You fight through a castle that rearranges itself each time you play, picking up new weapons and defensive tools along the way and losing most of them if you die. Combat is quick, with dodging and mixing melee weapons against different enemy types. Every run starts you back near the beginning, so it suits people who enjoy replaying short stretches over and over more than a single long story.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Why it lands
Motion Twin nailed the roguelike-metroidvania hybrid so well that it's become the reference point everyone else gets compared to. Years later it still feels fresh thanks to relentless free content.
How it plays
Every run rewards aggressive, flowing combat, with weapon variety wide enough that no two loadouts play the same. Death never feels cheap, just like an invitation to try something different.
Style and score
The pixel art has real bite to it, all fluid animation and gruesome enemy design, and it moves at a clean pace on Switch even during hectic fights. Sound design punches hard.
Who it's for
With years of updates and paid expansions still rolling in, there's essentially no ceiling on content. An easy pick for anyone who likes their difficulty steep but never unfair.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You wake up as a headless blob of goo animating a fallen prisoner's body in a dungeon that rearranges itself every time you die, holding whatever starting weapon the game gives you. You move with the left stick, attack with face buttons, and dodge roll out of danger, picking up new weapons and shields scattered through rooms as you fight your way toward each level's exit. Every run starts from the same cell, but the layout of rooms, the enemies you meet, and the gear you find are shuffled fresh each time, so memorizing a level layout never becomes the answer.
Your main goal each run is simply to survive as far as possible, since dying sends you back to the start with only permanent unlocks called blueprints to show for it, which let new weapon types start appearing in future runs. A single run to the end can take an hour or more for a skilled player, though most early attempts end well before that, and you'll spend a lot of sessions slowly chipping away at the same handful of tough areas. Later stages introduce harder enemies and optional difficulty modifiers you can turn on once you've proven you can handle the base game.
The combat itself feels quick and responsive, and finding an unexpectedly good pair of weapons partway through a run is one of the best feelings the game offers. The repetition of starting over from scratch will frustrate players who want to see a story unfold steadily rather than earn progress in small permanent upgrades. If you enjoy tense action where every run is different and getting better really is about your own skill improving, this is one of the sharpest examples of the genre.