Risk of Rain 2's Hallowed Concepts DLC is another hit for one of the best roguelikes around. Years after a shaky start, Gearbox seems to be doing a much better job with the genre icon.

The Borderlands maker bought Risk of Rain 2 back in 2022, as the original developers soon went to work at Valve. The beloved roguelike then found itself in troubled waters. Gearbox's first major update to the game post-buyout, Seekers of the Storm, was hugely divisive with series fans, but the publisher has since turned things around with last year's Alloyed Collective and this week's Hallowed Concepts.

Risk of Rain 2's newest expansion is already a hit on Steam, with 84% of user reviews giving it the thumbs up on the platform.

"Hallowed Concepts blows every other DLC out of the water," one positive review reads. "The DLC is so fresh and does so much to reinvigorate the lategame that it feels like the devs read my mind… There's so much intentional and clever design in how these new systems are implemented and overlay themselves on top of the core game. So much of the new content is geared towards making the lategame matter again… It's lovely. Truly."

"Easily the best DLC from the new team. Seekers was fine after it got patched from launch, Alloyed Collective was also fine, but this blows the others out of the water. I'd say it's on-par with Void. Not to mention the free update it came with was huge, adding 4 new skills and challenges for them (even if Acrid's is cruel). Good job," another says.

Hallowed Concept isn't totally flawless, however. The negative reviews that do exist draw attention to the expansion's bugs, and not the creepy crawly kind. "Great expansion, fun items and bosses, but in one day, two runs died to bosses spawning outside of the map and becoming impossible to attack, until that's fixed I cannot recommend this expansion, but otherwise amazing," a negative review says.

Regardless, it's a good step forward for the roguelike icon.

Risk of Rain 2, now under Borderlands house Gearbox, vows to take "full responsibility" for AI art it calls a "mistake" – "We are sending the designer to the Void Fields as punishment"

Astral Ascent, the highly acclaimed indie action roguelite from 2023, has received the rare blessing that is a crossover with Sandfall Interactive's 2025 GOTY sweep, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Of course, by rare I mean singular, as there's yet to be any actual game content featuring characters or world elements from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 until now.

Announced in a Steam blog, Astral Ascent's Expedition 33: For Those Who Come After update is live now and free for all players, with the only requirement being completion of the main quest on base difficulty. Once you've got the update downloaded, you'll want to pop a seat at the new Campfire room, because you'll find some of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's best characters waiting there as special, themed summons.

Gustave is a support-type companion who heals you and gives you attack buffs, but he also has "a devastating" attack that charges up every time he's summoned. Maelle fights alongside you using a stance determined by your HP, shifting from attack to defense and unleashing a "powerful attack" that unlocks when she maintains the same stance for a while. Sciel is a card-based battler with mana regen, a basic strike attack, and a "powerful attack," each triggered under different conditions.

Meanwhile, Lune is an elemental spellcaster who syncs up with your own spell-using habits, and as is starting to become a pattern, she gets her own "powerful spell" when you summon her "enough times." Verso ranks up every time you hit an enemy and drops a rank with every hit you take, starting with an attack penalty and then building to a "massive attack bonus" as he ranks up. Finally, Monocco draws a random card from a set of five and unleashes a "powerful monster summon" based on the card he pulls.

There are also three new Expedition 33-themed rooms in Astral Ascent's crossover update: the aforementioned Campfire, the Lumière, where you square off with Petank and the Mimes with Lumière in the background, and the Gestral Village, where you face off against Golgra. Developer Hibernian Workshop says these rooms appear randomly before the final boss of each run, and you'll have the chance to pick between the Expedition 33-themed bosses or the usual Andromeda Bar, "but choose fast, it won't come back this run," warns the dev.

"We've wanted to do this for a long time. Getting to work with Sandfall Interactive on this crossover has been one of the best experiences we've had making Astral Ascent," the Astral Ascent team says in a statement. "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game we fell in love with, like so many of you did, and this update is our way of paying tribute to it. Our biggest challenge was translating this world into our own pixel art, staying true to what makes these places feel alive while making them ours."

Speaking of crossovers, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 "broke" T-Pain with its "too sad" intro: "It gets worse? Absolutely not"

Supergiant Games is known for creating original games and original worlds, from the frontierpunk action of Bastion to the contemplative sci-fi tactics of Transistor and the doomed sporting conflicts of Pyre. But with a cast of lovable, lustable takes on mythic Greek figures and arguably the greatest roguelike action ever conceived, Hades turned out to be their biggest hit yet. So making a follow-up in Hades 2 was only natural, right?

While making a sequel to Hades might've been the smart business decision, Supergiant was far more interested in making sure their creative juices were still flowing. As the devs themselves explain in a new Noclip documentary running down Hades 2's development history, the sequel wasn't set in stone.

With each new project, Supergiant takes a step back to "think about how we feel about the last game," studio director Amir Rao explains. "What kind of lessons did we take from it and how did we feel about the original game? We did our process where we considered lots of projects and I actually, at the beginning of that process, thought we almost certainly would not make a sequel to Hades."

Art director Jen Zee and others on the team saw the possibilities that a Hades sequel could provide, though. "We still have enthusiasm for this world that we've been exploring," Zee says. "The Greek pantheon is so vast. It just felt like, 'Oh, there's this beautiful orchard and there's so much fruit left on the trees. Like, we should maybe consider harvesting.'"

In fact, the challenge of following up Hades was part of the appeal of doing a direct sequel. "We approach sequels with a fair amount of skepticism because we do love exploring new worlds and we've never done it before," Zee explains. "I would say that was actually one of the appeals of making a sequel, as well – because we'd never done it before. We're real thrillsekers here. We're like, 'What if we did a sequel? No one would expect that.'"

Every dev who speaks in the documentary emphasizes the creative challenges of building the sequel as the primary motivation to make Hades 2, not the business benefits. "If making the sequel is the right financial decision, we have made the dumb decision many times in a row," as Rao puts it.

"Certainly the success factors in," Rao admits, "but with the same success comes the expectations, right? For us, we always have to ask ourselves, 'Are we ready for this?' Even if it was the right decision, we had to creatively get ourselves to a place of excitement because otherwise it's just a non-starter for the studio."

No prizes for guessing what tops our list of the best roguelike games.

Despite Palworld's triumphant 1.0 launch this year, John Buckley, head of publishing at Pocketpair, says there's another, much lower profile indie game contending for the category's top spot this year.

"100% Combolands. I strongly recommend you guys check it out on Steam, even if you think you won't like it," Buckley wrote on Twitter of his new indie obsession. "I haven't played a game more addictive since Balatro. Perhaps the best indie of the year in my opinion! Simply a 10/10!"

Combolands is described on its Steam page as "a mini citybuilding roguelike" where you "place buildings, stack combos, and master deep strategy in short bursts to create a tiny thriving metropolis!" The gameplay loop involves placing buildings to open up new synergies and "cascading combos," unlocking new guilds with distinct advantages and disadvantages as you go, and hopefully transforming your fledgling settlement into a bustling economy.

Indie developer Crux Games, a tiny team made up of just two people, says the mash-up of roguelike, deckbuilder, and roguelike conventions culminates in "strategic depth and a 'number-go-up' rush in satisfying 30 minute bursts." And satisfying it is, according to not only Buckley, but hundreds of positive Steam reviews. As of the time of writing, 97% of Combolands reviews on Steam are positive, awarding the game the coveted 'Overwhelmingly Positive' rating.

Of course, despite my framing Combolands as a Palworld competitor in the indie space earlier in this story, that really isn't a fair comparison at all. As stated, Crux Games is a two-person team while Pocketpair is an established developer and publisher with about 100 employees according to Street Insider. Still, it's always good to see independent game developers support each other, and although I'm generally allergic to roguelikes and deckbuilders, Buckley's emphatic recommendation and appeal to genre skeptics like me make me want to give Combolands a shot.

Guillermo del Toro says "please, I beg you," make a less roguelike-y version of Dead Cells so "elderly players" can actually get through it

October 14, 2026: I had a look for new Shape of Dreams codes and added a brand-new promo for an emote pack!

With these Shape of Dreams codes, you can get some new and exclusive cosmetics for your travelers. While they don't provide any practical value, some of the skins and charms available make a huge difference to the overall look of your character. Plus, if you're trying to unlock everything in this vast roguelike game, you'll need to add these to your list.

While some cosmetics, like charms, can be equipped to any character, others are specific to certain Travelers, some of whom you may still need to unlock. Luckily, you can redeem any of these Shape of Dreams codes whenever you see them, and your rewards will be waiting for you should you unlock the relevant character in the future.

All Shape of Dreams codes

These are the Shape of Dreams codes you can redeem in-game right now:

• HOLODREAMS - Hololive Collaboration Emote Pack new!
• ABSOLUTEYUBAR - Midsummer Night's Dream Yubar Legendary Costume

Currently, the only Shape of Dreams promo is for the Midsummer Night's Dream costume for Yubar, a Traveler option who is not unlocked by default. If you want to use this skin, you'll have to unlock Yubar by collecting 450 Dream Dust first, then apply the cosmetic. Don't worry about redeeming the code before you've unlocked the character, though, as it'll be waiting for you when you do.

How to redeem Shape of Dreams codes

You can redeem Shape of Dreams codes from the game's main menu by selecting the Extras option, followed by the Redeem Gift Code button on the next page. Here, enter a code as it appears above, then click on Confirm to claim your code.

Expired Shape of Dreams codes

• 500KDREAMS - Trinket of Nobility
• LUNARNEWYEAR2026 - Wealth Ornament

Since the game was released on PC a year before arriving on console, there are already some expired codes. This means valid promos are also likely to expire soon, so redeem Shape of Dreams codes as soon as possible.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Shape of Dreams, probably the closest any roguelike has come to the Risk of Rain experience, is coming to PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch 2 thanks to console ports shadowdropped during today's Xbox Tokyo Game Show showcase.

Billed as an action roguelike with combat inspired by MOBAs, Shape of Dreams launched on Steam last September and quickly became one of the biggest success stories for Neowiz, best known as the creator of Lies of P and publisher of other indie hits like DJMax Respect 5, Sanabi, and Skul: The Hero Slayer. (The Lies of P team itself has rebranded as Studio Nough, and seems to be working on a sequel called Wonders of O.)

Now one year old, Shape of Dreams is coming to consoles with full crossplay support just in time for an anniversary update packing a new playable character – the ice leviathan Cetus – as well as additional story content and new options for existing characters. All platforms will get the new content simultaneously.

Shape of Dreams has sold over 1.5 million copies, plays well with a controller, and always gave me a comfy Diablo vibe, so it seemed destined for a multiplatform release. I was smitten from its very first Steam demo release, which also ended up becoming much bigger than the creators anticipated.

The similarities between Shape of Dreams and Risk of Rain, which sits near the top of our list of best roguelikes, are no coincidence, as members of the dev team were heavily inspired by the series before and during development. But the overlap runs so deep that it almost feels like fate: like Risk of Rain, Shape of Dreams was made by two college kids who weren't expecting to stumble into a very successful career. Coincidentally, I've also interviewed both them and Risk of Rain makers Duncan Drummond and Paul Morse repeatedly.

Ahead of Tokyo Game Show, I spoke to CEO Eunseop Shim of Korean developer Lizard Smoothie about the game's runaway first year. He says the small studio, which has grown to five people, is still "very chaotic," but now they have more wind in their sails thanks to all the love and feedback from players. "I think we shifted to a generally healthier direction of concerns," he says, no longer worrying if the game will flop.

"I am not letting this game go," Shim says when I ask if he's also dreaming of Risk of Rain 2-style update and expansion support. "There are so many things that players have been asking, and so many things that we want to do. We want a whole new game mode that I probably shouldn't go into. The players are giving us love, so we should keep working on.

"Even without that, we all have a direction on the game. We have a future view, the ideal view of what Shape of Dreams should be going for. It's not yet reached it in our opinion, so we are not letting go."

With some distance from launch, Shim reflects on the hard-won knowledge that he really could've used two years ago. "If I could go back, I would tell myself and our team that you cannot prove a game is fun through internal logic and thought experiments alone," he says. "No amount of experience and confidence will do that. You have to put it in our hands, or players' hands, to know it. Much earlier than what date feels comfortable.

"Especially in the months before launch, we had to make many compromises because we simply didn't have much time to apply all the insights we’d held, and that kind of backfired in spectacular ways. We released the game without enough extensive playtesting. Players had major concerns about the progression and the way we steered our game towards perfection in balancing and a stable experience, rather than the frantic fun that is the very essence of our gameplay.

"We were frantically working overtime to put out the fire. Our intentions were misinterpreted and undermined by so many obvious mistakes we've made that could've been prevented. I still think our launch went great with so many copies sold, but I don't think it was perfect."

Neowiz, members of which joined our call, and Shim don't see an end in sight for Shape of Dreams. "Being so new in the field, it can feel like we work in wonky ways, but I think there is still a charm in that," Shim says. "We'll keep doing our best to learn and to listen to our players."

Worms Galactic Tactics is such a good strategy roguelike that I can't believe it didn't already exist.

Balatro creator LocalThunk has leaked a few substantial details about his poker deck-builder's upcoming 1.1 update, which he admits has gone way past its initial 2025 due date, assuming one can truly leak information about their own beloved game.

Let LocalThunk have this, though – "I'm going to give a real honest to goodness leak," he announced to Discord on September 14, "a proper 1.1 leak." Highlights include more Jokers, more vouchers, and a new voucher system fine-tuning how often Tier 2 vouchers appear. The developer apparently has "the current iteration of 1.1" downloaded on his phone, so he should know.

"If people will indulge me," he begins to say about his new voucher system. The current version of Balatro includes 32 total vouchers, half of which are considered strong Tier 1, while the other half is an even stronger Tier 2 that corresponds to the first type of card. So, "if you take a tier 1 vouchers in ante 1 (say, paint brush)," says LocalThunk, "you would have a 1 in 16 chance of finding the corresponding tier 2 in ante 2 (palette)."

But, "If I were to add 32 more vouchers (not a leak, for arguments sake)," the developer continues, "you'd have a 1 in 32 chance of finding palette in ante 2"

"NO BUENO," he continues. "So what if there was a system that kept track of all the tier 1 vouchers you’ve taken and it rolls an N in 16 chance (N being the number of tier 1 vouchers you have without their corresponding tier 2) to spawn the upgraded tier 2 voucher? That way, if you take paint brush in shop 1 you still have a 1 in 16 chance to get palette shop 2." Hm, what if!

As for what new Tier 2 vouchers will be available, LocalThunk gives only a tiny leak – a sprinkle. The developer shares art for the new Tier 2 voucher called Lunker, whose card is emblazoned with a powerful green fish flapping its tail while fighting off the hook stuck in its mouth.

"This fish is my proof of life, yes I'm still working on 1.1!" LocalThunk says. "I'm not leaking the effect btw." Similarly, the developer reveals a new blue stake – currently, the difficulty modifier enforces -1 Discard – but, "Dw I'm not leaking it."

Except, LocalThunk can't help himself from teasing, "It's pretty interesting, and there are some weird implications I would love to break into a blog post. I had to use the quadratic formula ona whiteboard to solve something to implement it." Ah, yes. I'll pretend to understand the implications of using the quadratic formula here.

More straightforward is the new "when card is drawn to hand" mechanic, which "also applies when you open tarot or spectral packs," says LocalThunk. There's a 1.1 content checkbox you can toggle so that 1.0 modders can retain their work, and LocalThunk says he'll "add a new branch on steam well ahead of launch for current 1.0 version."

This last piece of information made everyone on Discord freak out – "I thought [the] lunker was the big ticket item," says a confused LocalThunk – but LocalThunk has one more announcement before taking his last bow: "at least 4 new jokers in 1.1," he writes in a September 15 Discord post.

By now, you're probably frothing under your Joker mask with anticipation for the long-awaited 1.1 update, but you should grab a handkerchief and prepare for more sitting around. LocalThunk says, "I'm happy the leaks are going over so well," but "I never should have given a release window."

"I don't want this to be half baked and wreck Balatro," LocalThunk continues. "I love the game too and I want to play a fun game not a rushed botch job." At the moment, he can only promise more progress updates and the occasional leak or 15, and let you know he's grateful.

"This past year of dev has been probably the most fulfilling work I've ever done," LocalThunk concludes.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 adds Balatro's Jimbo in a surprise new quest with a huge addition to the RPG's best minigame.

It's almost become tradition at this point: the announcement of a new release with massive historical significance gets buried within a sizzle reel in a Nintendo Direct. Today, we got a shadowdrop for Dragon Quest Heroes: Torneko's Mystery Dungeon Classic HD. This Super Famicom roguelike went untranslated for 33 years, despite building a massive following in Japan and laying the blueprint for the expansive Mystery Dungeon series.

Torneko's Mystery Dungeon is available today for $25 across Switch, Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam. It is a roguelike in the most traditional sense – as in, it's a lot like the original Rogue. This is a top-down dungeon crawler where every step you take is a turn. You delve into a massive dungeon, grab as much treasure as you can carry, and build up your experience to survive into the deepest levels. If you die, you start back at the very beginning.

That concept will be intimately familiar to modern gamers, but the roguelike boom was decades away when this game was first released. Developer Chunsoft took the bones of a fiddly PC game, stuck a familiar Dragon Quest character into the role of protagonist, and suddenly had a hit on its hands. But with the then-limited success of JRPGs in general and Dragon Quest in particular outside of Japan, an English release never actually happened.

Despite that, the Mystery Dungeon series would ultimately develop a global legacy. Chunsoft would spin it off into an original IP with Shiren the Wanderer, and we'd eventually get other licensed takes like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, which themselves would spin off into entire series of their own.

The Classic HD version of Torneko's Mystery Dungeon seems to mostly stay true to the original's old-school sensibilities, with a lightly upgraded look putting it in line with Square Enix's modern HD-2D games. But the devs do have one big modern tweak in mind – at least for the Steam version. This edition offers a free bit of streamer-focused DLC that allows viewers to influence "mysterious events" that occur throughout the dungeon. It's not a feature that the vast majority of players will ever engage with, but I'm at least interested to see what kind of chaos it adds to the adventure.

Here are the upcoming Switch 2 games you need to know about.

Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel have confirmed that Mewgenics is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2 in two weeks on September 8, 2026.

Out of the best games of 2026, the macabre strategy game roguelike slash cat-breeding simulator Mewgenics is still at the top of my list. It was no surprise, given that McMillen's previous game The Binding of Isaac is one of the best roguelike games of all time. But so far I've been bound to playing the game on my desktop PC, because if I had access to the moreish gameplay loop of Mewgenics on a portable, I'd have 100% put in way more time than the almost-200 hours I put into it.

At Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026, we were treated to a performance of Guillotina – one of the many feline-based songs featured in 2026's best soundtrack – by Ridiculon. This was alongside Geoff announcing that Mewgenics' long-awaited console ports are coming out in just two weeks on September 8, 2026 after being confirmed earlier this year.

At least, it was supposed to be the announcement, but both the Xbox Store and Nintendo eShop spilled the beans earlier today with store pages for the game appearing on both platforms. However, the PS5 store page didn't leak, at least, so that's new news! Unfortunately, there's no update on cross-save, so I fear I'll need to start my journey again if I want to have my favorite game of 2026 on the go. And while DLC is on the way we unfortunately got no news about its first expansion.

Check out our full Mewgenics review to find out why it's "a worthy successor to The Binding of Isaac."

At the beginning of an 84-minute video, Slay the Spire 2 YouTuber Jorbs wonders if it is more optimal to play two Strikes and deal 12 damage now, or play Bash on Ironclad to set up for 13 average damage across two turns. Around 75 minutes into that video, with the help of a fight simulator made to help optimize encounters, we finally approach an answer.

Jorbs is known for granular analysis of high-ascension Slay the Spire 2 runs, and his new machine learning-backed fight solver may be his magnum opus. It's excessive, finicky, impractical, and truly glorious.

"The amount of time that I have spent on being able to do stuff like this... it's fortunate that I can say this is my job, because otherwise this would be a concerning amount of commitment to a hobby," Jorbs says.

This Slay the Spire 2 fight solver, made in Sandbox, can theoretically be used to optimize for different outcomes – generally, reducing damage taken. Enter the cards in your hand and deck, tell the simulator what enemies you're facing, and let the computer break down different lines of play. Who needs basic arithmetic when we've got heuristics and probabilities?

The Strike and Bash example comes from a proof-of-concept fight. In the first encounter of your run, assuming you only have starter cards as Ironclad, do you save health by assuming and playing four Strikes across two turns (24 damage), or a Bash into two Strikes (26 damage), while accounting for draw variance and the possibility of only playing one Strike on turn two after Bash (for 17 total damage), all gauged against the enemy's health?

To answer this, we will drain the Earth's oceans if we must.

This tool, like the video explaining it, is a masterclass in overcomplicating something simple purely and literally for the love of the game. As Jorbs agrees, the moment you apply this simulator to more complex decks and fights – say, a 24-card Ironclad deck versus the Act 2 Decimillipede elite – it explodes like dough in hot oil.

Even a single potion with, in the eyes of machine learning, an arbitrary reward value can throw a wrench in things, to say nothing of the countless permutations of larger decks. Just entering every card and value would become tedious, never mind the calculation time. You could probably complete two A10 Ironclad runs in the runtime of this video alone.

But the human spirit is reflected in the popularity of Slay the Spire and the very existence of this tool, and as someone who's made spreadsheets and written formulas to optimize damage in other games, I respect it. Even if I will just keep playing Bash because Bash goes bash.

"I just kind of like watching numbers go up. That's a lot of why I'm here. It's just kind of a good time," Jorbs concludes.

After dropping a nerf bomb, Slay the Spire 2 devs say updates are slowing down so they can focus on "bigger, more impactful content" like a new character.

Coming up with new cards when you're making a deckbuilder must be tough. You have to keep finding inventive ways to push players and the game without breaking it. But for the Slay the Spire 2 devs, the best strategy has become obvious: let fans do it for you.

I say that only half-joking, because developer Mega Crit might be half-joking, too. On Reddit, a fan posted a selection of three hypothetical Slay the Spire 2 cards, each with creative effects, like, "Deal damage equal to another player's Block." Other Slay the Spire 2 fans enjoyed them, in the way we all lovingly engage with fanart, but there's one comment that's something special – a response from Casey Yano, a Mega Crit co-founder and co-creator of the roguelike's first installment.

"Wait, these are great, what the heck," the developer says, in what is somehow not the top comment of the thread. I mean, what else could even come close? It's truly a blessing from on high.

"[Anthony Giovannetti] steal these," Yano adds. Giovannetti is another of the central designers behind both Slay the Spire games – he co-created the original and the Mega Crit studio with Yano.

I can see the attraction to the concepts in the Slay the Spire 2 fan's cards. The first idea is called Buddy Slam, and it deals, as I mentioned, damage equal to another player's block. Very nice. The second is Gonna Finish That?, and it makes another player put all of their status cards into your discard pile. Lots of strategic value there. The third card idea is called Done Right, and it has you and your opponent swap hands next turn.

It's all fun and a little chaotic in nature, but the card Buddy Slam is the clear stand-out among commenters. "Damn, I really want Buddy Slam," says one Redditor.

Considering Yano's enthusiasm, who knows, we might see it added to Slay the Spire 2 soon. I just hope Yano understands the floodgates he may be opening in the process.

After dropping a nerf bomb, Slay the Spire 2 devs say updates are slowing down so they can focus on "bigger, more impactful content" like a new character.

Slay the Spire 2 launched into Early Access on Steam this year, with indie developer and publisher Mega Crit working since its release to release updates every two weeks. Until now, that is.

As the studio reveals in a new announcement, content is slowing down to allow devs to get more ambitious.

"The team has been hard at work on new content, but it'll be at least a month until any of it hits the beta branch," as Mega Crit writes. "We'll be out of office during late August for our annual team break, so there won't be an August 27 patch."

That's understandable enough – the devs do deserve a break.

"As a mostly remote company, it's good to meet in person to touch some grass, frolic on the beach, and whatever else it is that people do when they aren't playing or making video games," as the team puts it.

The past bi-weekly patch system that Mega Crit has built its schedule around has "allowed us to cross quite a few features and content off of our to-do list" and "to be more dynamic and experimental when introducing changes."

That checks out. Late last month, Slay the Spire 2 finally got a keyboard-only mode and various balance adjustments, for example. Then, with v0.111.0, substantial buffs to several enemies and a big ol' nerf to one of the strongest cards and relics in the game, Brightest Flame, came.

At the same time, though, "when doling out content piecemeal like that, it's harder to dedicate time to developing the bigger, more impactful content that so many players are most eager for." That's why Mega Crit is shaking things up now and taking updates more slowly.

"We've since shifted our focus to such pieces of content, including an alternate Act 2 and new character," the studio explains. That's why "we will be shifting our updates to be a bit further apart, at least for a while. We can't guarantee the exact pace or if said pace will be regular, but we'll continue to keep you updated, as always!"

Along with the character and alternate Act 2, Mega Crit plans to drop "experimental game modes," too.

I suppose it all makes sense – Slay the Spire 2 has a journey ahead of it to its full release, and bigger, "more impactful" updates could be the key to a smoother delivery.

Need something else to look forward to? Browse through our roundup of the best new games coming this year and beyond to wishlist right now.

Solo developer YuWave makes a simple pitch with Demon Lord: Just a Block, an action-strategy roguelike about navigating a blocky world filled with enemies that only move when you do. "One developer. One computer. One game. One year," they say on Steam. Behind the game's cute, pared-down world is a classical fantasy story that makes smart use of hands-off narrative to steer players through seven chapters and three endings, and with nearly 2,000 Steam reviews averaging 96% positive, this approach has been a hit so far.

"If FromSoftware released the full Dark Souls design document, no one would be debating the lore anymore," YuWave tells me. I agree with their assessment that Demon Lord: Just a Block is a "gameplay-first experience," but in my experience that's often where you'll find some of the most interesting video game narratives – stories designed more as scaffolding, something to be prodded by players rather than carefully conveyed.

"It creates story-driven goals," YuWave says of this approach. "Just like Hades, players aren't just pushing through levels in each run, they are also progressing the game to meet more NPCs and discover more advanced storylines."

I'd call Hades an interesting point of comparison, as a heavier narrative throughline was a major point of praise for Supergiant's own critically acclaimed roguelike – that, and the way that narrative weaves the mechanical tropes of the genre into a lush interpretation of mythology. Demon Lord: Just a Block, then, wants to have a similar effect on players, but through markedly lighter exposition.

"It eliminates lengthy, tedious dialogue," YuWave says of "fragmented, anecdotal" writing. "I firmly believe players are here to have fun, not read a boring novel. Short, punchy text is the key to keeping players immersed in the gameplay without constant interruptions." As someone who loves reading and gaming, but will still instantly skip a huge text log in a game if my brain is in exploration mode, I find myself nodding along.

YuWave stuck to a rule with text for this game: no more than 10 exchanges per scene, and no more than 50 characters per line. Their thinking is that, while this limits how much detail or exposition you can fit into each moment, "it actually makes players remember the characters’ personalities much more vividly," perhaps because they're more attentive to storytelling that doesn't stall gameplay.

This approach also aids exploration, YuWave reckons, as story fragments found and collected by players may reveal a hidden path or "a whole new way to beat the game."

"The entrance to the true ending has always been there, you just lacked that narrative knowledge to activate it," they tease.

The success of Demon Lord: Just a Block has given YuWave a platform for sustainable work as a solo indie dev after a few years grinding away in the mobile games sector.

"It's way beyond my wildest expectations," they say of their Steam debut.

"Receiving players’ recognitions and appreciations, I realized the game has turned into a collaborative work between the creator and players. First and foremost, I will definitely keep releasing regular, ongoing updates for this game - both major content drops and minor updates (new biomes, weapons, mechanisms), plus quality-of-life patches. I want to work with the community to make this game the best it can be."

After earning $1 million on Steam from a game that took 4 months to make, stunned devs end up in Valve's coveted "chocolate tier."

What better way to celebrate Moonlighter 2 fully coming out than making its certified banger of a predecessor free? For a short window, you'll be able to get the first Moonlighter for the low cost of nothing in the run-up to developer Digital Run releasing the follow-up.

Yes, the low, low cost of nothing. The offer begins later today, August 5, on Steam, and it'll run for four days, ending on Sunday, August 9. That gives you a proper window of over half a week to claim the action-RPG before it goes back to its regular price.

And if you haven't already tried Moonlighter, I sincerely advise you to do so. It's like The Legend of Zelda if Link was a character in Clerks when he's not adventuring. During the day, you're managing a shop in your local village, the typical job of a young person who wants to fund their other exploits.

But Will isn't any regular youngster, seeing as his hobby involves going out and tackling dungeons in search of loot, taking on whatever lurks within. The two play-types form a refreshing symbiosis, where one gives you a breather from the other.

It's especially good for those runs where you scrape by, or make a daring miscalculation and it all goes wrong. It's actually kind of nice to have the little store to fall back on, instead of the typical roguelike experience where you just dust yourself off and go again.

"Keep it forever and experience Will’s original adventure! If you love gorgeous pixel art and classic SNES-era Zelda games, this is the perfect time to dive in!" says the announcement. Moonlighter 2, then, jumps out of early access and into 1.0 on September 2, giving you four weeks to get the original done before moving onto the second.

Plenty of time - just watch out for thieves trying to rob your best stock.

After earning $1 million on Steam from a game that took 4 months to make, stunned devs end up in Valve's coveted "chocolate tier"

A new Slay the Spire 2 patch has shuffled into the deckbuilding roguelike's beta branch, bringing with it your usual torrent of bug fixes and balance tweaks that are sure to reframe certain builds, alongside a quite nice keyboard-only mode.

Mega Crit rounds up the biggest changes in v0.110.0 pretty succinctly: "Mirage and Pillar of Creation have been reverted back to their pre-0.109.0 versions and have also been slightly buffed and nerfed, respectively. We've also implemented a brand new feature in this patch – a keyboard-only control option! So be sure to let us know what you think if you try it out. In terms of art, many cards have new, polished portrait art and, excitingly, characters now have VFX for their unique forms!"

But perhaps the handiest balance change is creeping silently in the new Slay the Spire 2 patch notes: "Buffed Pael's Relax card: Block increased from 15(17) → 16(18)." Fighting Bowlbugs should no longer serve as a big block-counting barrier in Act 2, at least, not as often, fingers crossed.

"Relax buffed? Finally I won't be humiliated by Turn 1 Bowlbugs," one fan reacts over on Reddit. "I think it's in a completely fine spot now, I don't want every relic to be busted," another says, "I think people undervalue Relax by treating it like a block card instead of a delayed Offering, too."

Elsewhere, skulking in the corners of the change notes, developer Mega Crit has tweaked Uncommon cards so they show up more often "(as intended)" and players will "no longer discern the shuffle order of cards in certain scenarios." There's also now a Share button that screenshots the entire map, a bug fix that stops a monster egg from hatching in the Bestiary, and new art for a collection of cards.

Slay the Spire 2 just got its biggest patch yet, with so many new relics, buffed cards, and massive nerfs that players barely know where to start.

I've never met a roguelike that I didn't desperately but unsuccessfully want to love. I'm fascinated by games like Hades, Returnal, and Dead Cells, but they lose me with the amount of procedurally generated repetition you're practically forced to endure if you want to play through the full story. It's to my surprise and delight, then, that beloved film director Guillermo del Toro, of all people, has outed himself as a fellow roguelike skeptic.

At least, that's what I got from a recent IGN interview (thanks, PC Gamer) in which del Toro talks about some of his favorite games. As it turns out, the 61-year-old auteur knows ball. "I love Left 4 Dead," he says. Great choice. Some of my fondest memories from college are mowing down zombies with my friends. "Death Stranding made me cry," continues del Toro with another banging mention. "Shadow of the Colossus made me introspective about so many intangible things. There's not only one. BioShock, it's a world I could get lost in for ages."

Del Toro sure knows how to pick 'em. As a presumably busy person who's known for making movies, it's understandable that he would want to be choosy about the games he spends his time playing, and I think most people with full-time jobs and other hobbies can relate. I definitely do, and I've written at length about games being too damn long these days. That's precisely why most roguelikes, which make you replay the same levels over and over, just aren't my bag these days.

"Dead Cells was really interesting to me, I just hate respawning," says del Toro to applause from me. "You go 35 levels and then you start again. You get faster, but please do a version without respawning for the older, for the elderly players. I'm available, you contact me and send it to me, please I beg you. Because I like the world, great design."

It is a great design. Dead Cells is one of the roguelikes I've been most tempted to push through over the years, but I'm always turned off by the repetition combined with the brutal difficulty curve, and I'm almost three decades younger than del Toro. By the time I'm 61, I imagine I'll have a strict no games over 12 hours code.

Glutton for punishment? Here are the best roguelikes to play in 2026.

There's a new Slay the Spire 2 patch, and it brings some big changes to the deckbuilding roguelike. Several cards have been either nerfed or buffed, reframing certain strategies and keeping players on their toes, and adding two fresh Neow relics, just to tie all together.

Those Neow relics are a good place to start, per the patch notes. The first, Dowsing Rod, puts one Dowsing into your deck after you pick it up, and the second, Neow's Sacrifice, gives you one Ambergris and puts one Guilty into your deck. They each come with other circumstantial effects too.

Then we're into the maelstrom of card tweaks. Necrobinder's Eidolon has been reworked to play every Ethereal in the Exhaust pile, while Regent's Pillar of Creation's got downtuned to giving you 5(7) Block the first time you create a card on each turn.

Well-Laid Plans is now rare, costs 1(0), and makes it so you don't discard your hand at the end of a turn. That's not the only card to have its rarity shifted either, as Dominate is now rare as well, though with no effects changes.

The Dominate shift is spurring discussion among hardcore players. "Dominate going to rare is a HUGE nerf," says a top commenter on Reddit. "Completely deserved though, card was just way too good to be uncommon," another says in response. It's pointed out that Taunt becoming common balances out the changes, at least on paper.

People are a little stunned at what Mega Crit's done to Eidolon. "What the heck. Eidolon sounding crazy in long fights," a commenter says. Some are lamenting Eidolon's old effect, since it exhausted your hand, thus removing status effects, but they admit the new effect is "powerful."

Generally speaking, the alterations appear to have thrown the community for a loop, which was likely the intention. Now that Slay the Spire 2's been out over three months, there'll be a contingent who already know many of the combinations inside-out, whereas this kind of patch challenges their knowledge.

"INSANE card changes wow," says another popular comment. If you haven't played in a little while, this is a good excuse to jump back in.

Slay the Spire 2 lead says the garbage placeholder art is "important" and gen AI would ruin it: "People would judge the game as if it's a 1.0, fully developed video game."

Slay the Spire 2 devs are purposely choosing to use delightfully "shit" human-made placeholder art in their roguelike instead of AI-generated assets, the game's lead says – not just because the latter looks "lazy," but because "it's important" that the unfinished art looks distinctly, well, unfinished.

Speaking to GameSpot in a new interview, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano discusses Slay the Spire 2's approach to placeholder art, which you can find a bunch of in the game's Timeline. And, seriously, you can't miss it – I mean it with all the love in my heart when I say these artworks look like they were created in MS Paint, but according to Yano, this is very intentional.

This is largely because Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access, and Yano "wanted to set the precedent that some of the stuff is incomplete, and I wanted to make it obvious." Even though he reckons the roguelike's artists might have wanted more of the game's art to be complete by the time the initial launch arrived in March, Yano "knew that we were going to be drawing a bunch of garbage during early access," and believes that the incomplete look is "important" since "otherwise people would judge the game as if it's a 1.0, fully developed video game."

He continues: "If we use art that looks nearly complete, then people would think that that's going to be the final art. It has to look like shit. It's important that it looks like shit."

Of course, the placeholder art still serves an important purpose. Yano wants it to serve "kind of like a framework, especially – especially – the art that's used in the timeline." After all, those are "the narrative beats," and the lead wants to ensure that their planned compositions, as well as details and colors, are properly "communicated through those drawings." The devs don't let just any placeholder art make it into the public version of the game, either, as Yano discusses one artist on the team known as Jose who "tends to draw a lot of inspiration from pop culture."

He continues, jokingly: "It's really bad. We're [going to] get sued by Nintendo soon. He's no longer allowed to draw placeholder art now that we're in early access and it's more public-facing. We have some suspicious things in there. Some Among Us, some SpongeBob."

Beyond all that, though, Yano takes a stance against AI-generated art. "Anybody who has gone through the [artistic] process… I wouldn't say they would feel cheated, but they would feel a kind of sadness, right? You don't see the path that somebody took to get better and develop their own style. You just see somebody who's like, 'I just want something in this style,'" he explains. "And there are a lot of artists out there that make works that are meant to imitate certain styles. There's a lot of jobs where we imitate different things. But in this case, the game is in our style, so I don't know why we'd need AI to mimic our own style."

Not only that, but with human-created art, "there's a decision process for nearly every line – every line you erase, every line you adjust, and everything that you do." Meanwhile, AI-generated art has "a very distinct look" that Yano finds "very strange." He says: "It's very dense, very colorful, and very distinct. It doesn't fit with the rest of the art style and it's just clearly lazy."

He's not wrong about AI-generated art standing out like a sore thumb – we've now seen backlash many times over different games after fans have spotted something distinctly non-human lurking under the surface. For example, Crimson Desert launched with a number of AI-generated paintings, which Pearl Abyss swiftly apologized for – stating that the "intention has always been for any such assets to be replaced" – before going on to do so in a following update.

Similarly, 2025's J'RPG sweetheart Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was accused of including an AI-generated asset of some newspapers, which Sandfall quietly changed in an update. However, later in the year, The Indie Game Awards revoked the game's Game of the Year and Debut Game award wins, saying: "When it was submitted for consideration, a representative of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination."

In the case of Slay the Spire 2 developer Mega Crit, Yano isn't dead set against AI as a whole, calling it "like a glorified spell checker" for some of the studio's programmers who use it for code reviews. However, generative AI is a different story, and something that the team stays clear of – as Yano puts it, art is "an expression," not something that has "an end goal that's definable."

Why so many game developers don't want to use generative AI.

Another update has hit Slay the Spire 2's Steam beta branch, bringing with it changes that should be a welcome sight for many a card-slinger (a randomizer option, bug fixes, etc) and changes that'll likely be a little more controversial depending on who you ask (anything to do with balance).

Mega Crit just released a new Slay the Spire 2 patch for anyone playing the hit roguelike's beta branch, and top of the developer's list of changes is modding improvements. Slay the Spire 2 did receive Steam Workshop support not too long ago, but the feature needed some big fixes to function as intended.

"Previously, when launching the game with mods enabled for the first time, it appeared as though your progress was wiped," the developer explains in its patch notes. "That is because unmodded saves are saved separately from your modded ones as a protective measure, and we defaulted to having the modded saves start entirely from scratch. Now, your unmodded saves are automatically copied over to the modded saves and a popup appears to explain the process to new mod users." Both saves are stored separately, so you can switch between unmodded and modded playthroughs whenever.

To me, the handiest new feature is an absolute must-have for any and every roguelike game – scratch that, any game, period: "The run timer is now paused while the Pause Menu is open during a single player match." There's nothing worse than having tea runs and toilet breaks inflate your playtime, eh?

And if you're looking for a quick way to freshen up a run, Slay the Spire 2 now also has a randomizer option. "Added a Randomize button to the Custom Run screen which randomly selects two good modifiers and one bad one, and randomizes the selected character," the patch notes explain.

The rest of the update is full of nice-to-see bug fixes, added animations for the new Aeonglass boss, new multiplayer cards and art, and a stats section in the Bestiary. If the Steam forum comments are any indication, Mega Crit can't quite make everyone happy with its balance changes, though that's nothing new for the game.

Slay the Spire 2's lead birthed reviled boss Doormaker after "playing too much Deadlock," while Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke inspired another creature.

15 years after the original version released, The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth has hit its highest-ever player count thanks to a massive discount.

Earlier this year, indie developer Edmund McMillen released his latest roguelike Mewgenics, which proved to be a massive hit. Not only is it one of the best games of 2026 so far, but a shout for being one of the best roguelike games of all time, and its numbers reflected that. It became one of the most-played roguelikes in Steam history in terms of concurrent players, beating out McMillen's own The Binding of Isaac, which is one of the best roguelikes ever in its own right, even if it was apparently nothing more than McMillen testing out the genre in preparation for Mewgenics.

However, Isaac has reclaimed its throne. Per SteamDB, the game is now sitting at a peak of 130,181 players (and that was updated five minutes ago), eclipsing the game's previous record of 70,701 back in 2021 upon the release of the Repentance expansion. This is undoubtedly thanks to an absolutely massive deal on the game, which features the roguelike classic and all of its expansions at $5.09 (with the bundle's previous low being $26.46).

Over the weekend, McMillen noticed the spike in players, saying: "Isaac is about to beat Mewgenics for active players on Steam… unreal for a 15 year old game." A day later, when the game passed Mewgenics' peak of 115,428, McMillen once again posted, saying: "The binding of Isaac has officially eclipsed Mewgenics for most active players with 123,429 active players this morning! (take that, me!)"

Mewgenics co-creator Tyler Glaiel also responded to the new peak with a post of his own, saying: "Just wait till we put Mewgenics on sale for 90% off in 2038 after 12 dlcs."

Check out our full Mewgenics review to find out why it's "a worthy successor to The Binding of Isaac."

The Steam Summer Sale features a massive discount on The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and all of its expansions, bringing a game you can spend hundreds of hours in down to $5

Mewgenics is one of the best indie games of 2026, but its co-creator Edmund McMillen first earned renown for his previous roguelike, The Binding of Isaac. And despite McMillen saying Isaac was only made as a basic roguelike to test the genre out before moving on to Mewgenics, the game still earned a reputation as one of the best roguelikes of all time – one that defined the genre. After an expansion and a remake, which subsequently got four more expansions, The Binding of Isaac is ultimately a massive game that I've sunk hundreds of hours into throughout the 15 years it's been out.

So color me shocked when I log into Steam and see that The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth Complete Bundle – which includes the game, the Afterbirth expansion, Afterbirth +, and Repentance (as well as the free Repentance+ expansion) all of which typically costs $50.96 in total – is now sitting at 90% off, bringing what I'd call the greatest roguelike ever made down to $5.09.

Sales are common on Steam, but to put it into perspective, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth Complete Bundle's last sale (according to SteamDB) priced it at $35.83. Then, the lowest price the bundle has ever received happened last January, when it dropped to $26.46 – so getting over $20 off of that now is a wild discount.

As someone who has spent close to 500 hours in The Binding of Isaac across both games and multiple consoles, I want you to know you really don't want to miss out on this Steam deal, even if you have only a passing interest in roguelikes.

Check out our full Mewgenics review to find out why it's "a worthy successor to The Binding of Isaac."

Slay the Spire 2 is full of funky critters and threatening beasts, but some of the roguelike game's most memorable bosses take inspiration from places you'd least expect - Valve's Deadlock and Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke, to name a few.

In a recent newsletter mostly addressing changes made in Slay the Spire 2's last major update, Mega Crit co-founder and developer Casey Yano took the opportunity to also answer a few of the community's burning questions, like, how do you pronounce Nonupeipe? (No nu pay peh). And is the Doormaker referencing the Worm web series? (No no).

The Doormaker boss was so hated in Slay the Spire 2, the developers outright threw it in the bin and replaced it with the Aeonglass boss instead, but the origin of its name is pretty interesting no matter how reviled it was over on the game's Steam reviews.

"Doormaker isn't a Worm reference, I was playing too much Deadlock," Yano writes. Spending time in Valve's still-in-testing hero shooter Deadlock - probably with the portal-ing hero, The Doorman - likely led to the roguelike's Doormaker or, at least, its name.

When also asked if the Ceremonial Beast was a reference to survival game Valheim, Yano reveals the "original was based on the Forest Spirit from Princess Mononoke." Big, magical, horned deer thing? Checks out. "The initial concept drawing was a bit solemn and grotesque. Marlowe updated the creature to be more regal and spirity! But I can see a resemblance, I'm a big fan of Valheim actually! I believe it was the first boss design for Slay the Spire 2 (designed in 2021)."

Elsewhere in this month's newsletter, Mega Crit delved into the game's new Steam Workshop compatibility. While Slay the Spire 2's had mod support from its early access launch date, the dev "purposefully haven't been advertising mod support" because it knew the feature "still needed some work." Steam Workshop has now been enabled because the team have "deemed mod support mature enough" as of the game's last patch.

Slay the Spire 2 patches are half as frequent as the first game's because doing weekly updates "was a lot of work so it really sucked"

Slay the Spire 2 maker Mega Crit has come to its senses and acknowledged that, yes, its RNG didn't work as intended - and we can all thank the one rabid player who spent eight hours and 6,600 words to make it happen. Bless you, trooper.

Mega Crit's Early Access roguelike sequel has been a huge success and a big driver of passionate fan debate in recent weeks, partly inspired by the game's various beta branch patches, which have now hit the main game proper.

The Slay the Spire 2 studio today dropped off the game's second major update to all players in the main branch of Steam, calling it "4 patches in 1." Alongside changes beta branch players are already familiar with, this new update also has "big changes that will be totally new for everyone."

One of the biggest improvements is a total RNG rework. As we reported recently, Slay the Spire 2 fanatic Tckmn convincingly proved the game's randomness is rigged over the course of an eight-hour stream and a 6,600-word essay. Their argument was that "knowing the first output of one of the game's RNGs gives information that helps predict the first output of all of the others."

"It turns out that everyone complaining about receiving Debt too often from Neow's Bones was right! We did, in fact, have some unusual RNG problems," Mega Crit admits in its latest patch notes. "Huge shoutout to Tckmn for doing the research - their eight-hour descent into madness was an entertaining watch, and we wouldn't have caught the issue without it."

Mega Crit then gets into the nitty-gritty details of how its run seeds worked and how it accidentally "allowed players to predict outcomes given knowledge of unrelated parts of the game." An RNG rework was necessary, the studio says, because the player base would likely prioritize unfun pattern memorization as soon as they got a whiff of the exploit. "Rest assured that your suffering is now truly random," it threatens and/or assures.

Steam Workshop support is the other brand-new-to-everyone feature included in the update, which streamlines the process of downloading and managing mods. Meanwhile, the Bestiary and fresh Aeonglass boss are escaping beta branch prison.

Slay the Spire 2 has almost 80,000 negative Steam reviews – nearly 14 times more than the first game received in 9 years

A dedicated Slay the Spire 2 fan popped the hood on the game to inspect its inner workings, and soon emerged from its underbelly, face and fingers smeared with grease, with a head-turning report: the RNG is rigged. Kind of.

As PCGamesN spotted, Slay the Spire 2 mathematician Tckmn streamed and explained – in some 6,600 words – how he accidentally discovered correlated RNG in developer Mega Crit's hit roguelike deckbuilder.

The core claim is simple: certain events in Slay the Spire 2 influence and tell you about the outcomes of other events, many of which have a deceptively small pool of outcomes with unequal weighting. Or in Tckmn's words: "Knowing the first output of one of the game's RNGs gives information that helps predict the first output of all of the others."

Pertinently, this is described as a much bigger problem in Slay the Spire 2 compared to the original because the sequel apparently has a much narrower range of checks for outcomes.

This is similar in concept to the game's seed system. Each seed delivers a predetermined series of encounters, but you're still able to make branching decisions within that seed – the path you take, the cards you play in what order, the items you buy, and so on. Tckmn convincingly argues that there's almost a sub-seed of sorts that quietly creates runs where, as a very crude example, Outcome A in Event 1 indicates Outcome A is also highly likely in Event 2, even if Outcome B appears equally likely.

The relics you choose from at the start of a run help explain this. Tckmn reckons that the Neow relic Neow's Bones, which gives you a random curse card, has a 54% chance of giving the Debt curse in the Underdocks map, but a flat 0% chance of the same curse in Overgrowth, the other Act 1 map. Instead, Neow's Bones in Overgrowth massively favors the Writhe curse at 73%.

The same logic applies to the Neow capsules that give you other random relics. In Underdocks, Tckmn found that the large capsule had a 23.75% chance of giving you Precarious Shears; in Overgrowth, that drops to 1.35%.

This is a pretty clear-cut example of how this knowledge could warp your decisions and strategies. If you're choosing an RNG event hoping for a specific outcome, that desired outcome may actually be incredibly rare behind the scenes, which makes that RNG event less appealing.

"All of these give some information about all the others," Tckmn says of a remarkably long list of RNG events, including the Act 1 map, the last card you draw in your first combat, the first card you generate in combat, and whether your first fight rewards you with a potion. This can even impact which enemies the Defect's default lightning orb will 'randomly' hit, it seems (75% chance to aim left in the first fight of Underdocks, if you're wondering).

Tckmn says he only discovered this after building a tool that could search for seeds containing specific combinations of cards and events. Adding Overgrowth as a condition totally warped the otherwise normal search results, and that sent him down this rabbit hole.

With this in mind, Tckmn makes a "plea to the developers" at Mega Crit. "Of course, I do think that [correlated RNG] in Spire 2 is a bug and ought to be fixed, and I think it would be pretty bad for the game if it wasn't," he says. "However, I am confident that Mega Crit will address this issue. For one thing, Spire 2 is still in Early Access, much earlier in its development cycle than when CRNG was discovered in Spire 1."

Assuming that every assumption here is true, this isn't game-breaking or anything – obviously, Slay the Spire 2 is and has been fun – but could skew RNG in an unintuitive way. Tckmn suggests the fix is simple, and even mocked up some simple "drop-in" code that could apparently address it by decoupling that correlation. I would love to read Mega Crit's response to all this, in part to confirm how much of it is intended.

Slay the Spire 2 patch adds a crowd-pleasing buff as fans say one card just became "busted," while Mega Crit rolls out bug fixes galore.

After Epic Games spoke heavily about generative AI ahead of yesterday's State of Unreal presentation, Vampire Survivors dev Poncle says it's "reviewing" the Fortnite crossover that was announced during the event.

Earlier this week, Epic Games released a video titled "A Look At Epic’s Art Concepting Process," where it openly admitted that it is using generative AI during the development of Fortnite skins and assets. The video itself features the artists designing concepts for Fortnite before using a Photoshop tool to generate details and speed up the process. Unsurprisingly the video also features a lot of moments where the AI hallucinates and the artist needs to go back and fix the error, which – in the wake of Epic laying off over 1,000 employees earlier this year, and the general cost of everything due to global ram shortages from it being wasted on AI slop farms – feels especially tone-deaf.

A day later, during the State of Unreal presentation, new crossovers coming to Fortnite were announced, specifically Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Control Resonant, Phantom Blade Zero, and Vampire Survivors. However, mere hours later, the Poncle account took to a Reddit post about the collaboration to say the following: "Following today's news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sorts of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we're currently 'reviewing' our collaboration with Fortnite. We'll let you know if anything moves forward."

From the wording, I don't know that the collab is canceled entirely. Rather, it seems Poncle is looking into whether AI was used to create Vampire Survivors content in the game. Earlier this year, the developers of Phantom Blade Zero spoke out against AI usage, too, and while there hasn't been a similar comment from S-Game, I can see Epic's open use of generative AI tools being a hurdle for some collaborations in the future.

Why so many game developers don't want to use generative AI

Yet another Hades 2 hotfix has dropped out of nowhere this month – on PC, with a console release soon-to-come – but this one simply squashes bugs that accidentally made a few boons more useful than the Balance Gods at Supergiant Games intended.

The two boons that fell victim to Hades 2's latest hotfix are Hermes' Tall Order and Medea's Suffering on Sight (which is more a curse than a boon, but I digress). Tall Order was seemingly giving some players a big damage buff even before they gathered eight of the same element during a run, a surprisingly useful bug that's now been taken away.

Supergiant Games also fixed Medea's curse to stop it from dealing damage to enemies who were already lingering in new locations. Instead, it now works as intended: incoming foes will take between 1 to 999 damage while existing foes remain at full health.

Elsewhere in the hotfix, you'll no longer randomly find Artemis singing beside the Crossroads Cauldron. She's forever destined to sit next to the river to chirp her tunes, poor Artemis. And Dire Auto-Seekers are no longer "immune to being stunned if their armor was depleted in their defensive mode," the developer writes in its patch notes.

Hades 2's last hotfix was surprisingly big and even added features we've been waiting for since the roguelike hit Steam Early Access, but it also introduced at least one unintended issue "causing command inputs to sometimes not queue up as you cleared an encounter." That's seemingly been cleaned up, too, along with other unnamed "minor fixes."

Supergiant Games has now mostly moved on from its godly roguelike, it seems, as the studio was recently hiring for whatever comes next. Should Cronos allow the time to come, I'll definitely be tuning in to whatever the team dreams up next, whether it's in the form of a Hades 3 or another entirely original game.

230 runs later, Hades 2's ranking system has me feeling cheated out of a huge missed opportunity.

Even with chunky headphones on, the desperate clack-clack-clack as I jab at an Xbox d-pad playing through the Chivalware demo is a constant drumbeat. This room in Paris is filled with high-end gaming PCs, and even with windows open, it's a desperate heat. As the last demo in a day filled with them, fellow players slowly abandon their posts and trickle out. Yet, I don't notice I'm the final one left in the room until I die at the end of a particularly lengthy roguelike run, glued to the intense action and so many biomes deep I'd been half-expecting a PR to cut me off anyway. Chivalware has the juice.

Clearly inspired by Mega Man Battle Network, any player of Capcom's real-time RPG series will be familiar with the constant maneuvering responsible for my d-pad twiddling in Chivalware. This roguelike takes the concept of summoning weapons on a grid that also contains enemies up a notch, having the tiles double as a color-matching grid. Chain together matches and you'll charge up your battery to spend on attacks, the most recent of your three colors dictating the weapon type you have in hand. Flub a match, and your energy is depleted, leaving you vulnerable to enemy attacks.

Caught in the net

Make no mistake, you will need to dodge for your tiny, armored little life – enemy attacks come thick and fast, though are telegraphed just clearly enough to leave you cursing yourself for making silly mistakes. The benefit of the tiled arena is that each square is clearly defined, meaning each enemy type's unique set of attack patterns are pinged red, leaving you to weave through and around them like you're doing an MMORPG raid boss.

Early on, dodging these attacks is simple enough. A slow moving projectile may track across a single line, or another may sword-slash a couple of squares in front of it at once. These grow more complex, with bigger foes sometimes having sequenced waves of attacks you need to actually time your way through, and bosses that have screen-filling attacks that get tighter with each phase.

Put them all together, and even those easier enemies can turn up the heat alongside larger ones, making me weigh up which to attack and clear off the board in real-time as I weave to stay alive. A mecha scorpion's laser turret targets the whole of my side of the battlefield in a zig-zag barrage, as I try to avoid the imminent explosion from a burrowing Dune-like room. Add in shields that make some enemies immune to certain color attacks, and it's like playing Tetris while doing Five Finger Fillet. Even Aliens' Bishop would struggle with that.

Like the best roguelike games, it's not just the enemies that get stronger. Your Disk Knight can equip new floppy disks that alter their properties. New weapons – swords, guns, hammers, and more – are the most obvious, all of which come with vastly different attacks and battery usage requirements that also have me quickly calculating which I should be aiming to summon to deal with the situation in front of me. These range from attacks from combos that reward using a large chunk of battery to get off more powerful final strikes, to ones that you can charge up to dish out more damage if you get enough breathing room. One grenade launcher gets me out of a lot of scrapes, but if I'm startled before I can charge it up enough the blast radius also includes my poor Disk Knight.

Chivalware also features numerous per-run buffs and passive abilities that, in typical roguelike fashion, feel like they court the edge of being game-breaking as you imagine potential builds. Some might reward you for sticking with the same weapon type for a while, or for swapping it in and out as much as possible, with lots of room to debuff enemies. One quirky power I don't have enough time to master even transforms me into a hulking werewolf at the cost of a bespoke rage meter, able to dish out huge damage with my claws but only directly in front of me, and only for a brief moment. This roguelike has the right mix of moreishness. The Chivalware Steam demo is already calling for me to hop back in to try it again – though I'm worried about spending too much time matching blocks and mashing enemies before its full release Q4 2024.

Chivalware's retro flavor has me itching to get back to the best GBA games. Plus, in the similarly old-school Mina the Hollower review we say that "classic Zelda vibes channel Bloodborne to create one of my new retro-style favorites"

Thunder Lotus, the indie team behind emotionally-charged management sim Spiritfarer, is gearing up to release its roguelike, 33 Immortals – a game we finally have a release date for thanks to a new Summer Game Fest reveal.

During tonight's Day of the Devs showcase, we were graced with many a good sneak peek and teaser – 33 Immortals included. In case you've not heard of it, it's a unique new game from Spiritfarer dev Thunder Lotus… although it honestly looks nothing like its tear-jerking predecessor. It feels like some unholy (in the best way) blend of Hades, World of Warcraft, and Diablo 4, with all the action a title could possibly pack in.

If you're out of the loop, Thunder Lotus describes the game it's been working on "for the past seven years" as a title in which you "jump straight into the action through instant matchmaking." There's "no waiting around" here, which means it's constant combat and chaos – just how I like it.

"You tear through hordes of enemies sent by God to punish you and rebel against the wrath of God together." And, if you prefer to go it solo, you can choose how you want to experience 33 Immortals.

Alone or with up to three friends – because, as the devs put it, "In 33 Immortals, everything is about cooperation." You'll probably die a lot, but that's all right, it's how you get stronger. I'd wager the roguelike loop will keep us all coming back for more, as the genre tends to do.

The overarching theme is nice, too. Much like Hades is inspired by Greek mythology, 33 Immortals draws from Dante Alighieri's literary masterpiece, the Divine Comedy. I'm a big fan of the aesthetic here as well – which isn't all that surprising, considering how visually beautiful (and moving) Spiritfarer was.

There's not long left to wait now for it, either: 33 Immortals is set to release this summer on June 10. That leaves just a few days until we can hop in and tackle Gods with other players.

If you're sold on the new Thunder Lotus title just as I am, you can check its demo out for free on Steam – just don't get too hooked.

Wondering what other new games we'll see during this year's big showcases? Browse through our Summer Game Fest 2026 predictions to find out what we think.

The latest Slay the Spire 2 patch is a bad one if you've been lying about how much you've been playing the roguelike. Besides that, there's a blend of nerfs, buffs and fixes to prepare some internal changes within the game.

To start, Vakuu's been changed a little, per the patch notes. Before, when the Ancient would quote how many times you've visited them, it'd be a random number. Now, it's accurate, leaving no question about the amount of times you've randomly landed on him through the deckbuilding gauntlet. For many of us, this won't change anything, but if you've been boasting to your friends, or your viewers as a streamer, Vakuu will reveal all.

Otherwise, in the bugs department, local saves aren't erased by cloud ones if you've got Steam Cloud switched off, and music doesn't restart right when you kick off a run, amongst many other things.

In a small, but quite good alteration, progress involving mods that either don't work properly or have been removed isn't erased. That's one I can easily imagine being infuriating if it was left long enough.

As far as balancing goes, Monarch's Gaze now costs one less energy to use, Juggernaut's been buffed by one point, and Skulking Colony's been buffed as well, making this the latest in a growing line of changes to that card. Players are immediately enamored by how useful Monarch's Gaze has become.

"The Monarch's Gaze buff legit made me so happy," says a commenter on Reddit. "I love that card and now I can take it without cratering my run."

The previous cost proved somewhat prohibitive to people's choices. "Now I might actually consider picking Monarch's Gaze! One energy upgraded for a really powerful defensive effect, especially on multihit regent, is actually busted," another Redditor adds.

This patch has been rolled out, so you can check out how it all feels at your leisure.

Slay the Spire 2 review bomb didn't actually affect sales that much, Steam expert says, even though "in any other case you would say this game is dead."

After receiving its second bigger patch mid-April, Hades 2 returns to the limelight with a new hotfix that addresses a plethora of issues – and adds a couple of nice new features.

Just in case you missed it, Supergiant Games launched Patch 2 on April 14, adding bonus content and bettering players' quality of life in-game. It was quite a hefty update, all things considered – but the indie developer clearly isn't done polishing up its roguelike sequel just yet.

Yesterday, the studio dropped a smaller (albeit significant in its own right) hotfix that tackles a good few bugs, and as it writes itself, includes "various additional fixes."

Some of these have been a long time comin' – take the Mystery Seeds, for example. Now, Supergiant Games says it's "added an inventory hint for Mystery Seeds about where they can be found." No longer will we need to question whether we'll get the seeds we want or something else at a digging spot, like Nightshade.

There's also a new death animation for the Hellifish, which is a fun little addition, and plenty of tweaks.

From improved visuals to fixed interactions, the hotfix targets just about everything – it's a surprisingly all-encompassing patch, considering that it's not one of the "major" releases for the game post-launch.

Heck, it makes our chances against bosses a bit better, too, resolving disappearing barriers in one of the most difficult fights in the game, for instance.

Enemies won't randomly get boosts they weren't supposed to receive, either, and so on. In a game (roguelike, might I add) as challenging as Hades 2 can be, these adjustments aren't just for naught… they can mean the difference between clearing an area and having to redo so much.

I'd recommend giving the full patch notes from Supergiant Games a read if you're hoping to dive back in – as it seems commenters certainly are.

As one person puts it, "Every hotfix makes me come back and see what new things I can do." Here's hoping the next big patch gives us even more incentive to play again.

Read through our Hades 2 review to learn more about what might just be one of the past few years' most impressive new games yet.

Mewgenics leads Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel recall when the game went from being a Pokemon-esque title to a tactical RPG.

A long development is something that's becoming more common in the industry as ballooning budgets and tech become a factor. It's almost easy to forget that for series' like Gears of War the first three games all released within five years, kicking off in 2006 and ending in 2011, while the next entry in the series Gears of War: E-Day will probably end up releasing around seven years after Gears 5 released. But not many can step up to Mewgenics, which was first announced in 2012 and finally released earlier this year.

However, the original Mewgenics and the new game are a different beast. The original game was shown at PAX Seattle 2013 "I think we only had one functional minigame, the cat fights, which was this Pokemon-esque turn-based combat game" McMillen recalls, speaking to Edge. McMillen's Team Meat coworker Tommy Refenes had lost interest in the game in favor of working on Super Meat Boy Forever, with McMillen leaving the developer in 2017.

"I was still pitching it to Tommy before I left. I was trying to wrap it in a genre that I thought he would be excited about." McMillen explains, with him recalling a version closer to the devious platformer icon Spelunky. Mewgenics co-creator Glaiel adds "I remember suggesting back then: 'Why not try Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat instead of Pokemon combat?'"

He explained, "they’re on the same tree, kind of, but you can do a lot more with the positioning stuff." McMillen adds, "Yeah. One has depth, and the other has the illusion of depth." Of course, the thousands of EV and IV fanatics will likely take umbrage with the implication Pokemon doesn't have depth, I get his point. Pokemon is solely about the attacks when you get into battle, while Tactical RPGs have the extra layer of positioning and taking into account yours and your enemies ranges.

Thankfully, the Final Fantasy Tactics-inspired version is what the duo went with for the game, and ended up releasing one of the highest-rated games of 2026, which currently sits atop my game of the year list with the strength of a cat wrestling one of those mouse on a stick toys.

After Slay the Spire 2 negative review spike, Mewgenics lead says releasing balance patches is scary

The latest update for Slay the Spire 2 is here, and several enemies have received alterations. On top of that, there are some general quality-of-life changes, and smatterings of bugfixes and new animations - and a couple of tweaks not listed in Mega Crit's news post.

Aeonglass, the latest boss to be added to the roguelike deckbuilder, has had its abilities tweaked, as well as its Wither and Withering Presence adjusted. Ramming Speed's been taken away from Haunted Ship, leaving them to switch between Swipe and Stomp.

The order of attack for Punch Construct is now Ready into Fast Punch into Strong Punch, and it now leaves opponents with Frail as opposed to Weak. Skulking Colony's gotten a couple of buffs: their HP is up to 75(80), and Hardened Shell's more powerful too. On the flipside, it no longer gets Block and its Smash is gone. Infested Prism's gotten a full rework, but there's no mention of the extent of the changes.

In terms of broader changes, the biggie is that if you've put Vulnerable on an enemy, it doesn't decrease if you take an extra turn. The same is true for other ailments, like Frail, Intangible, and the like.

Four of Ironcad's cards have been buffed: Drum of Battle; Howl From Beyond; Entrench; and Unrelenting. Necrobinder's got one buff, to Death March, and one nerf, Debilitate, while the colorless card Fasten no offers slightly less Block.

Some changes aren't listed by Mega Crit, like those to Astral Pulse. It now does 6(8) damage to all enemies, and players are a little befuddled about this being left off the list. "Did they cut completely the card change section?" a fan asks on Reddit. "Regent Astral Pulse got reworked and Scare isn't explained ."

Despite this, Aeonglass is one of the bigger facets resonating within the community. "Aeonglass is much stronger, that's good But the damage output is wayy too high," one fan says in response on Twitter. "Aeonglass might be worse than doormaker," another adds.

As Slay the Spire 2 continues its run in early access, expect more changes, big and small, in the coming months. Even ones the devs don't directly tell you about.

Slay the Spire 2 review bomb didn't actually affect sales that much, Steam expert says, even though "in any other case you would say this game is dead"

Following Balatro's explosive debut, there have been almost too many deckbuilding roguelikes hoping to snatch a piece of the pie for themselves. Even Krafton (the corporate owner of Subnautica 2, PUBG, and Hi-Fi Rush) received a couple of hundred pitches from devs chasing Balatro's coattails.

Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun at the Digital Dragons conference, Krafton executive Victor Lee says that the average "trend cycle in gaming is just getting shorter and shorter," and advised prospective devs against mindlessly following the Next Big Thing since it'll probably fall out of favor in a year or so.

"I've had maybe 250 roguelike deckbuilders [pitched] in the last 12 months," he adds. "I don't know how to choose. Would you? Like, they're all Balatros with different cards. I don't know how to choose one."

Balatro-likes aren't unique in that respect, however - just look at all the 'friendslop' co-op games that spawned off the back of Peak or the social horror games that stalked out the shadows after Lethal Company.

Lee reckons chasing a fresh Steam trend, no matter the genre, would be fine if devs could pump their games out in a month. "I might even fund it." But for most in-development games that won't be ready for another year or two, there's no guarantee any trend will still be piping hot by the time the project comes out.

"So if you're spending a very small amount of money, taking a very small amount of risk to get something out there very quickly, to see what happens - great," Lee says. "If you're betting your life on a very low risk, low barrier-to-entry genre, really think about how many people actually play that, right? Really think about how big that space is. And again, it was friendslop last year - this year, I don't know what it is right now."

He's not necessarily against working with the developers of a roguelike deckbuilder, either, but Lee's more concerned with whether devs are making a game to chase a trend or making a game out of passion since the latter will probably yield better results. "I would rather work with, you know, RPG players who have only played RPGs and they want to make their RPG and that's going to deliver in 2029," he explains, adding that even if RPGs aren't super hot by then, at least he can be confident the group of RPG fanatics will build something that speaks to other RPG fanatics.

Not sick of roguelikes just yet? Check out the best roguelikes to play right now.

Comfortably one of the biggest hits of the year so far, Slay the Spire 2 launched to a massive spike of over 573,000 concurrent players on Steam. Though the community's remained steady, reviews on Steam have nose-dived in a way that's surprised developer Mega Crit, but one analyst doesn't think such things ultimately moved the needle in terms of sales.

During a talk at Digital Dragons attended by GamesRadar+, Tom Kaczmarczyk, the founder and CEO of games analysis firm IndieBI, discussed the importance of player scores on Valve's store. "The social proof of having a game which is mostly positive instead of overwhelmingly positive, but has 1,000 reviews instead of 600, I think the 1,000 is gonna perform better," he begins.

"We've seen the extreme cases of review bombing for good reasons, like Slay the Spire 2, and the impact on actual sales," Kaczmarcyk argues. "Slay the Spire 2 had issues where the community in China, huge player base, they didn't like some of the updates on the changes, and they roasted [it]."

It's true much of the negativity came on the back of the game's updates and patches. Being a roguelike deckbuilder in early access, Slay the Spire 2 is a constant work-in-progress as the devs make alterations, rebalance cards and features, and then add more as time goes on. Some of these will go down better than others. Players in China, where leaving reactive reviews like this is a more popular (and, due to online restrictions, arguably necessary) approach, were just especially against some changes.

But Kaczmarcyk believes the game will simply endure, even though this sort of review dive may have been a death knell for other releases: "The review score dropped to the floor, to a point where in any other case you would say this game is dead, it's unplayable. Clearly, nobody likes it."

Even "sales in China did not fall that much," he concludes.

Since the first game had a healthy lifespan of several years, I'd err on the side of enjoying the game, early access foibles and Steam reviews aside. It's the successor to the king of deckbuilders, and it's commanding the throne so far. And for a game like this, the tide is always just one nerf, buff, or new class away from turning.

I beat Slay the Spire 2 Ascension 10 with all classes, and I have one question for Mega Crit after the new patch.

Steam has released a new update to the store, overhauling the tag system with new additions and some removals.

In a post to the Steam community page, Valve details the update, saying, "These changes are made with the goal of helping players identify the games that best fit their interests, and helping Steam generate appropriate recommendations."

This update adds 17 new tags to the storefront and removes 28 from rotation, with new additions finally getting genres like the Bullet Heaven, which Vampire Survivors popularised, and Desktop Companion, which refers to games that won't take up much of your screen. There are some specific ones, too, like Wolves, Poker, Samurai, and Capybaras, for descriptions of things that are in the game.

The removals took the biggest hit with 28 going away, with Valve explaining, "The set that we've removed today are done so because they no longer serve a good purpose for establishing connections between games or describing unique and useful elements of content in the game. Many of these tags have alternative options on Steam that better describe the content, and already have a high degree of overlap in application." These include the NSFW and Mature tags that are a bit too vague when specific tags like Gore, Sexual Content, and Violent exist.

Alongside these ones, Valve deems "subjective" like Well-Written and Masterpiece, and tags that refer to specific IP, like Lego, Dungeons & Dragons, and Warhammer 40K, which would be applied to games that aren't in those. Plus Valve has renamed and merged a few, tags, with Unforgiving going into difficult and Clicker being replaced with incremental.

While Vampire Survivors wasn't the first game in its genre, its massive success definitely inspired a lot more of that ilk to appear, including last year's standout Megabonk. And now the creators can celebrate that the genre has been canonized by Gaben himself (or, rather, the Valve employees who handle Steam tags).

Hope you saved room after Slay the Spire 2, because the Vampire Survivors deckbuilder is already Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam after 4,000 reviews

The end of last month saw the arrival of Saros, the grim sci-fi follow-up to Returnal from Housemarque. Another tough-as-nails roguelike, some sales data reveals it's not launched quite as strongly as its predecessor, but that's partly due to the current lay of the land.

On Twitter, Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, gives a bit of insight into the game's performance thus far. He estimates it's sold over 300,000 copies in two weeks, almost a third of which were pre-orders, generating over $22 million in revenue.

According to the firm's numbers, it's lagging behind Returnal, but although that may sound negative given there are now 11-times the amount of PlayStation 5s in the world, the console's library offers a great deal of variety now compared to 2021. "When Returnal hit in April 2021, less than six months after the PS5 launch, those early PS5 adopters (the ones who inherently buy a lot of new games at full price) were dying for something to play," he writes.

"Returnal was the first big first-party PlayStation release since launch, and it made amazing use of the unique DualSense haptics and spatial audio," Elliott explains. "Many core PS5 players flocked to it almost by default."

Now, some five years into the system's life, there's a laundry list of great blockbuster releases. Several arrived within the last 12 months, in fact. Saros "launched not too long after Crimson Desert, Resident Evil Requiem, Hades 2 on PS5, Pragmata, and a whole bunch of rad 2026 games," he points out.

Elliott notes that Saros "is a more niche" game compared to Ghost of Yotei or a new God of War. It's not an established IP or an open-world action-adventure. It's stylish but frequently grueling, and even having Rahul Kohli in the lead role doesn't make that an easier sell to many players.

These returns are still disappointing, Elliott says, and "it will struggle to break even" against the purported budget exceeding $76 million. If there's one saving grace, however, it's that Saros has already outsold Marathon on PS5. Gotta take your victories where you can, whether selling video games or battling aliens on Carcosa.

Saros trophy list includes an unexpected tribute to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

I famously find it hard to nitpick things I love, and Hades 2 is no exception. Try as I might to resist the rose-tinted veil that falls over Melinoe's journey every time I boot the game up on my Steam Deck, I'm still firmly under its thrall after many hundreds of hours spent at the Crossroads. I was aghast when my colleague and fellow Greek mythology fanatic gave the new game 4.5 stars in his Hades 2 review. How could something I love so much in all of its godly, witchy, titanic power be anything short of perfection?

Such was my (admittedly black and white) way of thinking until Hades 2's console launch update. Reading the patch notes, the shimmering shroud of pure blind devotion settling over my eyelids once more, I prepared myself for greatness. An update! I love those things! I'm going to love this one so much! And for the most part, I did. From Dream Dives to expanded relationships, Hades 2 is still one of my favorite games I've ever played. But it also has one glaring post-game letdown that feels, after all the wonderful ways the game builds on elements of Hades 1, like a very big oversight.

Grind is not life

I'm pretty deep in my post-game Hades 2 experience at this point. Mel's great task has been completed, order has been restored to the House of Hades, and all that's left to do is tie up a few loose ends and decorate the Crossroads to my immortal heart's content.

Between tending to the last remaining tasks on my Fated List of Minor Prophecies, an interesting discussion arises with Headmistress Hecate. She mentions something about the goddess Nyx – queen of the night, child of Chaos, and mother of a handful of my deific beaus (don't judge me, everyone is hot and I am weak-willed) – and how I might curry her favor by raising my notoriety as a shade-slayer. I fail to see how 230 runs isn't notorious enough for the great primordial goddess, but I intend to be an excellent daughter-in-law thrice over. So, I head over to the cauldron to perform the only new incantation available to me.

Now, I'm able to head to the Spirit Mixer in the taverna, upon whom I can bestow Kudos (one of my many, many in-game currencies, earned by selling unwanted reagents) and other ingredients in order to earn ranks. Each spending spree increases my notoriety, earning me a special little badge on every victory screen after completing a successful run up to the Surface or down to Tartarus. I also get a polite round of applause from the watering hole's denizens upon each rank-up; think of Melinoe as something of a Bard, regaling pint-slingers with grueling tales of battle while they toast her continued good health.

But here's the thing: after pumping pretty much all of my Kudos into my rank, rising straight to the top of the starter Wraith category in one fell swoop, nothing actually happens. I run out to do a quick Pitch Black Stone challenge, hoping that I'll get some new dialogue about my escapades to share with Hecate – or, dare I dream it, with Nyx herself – upon my return. Instead, I get the usual smattering of generic chats with my fellow Crossroad-dwellers.

Unseen victories

Maybe it was my fault for getting too swept up in things. The first Hades had postgame rankings, too, and they also had no actual gameplay function save for putting some of your hard-won resources to use once all other avenues were exhausted. It was nothing more than a prestige system – a totally private one, given that both Hades games are single-player ventures. But I really expected developer Supergiant to have expanded it for Hades 2, and doubly so due to the fact that Nyx herself was mentioned in tandem to it.

As one of my favorite Hades characters ever, her elusive presence in Hades 2 compared to her co-starring role in the first game means my ears prick up whenever she is mentioned. When Hecate suggested that Nyx herself might take note of my exploits through raising my rank, I thought it was a tacit hint from Supergiant that doing so might make her appear in the Crossroads. I've come across her in Chaos' domain after entering their portals out on a run, but if she's ever appeared at the Crossroads itself following the game's true ending, I've probably forgotten already (see: 230 runs total).

It made perfect sense to me for this to be a significant post-game story node, considering the game already expands upon so many of the original's systems. Hades 2's familiars enhance the resource collection mechanics, for example, while arcana upgrades refine the Mirror of Night's build creation, Fear upgrades Heat for tougher challenge modifiers, and Hades 2 has a wider range of gods and boon-givers in general.

So it's a little demoralizing that the Nyx namedrop might have been nothing more than a contextual hook with no post-game story implications. In theory, it gives Melinoe a reason to strive for higher rankings and not give up the fight just because it's technically over. But what if we could see more of Nyx and her children's interactions as she encourages them to aid our cause? What if she became a secret boon-giver herself? What if we got literally anything for all that resource-dumping?

Well, I guess there is one tiny reward, if you can call it that. I've learned that Nyx does have some unique dialogue that triggers once you reach the upper echelons of Unseen (the highest rankings band) but I hope you'll forgive me for not chomping at the bit for a throwaway piece of acknowledgement. Her words are kind, but it doesn't change the fact that my rank feels little more than a pat on the back I have embarrassingly given myself. Truthfully, I regret parting with all those precious resources when they could have gone into my interior design habit instead. (Hey, Odysseus could always use a new rug.)

Hades 2 is one of the best roguelikes of all-time, but there's plenty more to choose from.

A big Slay the Spire 2 patch just hit the beta branch of Mega Crit's hit roguelike deckbuilder, affirming its new biweekly patch schedule and completely doing away with the notorious Doormaker boss. After polishing off my Ascension 10 clears mere hours before the patch hit, a different section of the patch notes raised my eyebrow. I have just one question for Mega Crit: do you want Regent to die?

The latest patch notes are relatively light on card balance changes compared to previous updates, but I'm perplexed by some of the few changes that made it in. In particular, the Regent class had five cards retouched – two nerfs, two buffs, and a rework. Both of the nerfs were to block cards, which feels incredibly strange to me because, at least based on my own runs and conversations with fellow slayers, Regent is already struggling with block compared to the other classes.

Two of Regent's limited block cards were nerfed. Bulwark, an uncommon card, and Patter, a common, now grant one less block apiece. It's a small change, but a confounding one. I can't be the only one who was expecting to see Regent get more block, not less.

You can argue that Regent also got a block buff via the rework to Sword Sage, a rare Power card that now adds Replay to your Sovereign Blade instead of just making it hit twice. This new wording favorably interacts with the uncommon Power card Parry to give you double the block when you play the sword. The problem is that we're talking about a rare Power playing off an uncommon Power that revolves around a generated attack that you only have one copy of, and that sums up the challenge with Regent.

Regent is demonstrably capable of clearing everything in Slay the Spire 2, and he can produce some of the strongest synergies if you really get going. That said, I've found him to be the least consistent of the five classes, and that's largely because of his block economy (though it could also just be my play style or skill issue). Maybe that's Mega Crit's intent: Regent is the glass cannon. But this is fundamentally a game about dealing and blocking damage, so limited block doesn't feel like a compelling identity unless it's paired with uniquely high damage potential, but right now it just feels like Regent has to fly to get where the other classes can walk.

The common block options for Regent are pretty poor, and he has limited access to weaken to reduce damage as well. The nerfed block card Patter is only good when you have multi-hit attacks to pair with it, Glitterstream does too little for two mana, Gather Light is solid, Cosmic Indifference is a good card but has low block, and Cloak of Stars is very good but obviously uses up stars. His uncommons are great but, outside the newly nerfed Bulwark, also situational, with Reflect and Particle Wall chewing through stars, and Manifest Authority granting low block in isolation. Likewise, his block Powers – Pillar of Creation, Parry, and Child of the Stars – all work off of other cards. He can generate a lot of colorless cards, and some of those might provide block (which actually won me my A10 run), but that's pure RNG.

Meanwhile, old classes like Ironclad, The Silent, and Defect are rolling in strong block cards that don't ask anything extra of you. Shrug it Off is just good. Leg Sweep is just good. Leap, Charge Battery, and Boost Away are all just plain good, and common, block cards. Fellow newcomer Necrobinder has access to powerful weakening effects, some excellent common blocks, and the enormous power of effectively banking block by powering up her summoned companion Osty.

Regent feels right in the middle of the other four classes. Maybe that's the point, and actually good design? He's got a little bit of everything, but it's inordinately hard to get enough of anything? I don't think this is a game-breaker, but it feels like Regent wants just one more good, neutral block card, so I'm a little surprised to see Mega Crit weaken the few options he does have. I guess this is the fun of an early access game: rolling with the punches, figuring out how to offset weaknesses, and, uh, having a 21% lower win rate on Regent than Ironclad and Necrobinder.

Steam stats for Slay the Spire 2's engine Godot show "strong signs of exponential growth."

For weeks, many Slay the Spire 2 players have complained to developer Mega Crit about the Act 3 boss Doormaker. The game's Steam review score plummeted, largely due to reviews from Chinese users, as Doormaker hate crept into feedback. How can Mega Crit make the boss fun and balanced, even though it was apparently already "slightly weaker" than the other Act 3 bosses by many metrics? It was already reworked once, after all.

Mega Crit had another idea, per today's Slay the Spire 2 patch notes: get rid of it.

Yes, the Doormaker is gone. Dead. Deleted. Poof! In his place stands a new Act 3 boss, Aeonglass. This all-new boss has different mechanics and a stack of three status-preventing Artifact. Why?

"While Doormaker had interesting micro decisions in the fight, he was over the complexity threshold of what we want and had lingering issues," Mega Crit says in the patch notes. "We decided that starting over fresh will let us hit what we actually want for an Act 3 boss."

Aeonglass seems to have two gimmicks. Firstly, Withering Presence. For every four non-status cards you play, Aeonglass will add a one-mana junk status card called Wither to your hand, slowly polluting your deck unless you find a way to exhaust these statuses, or have the mana to exhaust them by playing them. Wither status cards have retain and deal two damage to you at the end of your turn if kept in your hand.

Additionally, not unlike the giant stack of debuffs you get from the Queen, Aeonglass will reduce your strength and dexterity by three on every other turn – not cumulatively, just for that turn. So, you'll have a harder time dealing and blocking damage on half of your turns.

The new boss is substantially simpler, and seemingly a bit weaker, than Doormaker. I haven't fought Aeonglass yet (tragically, I am at work), but I did finish clearing Ascension 10 with all five classes just hours before this patch hit, so I have plenty of experience with Doormaker. Doormaker's ability to completely shut down certain archetypes and force you to delay playing specific cards to avoid exhausting them has vanished, making Act 3 a lot less threatening.

Aeonglass does demand different strengths from your deck, however, so perhaps I'm underestimating it. I suspect Ironclad, who can readily exhaust cards in his hand and has good access to extra mana, will have the easiest time with it. Then again, Ironclad arguably has the easiest time with just about everything.

Steam stats for Slay the Spire 2's engine Godot show "strong signs of exponential growth."

Slay the Spire 2 maker Mega Crit has stopped patching its hit roguelike every single week because an update cadence that frequent understandably sucks for everyone involved, according to the indie dev.

As Mega Crit pushed yet another patch into Steam's beta branch earlier today, the studio took some time to address its slightly slower-than-usual release timings. Rather than enjoying weekly patches, as the first Slay the Spire did, the sequel now gets patched every two weeks instead.

But don't worry, fortnightly patches are an effort to pump out (hopefully) better updates that don't burn the devs to to ash. Plus, Mega Crit hopes it gives beta players more time with changes and the devs more time to act on feedback to those changes. A win-win scenario if all goes well.

"As you've probably noticed, we're moving to patch every 2 weeks rather than weekly as outlined in our Early Access Disclaimer," Mega Crit writes in a new Steam blog post. "This may be a bit surprising as the first game patched weekly, but it was a lot of work so it really sucked."

"Anyways, the 2-week cadence should make it less hectic for us, allowing bigger changes and more time working and polishing stuff before it goes out. It also allows more time for beta players to absorb and give feedback on changes," the studio adds.

Slay the Spire 2's Steam reviews absolutely plummeted last month following the game's first major update (largely due to posts from the game's big Chinese audience), which basically sent a bunch of changes from beta patches marching into the game's main branch. Many of the reviews lobbed complained about how tough it had gotten to assemble satisfying runs or long combos. Hopefully, Mega Crit's slower patch strategy can allow more time for gathering useful criticism and avoid another flood of red reviews.

Slay the Spire 2 "may not be perfectly balanced yet," Half-Life writer and Valve veteran Erik Wolpaw says, but with 1,500 hours in the first game he has no doubt Mega Crit will pull it off

Slay the Spire 2 is, quite handily, the most popular game ever made with the Godot engine, but the engine's operators say it was already comfortably on the rise.

In a new report on Godot's stats going into 2026, lead rendering maintainer Clay John examines the engine's rise in popularity through a couple of lenses. Some of the data is "a little messy," he admits, in its reliance on downloads from sites and sources like Github, Steam, and Google Play. But even with some "fragmentation," the trends are pretty consistent: Godot is gaining installs, downloads, and users.

Steam, via SteamDB, provides "the most exciting statistic," John says. "The data is approximate, and it can change when SteamDB updates their algorithm, but the overall picture stays the same. The number of Godot games being released on Steam is exhibiting strong signs of exponential growth!"

In 2023, 375 Godot-made games were released on Steam. One of them was Brotato, a top-down roguelike shooter that, before Slay the Spire 2 came along, held the crown of biggest Godot game on Steam.

In 2024, 819 Godot games hit Steam. Among them was Halls of Torment, another roguelike featuring a zillion enemies, which was the biggest Godot release of its year (by Steam peak players).

And in 2025, that figure jumped up to 1,229 Godot games released on Steam.

"It is amazing that many people are adopting the engine and using it, but as a person on the technical side of things, I also want to see that users are successfully using the engine to make their games," John says.

Godot has empowered hit games on Steam for years, but nothing has hit as hard as Slay the Spire 2. The deckbuilding roguelike – boy, roguelikes love Godot, huh – was originally made with Unity before the engine's abrupt fee changes pissed off developer Mega Crit so hard that it pivoted the entire project. In a 2023 post, Mega Crit said to Unity: "We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up."

Slay the Spire 2 launched this year on March 5, and with a Steam peak of 574,638 players, it's not only miles ahead of Godot runner-up Brotato's 38,905 player peak, it's one of the biggest games of the entire year. It had the 20th biggest launch in Steam history, putting it in the same realm as mega-hits like Hollow Knight: Silksong and above games like Terraria and the Call of Duty hub (which is notably less Steam-reliant than most games). It's also one of the best games of 2026 so far, though a surge of negative reviews largely written by Chinese Steam users has tempered its rating on Steam.

Few things put eyes on a game engine like breakout hits using that engine, and Slay the Spire 2 demonstrated louder than ever that you can convert a project from Unity to Godot and use the engine to deliver a feature-rich, readily update-able, enormously deep game – which includes multiplayer, a major addition over the original Slay the Spire.

John lays out how Godot was already gaining ground as a free and open-source alternative to engines like Unity and Unreal, which still dominate the market. The Slay the Spire 2 effect may take a while to kick in given development time lag, but I wouldn't be surprised if it kickstarts the biggest wave of Godot games yet.

After Slay the Spire 2 update led to negative Steam review spike, Mewgenics lead jokes releasing balance patches for popular games is "the scariest thing a human can experience."

Hades developer Supergiant Games has shouted out a fan-made mod for Hades 2 which ports the original game into its sequel.

A developer who goes by the name NikkelM released the Zagreus' Journey mod for Hades 2, a mod which adds every region, enemy, and boss from the original Hades and allows you to play through it as the second game's protagonist Melinoe, with new NPC encounters and other content added while they're at it. It was first released late last year, but just got its 1.0 launch a few days ago.

It's an impressive mod, and quelling any fears, NikkelM also explains: "This mod does not, and never will, use generative AI for any art, voice or music. All voicelines are from the original game, and art was custom created by talented community artist burn."

While mods are a commonplace thing for games nowadays, most don't come with trailers that look almost official thanks to their production value, so it's only natural that this one caught the eyes of fans. Unexpectedly however, it's received a blessing from the original developers, too. The Supergiant Games Twitter account shares the mod, saying: "We're blown away by this user-created mod for the PC version of Hades II, which lets you play through the original game's encounters as Melinoe."

Zagreus' Journey looks so official that many fans have been shocked, too, with one reply saying, "it's user created? I saw this trailer yesterday and thought it was official." They speculate that Supergiant reposting it was a way of making it clear that it isn't. Elsewhere, commenters on the trailer say, "I hope the devs see this and contact you to make this an official dlc because with this is so good," with more asking for a way to bring the mod to console versions of the game.

I never got around to finishing Hades 2, but with the little glimpses of Asphodel you sometimes get in that game, I actually somewhat expected this to be a surprise hidden in the game somewhere, so it's cool to see someone take the idea and run with it.

Hades 2 developer is hiring for "what's next" after its 2 roguelike juggernauts, but fans can't decide if they want a threequel.

Adrenaline levels in Saros are some of the most important and under-explained mechanics in the game. Adrenaline levels build up as you progress through combat without taking damage, granting you a series of buffs and perks, then resetting once you take a hit and forcing you to start all over again. Consequently you're encouraged to play carefully and do everything you can to avoid getting hit, but what actually do the adrenaline levels do, and are the perks worth playing so cautiously?

What do Adrenaline levels in Saros do?

There are five Adrenaline Levels in Saros before you max them out, each one of which grants a new perk or buff that stacks on top of the previous ones until you have all five.

1. Power Boost: Increased power absorption rate
2. Infrared Boost: Marks enemies through walls with a red glowing effect
3. Melee Boost: Increased melee damage
4. Repair Boost: Increased health restoration from Aether
5. Power Boost+: Further increase to power absorption rate

I should be clear here that Saros doesn't explicitly state what the effects are beyond the initial labelling of the five adrenaline levels, so what's above is a result of me testing these mechanics in the game and comparing accordingly.

How to raise Adrenaline levels in Saros

To raise your Adrenaline levels in Saros, you need to deal damage to enemies and pick up Lucenite (as well as periodic pickups that can improve your Adrenaline specifically).

Lucenite is very easy to find, dropped by all enemies when killed as well as found around the game. However, the Armor Matrix upgrade system will allow you to enhance the speed at which Adrenaline is increased through Lucenite collection, with multiple nodes with that purpose.

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Supergiant Games is officially ramping up for its first project after Hades 2, but there's no consensus among fans on whether it should be Hades 3.

The beloved indie game maker recently posted a graphics and animation engineer job opening at the studio, asking prospective developers to "come build what's next after Hades 2." As far as we can tell, this is the first concrete mention of the studio working on a new project since wrapping up Hades 2's 1.0 launch and its recent Xbox and PlayStation ports.

In a blog post published at the time of Hades 2's full release last year, the developer said it wasn't really sure what it would work on next outside of hotfixes, patches, and as we came to learn, ports for the roguelike sequel. "Beyond that, it's too early to say what's next for our team! We'll likely take some time to reflect and recharge," the developer wrote back in September 2025.

Plans for the future appear to be a little more concrete now, at least inside the studio, but fans are less certain. "Please NOT Hades 3," one player writes on social media, hoping the studio goes back to the non-roguelike action games it cut its teeth on, like Transistor and Pyre.

Another fan says, "Hopefully a Hades 3." (Whiplash much?) They also link to a Wikipedia page about Macaria, a very mysterious mythological figure who's said to have been Hades' daughter... based on one single source. I'm sure the myth remixers at Supergiant would have a field day with the concept of the daughter of the underworld who's essentially been scrubbed from the record books.

Other fan theories involve a co-op game featuring Zagreus and Melinoe, a prequel game starring the titular Hades during the Titan War, or a kart racer. I'd take it.

Days before the sequel launched in full, studio director Amir Rao explained that the team actually hadn't discussed plans for Hades 3 much at all because it wasn't a "preordained" inevitability: "It's not something we secretly know right now or anything like that."

Hades 2 lead doesn't think about the roguelike's legacy much because he just wants "to make things that don't get forgotten right away."

Saros is putting so much pressure on my controller's right-trigger that it will likely turn into diamond before the credits roll. Surviving in this sci-fi shooter demands dividing your attention between dodging bullets, flinging them back, and hoping you don't back-pedal off a ledge. Yet – fitting to developer Housemarque's cosmic horror leanings – I can't resist sneaking glances at the forbidden knowledge that the planet of Carcosa teases in my peripheral.

Pillars of stone-carved hands reach for eclipsed heavens, while silver gates gleam incongruously in ancient alien ruins. Below, mineshafts carved by would-be colonizers sprawl into futuristic vaults. What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine – I'm only a few bosses into Saros at time of writing – but Carcosa feels skeletal yet still autophagic; devouring itself to excess.

With the back-to-back release of Returnal and now Saros, Housemarque has become one of the greatest modern storytellers in cosmic horror and weird fiction. Combined with its knack for compulsive arcade action and using looping roguelike conventions as narrative tools, few AAA studios seem as comfortable in their own skin as this PlayStation-owned developer.

Hoping to get a clearer sense of Housemarque's eclectic identity, I caught up with Saros' creative director Gregory Louden and art director Simone Silvestri. Certain shared influences go some way toward explaining the studio's arcade-arcademia formula – the works of H.P. Lovecraft and esoteric short story collection The King in Yellow were particular inspirations for Saros – but in truth, Housemarque's biggest inspiration is… Housemarque.

The Silver Key

Saros carries everything from Returnal but the name. Both games task the player with exploring a hostile alien planet, sidestepping bulbous neon bullets and steadily finding better gear before dying and starting another run anew. Both are roguelike-Metroidvanias, and while these conventions are remarkably fun as standalone elements, they're also used smartly to drip-feed gripping existential stories.

For most developers, making such a fluid continuation in Saros would warrant simpler signposting – IE 'Returnal 2' – but I get the sense that Housemarque prefers the freedom to play around with past ideas without boxing itself in. In doing so, the studio has honed its identity with each iteration – something Louden touches upon while explaining where Housemarque's signature weirdness comes from.

"The number one reference for Housemarque games are other Housemarque games. That was true of Returnal – when I joined, our biggest reference was Nex Machina. And it's true of people I've introduced to Saros, our biggest reference is Returnal. So there is almost this self-perpetuating reverence of our past, to really want to stay true to our DNA.

"The other thing is, we like to be bold," Louden continues. "In a lot of ways, we try to do something the Housemarque way. When I was the narrative director and the cinematic director on Returnal, as much as we love other games, we wanted to do it our way. We wanted to do a game where characters are discovered, not told. We wanted to have rules like 'play, don't show'. We love big cinematics and have them in Returnal and Saros, but they're always about reward. We want you to play a lot of it. This ethos that we follow is to try to create something really bold and exciting for players to get lost in, [with] this sort of reverence for what we've done. That way we stay true to our past, but we're also innovating and bold and trying to stand out in the future as well."

For Silvestri, who joined Housemarque after Returnal, the studio's interest in cosmic horror is the reason he joined Housemarque. "It's the last real frontier of human curiosity, right?"

In that regard, Saros doesn't disappoint. The game's story follows search efforts for a lost colony on Carcosa, a planet covered in the ruins of an ancient civilization and wracked by supernatural eclipses which corrupt life on the surface.

"When I started and Greg told me about the eclipse, I was like 'Yeah, we're going to cook with this one,'" recalls Silvestri. Heading into Returnal's follow-up, Housemarque wanted to recapture the same atmosphere, but couldn't "repeat the same tricks" – which meant no repeating color palette and taking a "much bolder" approach, for starters. Yet across all disciplines, both Silvestri and Louden say, there was a drive to not just meet that challenge but exceed it at an individual level.

"One thing I always say about art in Housemarque is that we live on the fringe," says Silvestri. "We have this spectrum of minimalistic to extreme, and we always tend to go towards the extreme side. One of our pillars was called radical escalation, which means whenever you're in doubt, go for maximum impact. Then, when you put the eclipse on, go [for] even more. We always try to find the maximum expression of the concept that we have. If it doesn't work, can we make it more extreme? And if you can't, then it means it's probably not the right thing in the game. But usually there's many more levels to go.

"I think our artists are so comfortable in this space, which is very unique to us, and it's very inspired by the narrative that we have," he adds. "The kind of stories that we tell are very old and different and rare – I would say fringe as well – and to me, that's really precious. It means I can give my best. And I have partners in gameplay and narrative who want to be as weird as I want to be. That's a legit term that we use!"

At a mechanical layer, Louden carried forward lessons learned from Returnal to ensure Saros could be enjoyed by more players without making compromises. A good example is in the game's opening run, which plunges you into the deep end against a boss you're unlikely to survive. Saros gets into the action far quicker – a delight for returning fans with itchy trigger-fingers – but compensates with the option to earn permanent upgrades at your hub. These upgrades take some time to feel powerful, with more dramatic boons locked to higher tiers of an unlock tree, but create a net for struggling players to still take something from dying.

"We wanted to allow more people to experience this game," says Louden. "And for people that haven't played a Housemarque game, this is a great one to start with."

Not-so tattered mantle

Indeed, 'come back stronger' is more than just Saros' tagline. It's been a "vision statement" for the team throughout development, Louden stresses, and I see it in action every time I'm stuck – each death offering a chance to grow, or less generously, callusing my head as I bang it repeatedly against the same boss fight.

It's a smart evolution of Returnal's own spin on the roguelike loop, which slowly eked out its mysterious story with each run. Saros is similarly well-paced, both as a story and roguelike. Upgrades and new areas unfurl often enough to keep the game fresh, while its story makes each run feel like coming back for another bite of a baited hook. It's the product of "iteration and a lot of playtesting," says Louden, who feels the result makes Saros hard to categorize as a roguelike. "As much as we love the genre, we almost feel like we're creating our own voice," he adds. "The only game that's quite similar is Returnal."

Louden and Silvestri have a tendency to make Saros sound more like a collaborator than creation. There's an undeniably intimate relationship between the studio and its games, and there lies Housemarque's true identity: a studio confident in its own artistry and ideas.

"It's a constant dance between what you think will work, and then what works," says Louden on the development process. "The game will tell you if it works. We just listen to the game."

Saros aims for bite-sized 30-minute runs, and the cool-off makes you "ready for another", its game designer tells me

Now that Saros is about to come out for everyone, there's some discussion going around about the overall difficulty, especially compared to its predecessor, Returnal. A higher-up at PlayStation is here to quell any concerns, maintaining that the sci-fi roguelike remains approachable despite its tricky parts.

On Twitter, a user posted about how hard Saros is, pointing out that once you get past the game's second boss, you unlock bonuses you can toggle on and off to tailor the experience more to your preferences. Mihir Sheth, senior product developer director at PlayStation Studios, piggybacks on this sentiment to send a broader message.

"Housemarque made this game with care and consideration for many types of players while preserving challenge," he states. "There is more in your hands for how to play... but if this video game looks cool to you, then IT IS FOR YOU."

Speaking without having played Saros yet, Returnal had a pretty harsh difficulty curve in my experience. It's not the hardest roguelike I've ever played, but it was punishing at times, and completing it required a couple of breaks to psyche myself back up before jumping back into the wilds of Atropos.

Saros seems like more of the same, but with the added perk of the aforementioned modifiers and greater weapon choice. These include strengthening your defenses and giving you resistance to enemy infections. Those would've certainly made Returnal more bearable, and I can already see myself making ample use of them.

But to Sheth's central point, Saros is a massive release, one of the PlayStation 5's biggest of the year, and if it piques your interest whatsoever, you should consider giving it a go. Even if it's just to support Rahul Kohli as the lead character.

Saros Metacritic score makes it one of the best games of the year, putting the cosmic roguelike right behind Resident Evil Requiem and Pokemon Pokopia

Mewgenics co-creator Tyler Glaiel has spoken about the stress attached to releasing balance patches for popular games.

Over on Twitter, Glaiel says: "People be like 'The scariest thing a human can experience is drowning'. They clearly have never had to release a balance patch for a popular game on Steam."

This is in reference to the latest Mewgenics patch released onto the game's beta branch on Steam. The patch has been pretty well received for elements like the Mage buffs, but a nerf to the Mutation stat has been a sticking point for some, as the meta has been to create a big, mutated, inbred army of cats so far. Plus, the Hunter's somewhat overpowered Scattershot skill has been nerfed as its upgraded version no longer exempts allies.

Of course, Glaiel's fear is somewhat understandable, we've literally just seen Slay the Spire 2 plummet to 66% positive lifetime Steam reviews after its first major update earlier this month, as fans' negative reaction to some of the changes have been a widespread issue among the community – even if the devs don't really agree with some of the criticism levelled toward some of its bosses.

Granted, I've played 120-odd hours of Mewgenics and haven't really bothered to go for meta builds or min-max my stats in any way. Sure, it's cool that these in-depth breeding mechanics are in there, and it's undoubtedly super impressive stuff, but I'm just happy building up my cat army and rolling with the punches. Unless something is super busted, I don't really see the issue with changes like this to single-player games.

Slay the Spire 2 won't get an endless mode, but creator says "maybe a modder" can "make it work."

Saros is out soon for most and out already for some, with different editions of the game having different release times and release dates accordingly. If you bought the deluxe edition it'll be playable for you right now, but those who bought the standard edition will have to wait until April 30, as we'll lay out below. We'll make clear the different release times for Saros, broken down by region and time zone accordingly.

Release times and date for Saros Standard Edition

If you pre-ordered the Standard Edition of Saros, you can expect to play it in your region / time zone at the following times and dates:

• PDT (US West Coast): 9 P.M., Wednesday, April 29, 2026
• EDT (US East Coast): 12 A.M., Thursday, April 30, 2026
• BST (UK): 12 A.M. BST, Thursday, April 30, 2026
• CEST (West Europe): 12 A.M., Thursday, April 30, 2026
• JST (Japan): 12 A.M., Thursday, April 30, 2026

It's worth clarifying that with these being digital preorders, for most players these games go live on the PlayStation Store at midnight for your local time zone, rather than simultaneous releases across the globe. You can also pre-load the game if you pre-order, with it taking 83.5GB of storage space.

Deluxe Edition and Early Access Release times and date

If you purchased the Deluxe Edition of Saros, it should be available to play right now, as the Deluxe Edition includes 48 hours of early access to the game, effectively allowing you to play it two days prior to the standard release in your region. If you haven't bought the game yet, buying the Deluxe Edition should allow you to play it immediately (at least, once it's downloaded).

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Slay the Spire 2 has been wildly successful so far – notwithstanding the piles of negative reviews that every balance change for the early access game seems to garner – but the developers at Mega Crit initially didn't want to make a sequel at all. Instead, they'd hoped to just keep updating the original with new features and tweaks, but that started to look pretty unrealistic when their publisher shut down.

"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,'" as Slay the Spire co-creator Casey Yano says in Edge Magazine issue #423. "But I guess we were a little naive."

I've been unable to track down that specific Reddit comment from Yano, but it's easy to see how a small indie studio, flush with the unexpected success of a breakout hit, might consider just continuing to update it forever. After all, that strategy has worked for the likes of Terraria, Stardew Valley, and No Man's Sky – why not Slay the Spire?

It seems a big part of the issue is Humble Games, the now-defunct publishing arm of Humble Bundle. Humble Games handled Slay the Spire's console and mobile ports, but when the label shut down in 2024, those versions of Slay the Spire were suddenly in some form of limbo. Yano doesn't go into the specifics of the status of Humble's Slay the Spire ports here, but it seems there's quite a roadblock in place.

"We couldn't just work more on Slay the Spire 1, because its future was very murky," Yano explains. On top of the issues with the console and mobile ports, there's also all the existing PC mods to consider. If Mega Crit wanted to make any real additions to the Slay the Spire formula, "then it would have to be a sequel."

Slay the Spire 2's fate twisted again when Mega Crit literally flipped a coin to decide on its next project. Years later, the king of roguelike card games is back in rare form, with what feels like the entirety of the first game remolded and expanded. We've got new classes, cards, relics, and enemies, but ask any Ironclad, Silent, or Defect player and they'll tell you Slay the Spire 2 very much feels like home.

Slay the Spire 2 almost had fewer new cards because of the co-creator's love for Dark Souls, but testers "were not jiving with that at all."

Slay the Spire 2 has been on my mind, and my thumbs, a lot lately. I've been playing it for work, my hourly playtime is well into triple digits, and it's time we had an honest conversation about something. Sometimes, this game is genuinely, heartbreakingly unfair.

I can already hear the cries of skill issue, deriding me for having the temerity to get annoyed at a roguelite, but hear me out. This game, at its base difficulty but especially once you start getting into ascensions, is extremely reliant on your builds.

Whether you're putting together a cloned Claw build for The Defect that can shred through enemies once it gets going or a poison build for The Silent, you need to go into the game with a handful of possible builds in mind. By the time you've completed Act 1, you need to have a focused build that you're working towards. Playing cards haphazardly will do nothing but get your character killed.

Play your hand

But you can only do so much to prep. The cards that you get are randomly pulled from those that you've unlocked, which means that as the game progresses and you unlock more cards, you dilute your pool of possible cards. This means that you get two things: more flexibility and more opportunity to be dashed upon the rocks by random chance.

This dualistic nature runs all the way through Slay the Spire 2 like a seam of fool's gold. You will never know high highs and low lows like you do in Slay the Spire 2, a game that manages to oscillate between being as frustrating as smashing your thumb with a hammer to being as joyous as an angelic choir.

If you can nail a build down, when the whims of the game's random chance grants you just the right cards at just the right time, you can punch your way through the Spire. Just yesterday, I had a ridiculously good Necrobinder build where everything came together. Osty was as strong as an Ox(ty) and Squeeze ended the fight with the Queen in a skeletal handful of rounds. Then I decided to try and do the same with The Defect and was showered with cards for all different kinds of build, meaning fewer synergies and fewer opportunities to hand out beatdowns. That poor little robot died in Act 2, I'm sad to say.

After so many hours in both the original Slay the Spire and its sequel, I've got to the point that if I don't get a few cards into a build by the time I'm halfway through Act 1, I restart. That's probably really bad on my part, honestly, but the game encourages this kind of perfectionism.

The most obvious point of comparison for this is Balatro, another roguelite deckbuilder that can get fiendishly difficult. However, the greater variety of decks, increased build possibilities that are more apparent, and the greater frequency with which you visit the shop, and thus have more options to add to your deck, tame that perfectionist feeling quite significantly.

Slay the Spire 2, however, has few shops spread across capacious acts and random card rewards for beating enemy encounters. Sure, you can skip card rewards, but that risks you being ill equipped for the elites that you need to fight to get relics. You see how this perfectionist streak is baked into the game?

Deathtones

I love Slay the Spire 2. But I also hate Slay the Spire 2. Its basic design requires a precision on your part that is then thrown into disarray by the random chance that is inherent in the game, which feels significantly more severe than it does in other roguelites, even other build-focused ones like Vampire Survivors.

Fundamentally, there will always be an element of luck in roguelikes and roguelites. That's part of what defines the genre, but some are harsher than others, and Slay the Spire 2 sits firmly on the harsh end, despite its massive popularity perhaps making it seem softer than other stablemates. Playing it can be heavenly or hellish, but there is something to be said for the game's Yin and Yang approach. Much like the Yin-Yang, even the negative side contains seeds of good, whether they be build inspirations, a deeper understanding of the mechanics, or unlocking new epochs.

I'm going to keep playing Slay the Spire 2. If you have even a cursory interest in roguelites, you should too, because it's a fantastic example of the genre. Just be prepared for the inevitable frustration when the cards don't come up the way that you want them to, because it'll come. Try not to throw your PC out of the window when it does.

Check out the best roguelikes to play for short, intense bursts of fun, from Balatro to Hades 2