well-made game, and a great entrypoint into the genre if you’re not sure if you’ll like it.

My one single complaint was that it’s one of very few 3D games in the genre, and I kind of wish it hadn’t been — it caused the SteamDeck to run insanely hot and Mr Act said the Switch struggled with it. I never encountered any lag or stutters, but man the SteamDeck sounded like a rocket at times. I’m not sure the 3D added anything, and it would have been nice to have it be easier on the hardware. But this is a real nitpick.

Pesticide Not Required
(Jampacked Games, 2024)

This was the game that started me down the path of bullet heavens — it was a genre I was aware of but didn’t really grab me, but this game pulled me in with the cute art and farm elements, and kept me with incredible gameplay and really unique mechanics. This and Army of Ruin were the first games in the genre I played, and unfortunately I may have played the two best ones first. Alas. I had this same problem with Hollow Knight and metroidvanias.

In PNR, you are a smol froggie, and your goal is to protect your farmstead from insect invasion. You do this by farming, mining, and fishing to gain exp, and then growing weapon plants to use as attacks and upgrades. You can also buy or earn farm animals who all help with different farm tasks.

The farming mechanics are really, really well-implemented, and make the game very unique in the genre. Choosing whether to focus on farming, mining,or fishing or whether to be a generalist completely shapes your strategy in the run, from which crops you plant to which animals you recruit, and each of the 25ish frogs genuinely requires a different playstyle. The weapons all have their plusses and minuses (I was entertained to find one of the big guides and I really disagreed on what the best weapons were, a great sign for the gameplay), and while certain frogs can aim at certain goals better than others, all of them have their moments, even the more gimmicky ones like James Pond.

The game was honestly just a blast. I had runs where I just eked out a win, but the ones where you’d absolutely go off for the last few waves were so satisfying. I’ve been walking around the house lovingly talking about how much fun “the frog game” was for weeks now; I’m excited to see what this dev does next, because they have a real understanding of gameplay design.

Machick
(DeadPixel, 2024)

This is a really competently made little game. If you’re looking for a bite-sized Survivors experience, I totally recommend this. I had fun with it, and finished everything in about 6 hours.

You are a magic chicken (ma-chick) with a wand who needs to defend their home from the frog scourge. The game brings two things to the table: first, the ability to modify your base attack by customizing your magic wand. This was a clever little system and I enjoyed toying around with it; while in some cases expensive parts = better, there was also room for playstyle customization (eg, I don’t think any of the elements were really inherently superior), and it was really satisfying to lose a run, make an upgrade to the wand, and go back in and beat it. The focus on modifying your main attack for progress meant runs really felt in your hands; it also helped mitigate the small array of available weapons. Especially once you hit the 20 minute levels, you’re going to be grabbing every weapon — though personally I liked the trial-and-error of seeing which order I wanted to grab things in, what I wanted to pour levels into versus what can wait, etc. The wand was a neat little system and added a lot to the basic VS gameplay.

The other thing it did I really liked was having level time scale with difficulty. So the first level is 10 minutes, then 15, 20, 30, and the last one is endless. Frankly I think more VS games should adopt this system (Army of Ruin also had it) — one of my few complaints about VS was that you could get very ‘stuck’ on levels, especially the first one, and having to live 30 minutes when you could barely get past 10 at the beginning could be pretty daunting. This way your beginning runs don’t feel so futile, and you get the satisfaction of beating a boss and clearing something much earlier, and the scale up is satisfying instead of every level being the same in terms of goal. Plus, frankly, as a person with a life, having to commit 30 minutes minimum to every run kind of sucks.

My one complaint is the 100 wand achievement — I think I got like 15 naturally through clearing everything else, 50 is a stupid grind and 100 is bonkers, especially since the minigame can’t be automated easily.

But on the whole this was a cute entry into the genre and I’m definitely going to grab the sequel.

DunHero
(Dev Kacper, 2025)

Sometimes a game manages to distill a genre down to the simple components that make it fun, and that was DunHero for me. This game actually started me off on my twin-stick shooter/bullet heaven kick. Does it do anything groundbbreaking? Nope. Is it fun? Hell yeah. It just does what it does well.

One thing that is on the more unique side is that DunHero doesn’t use discreet rooms; each level is an open map with topography that produces vague room-like areas but that you can explore however you want. I really liked this, and I wish more games in this genre did that. In addition to giving it an exploration vibe, it also meant you could figure out how to approach mobs instead of them just being auto-aggro’d when you enter a room. I definitely had runs where I had a crappy build that I pushed through by strafing enemies and hitting them through walls with auras. I like when games give you the choice to do stupid things like that.

I liked the variety of classes, but it did have the issue of like, here are your starting classes and you can use them to unlock the better versions. There wasn’t really much of a reason to go back to a class once you’d gotten the “better” one; I would have enjoyed some kind of reward, even like, a statue in town, for clearing a class, and then something big for getting a win with everyone. Mostly I wanted an excuse to keep going after seeing everything, lol.

I also really enjoyed Hell Mode. The original game was medium-ish difficulty, the heat modifiers were nice, but trying to clear Hell Mode was a real challenge and I had a lot of fun slowly figuring out the best approach and then finally getting there.

Juicy Realm
(Space Can, 2018)

I’m always so grateful for games with actual art direction. Juicy Realm is a great looking game, its cartoony style perfectly complementing its gonzo plot about an evil extraterrestrial tree seed falling on earth and causing all fruit to come alive and wage war on humanity. You must fight your way through heavily-armed apples, pears, and avocados in order to destroy the tree and turn all the fruit back into fruit. Tonewise it reminded me a lot of Unholy Heights — it knows exactly what it is and it leans as far into it as it can.

This game is pretty fun, and its relatively small dungeon — four main floors plus a small final boss realm — makes it great for short playthroughs. The 10 characters all feel very different, and some of their powers are pretty off-the-wall, like the girl who can summon a mech suit and the one who can dual wield. I liked the variety and the balancing, and also liked that the character upgrades could be small but also be juuust enough to push you meanigfully forward.

I also enjoyed the logbook and variety of very practical achievements as some extrinsic motivators (though I wish there weren’t co-op ones…). I always felt like I knew what I was trying to accomplish, which is something a surprising number of these games really lack.

I do think there were too many weapons. Really there were too many types of individual weapons — we didn’t need multiple wands, multiple shotguns, multiple SMGs. This matters because the  weapon you roll can make or break your run, and they’re not easy to come by, so if you have a run where you only roll one of the too-many ‘joke’ weapons you’re just kind of screwed. There were something like 90, and I think that number honestly could have been halved and still felt like it offered a ton of variety, especially since some of the weapon effects were really clever and unique, like the trophy, the keyboard, and the frog. But there were also ones like the wands where the difference was really cosmetic, and having three just meant you were 3x as likely to get something useless. I think if they’d limited themselves to one of each type, maybe two for more useful types, if would have made things feel a bit more balanced. This was more of an issue on early runs, before your starting weapon is maxxed out (though some starting weapons are so shit, like the panda’s, that your entire run always depended on rolling a good weapon at some point, and it made a couple of the classes really miserable to play).

I liked the difficulty options, and enjoyed the way each additional level of stars felt like it forced me to recalibrate and play a bit differently; it felt like meaningful changes in the way the game worked and not just “enemies now have a billion hp, sucks to be you” like these games sometimes do.

I also actually briefly played it coop, and it was nicely chaotic and a good time.

On the whole, while I don’t think this is a game that’s going to convert anyone to the genre, it’s a standout to me, way above other small games in the genre like AK-xolotl, Rogue Labyrinth, or Blazing Beaks.