The premise sounds like a gimmick and turns out to be an engine. You are Simon P. Jones, fourteen years old, and your great-uncle has left you a house called Mount Holly on one condition: find Room 46. The estate has forty-five rooms. The floor plan is a grid, five wide and nine deep, with the entrance hall at the bottom and a sealed antechamber at the top. Forty-five rooms, forty-six needed. That’s the whole hook, delivered in the first sixty seconds, and it takes most players a very long time to work out what kind of question it actually is.

Blue Prince arrived in April 2025 from Dogubomb — essentially Tonda Ros — published by Raw Fury, on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. It has been described as a puzzle game, a roguelike, a deduction game and a walking sim, and the reason nobody can settle on a label is that its central mechanic belongs to a genre that doesn’t have a name yet. You don’t explore Mount Holly. Youdraft it.

Drafting as level design

Here’s the loop. Open a door, and rather than a room, you get three blueprints: pick one, and it becomes the room behind that door, permanently for this run. Each blueprint shows its footprint — how many doors it has, and which walls they’re on — plus its cost and any rules attached. Some rooms only place in dead ends. Some cost gems. Some can only appear in the outer columns, or in the back half of the estate. Some are rank-limited, appearing once and never again.

Then you walk in, and the room does something. It might contain a key. It might contain a lever, a note, a shop, a security terminal, a slot for a coin. It might contain nothing except three more doors and three more decisions.

The resource that governs all of it issteps. You start each day with a step budget, every room you enter spends one, and when the steps run out the day ends, the house empties, and tomorrow’s Mount Holly is a fresh sheet of paper. Everything you built is gone.

Set that beside how roguelikes normally work and the difference is sharp. InDead Cells orHades, the run generates a level and you react to it. InBlue Prince the run generatesoptions and you author the level from them, which makes every door a small architectural argument with yourself. Do I take the room with four exits because I need the reach, or the room with one exit because it has a chest in it and I’m nearly out of steps? Do I place the Boiler Room now, knowing it’s cheap and useless, because placing anything else here costs gems I don’t have?

The genius is that the drafting rules are themselves the puzzle. A room that only spawns in dead ends means dead ends have value. A room that must sit on the west wall means the west wall is a resource. Within a few hours you stop seeing a floor plan and start seeing a constraint satisfaction problem with wallpaper. I can think of no other game where the act ofbuilding the dungeon is the intellectual content and the act of walking through it is the reward.

The step economy is the difficulty curve

The elegance of steps as a currency is that it prices everything at once. Curiosity costs steps. Backtracking costs steps. A room that turns out to be a dead end with a locked door costs a step going in and, if you routed badly, several more getting back out. There is no health bar and nothing kills you; the only enemy is the walk itself.

That makesBlue Prince one of the very few games wherelayout efficiency is the skill. Good players don’t have faster reflexes. They have a better sense of the grid — they know that placing a corridor at row three buys them lateral movement for the rest of the day, that a room with doors on three sides at the bottom of the map is worth more than the same room at the top, that spending eight steps on a detour to a shop is only correct if you already have the coins. The difficulty curve is invisible because it’s inside your own planning, and it flattens the moment you get better at reading the grid, which is the most honest kind of progression there is.

The genuine cruelty is that Mount Holly is stingy with the thing you need most, which is reach. Room 46 sits at the top of the grid. Getting there requires an unbroken chain of drafted rooms from the entrance hall to the antechamber, which requires door alignment, which requires luck, which requires that you spend your entire day building a corridor rather than looting one. The house is constantly offering you interesting rooms that lead nowhere and boring rooms that lead north, and choosing correctly means choosing boredom over and over. That’s a real design risk, and the game takes it deliberately.

What actually persists

If the house resets every day, what carries? Two things, and the split is the reason the game works.

The first is a modest layer of permanent unlocks — keys, codes, tools, changes to what can appear in the drafting pool. It’s real, it’s slow, and it’s the least interesting part.

The second isyou. What actually persists across days is the notebook in your head. The house is stuffed with documents: letters, ledgers, memos, a newspaper, plaques, timetables, a set of family records that don’t agree with each other. Read them and a second game emerges underneath the drafting one, made of numbers you can’t use yet, names that mean nothing yet, and rules that turn out to be literal. The most powerful thing you can take out of a run is a fact.

This is the same trickReturn of the Obra Dinn andLorelei and the Laser Eyes run: the gate is knowledge, and knowledge doesn’t reset.Blue Prince welds that to a roguelike’s structural churn, so the randomness that would ruin a fixed puzzle game becomes the delivery mechanism for the clues. A run that ends four rooms short of the antechamber still hands you three documents, and the documents are the actual progress. Once you understand that, the failed days stop feeling like failures. You aren’t trying to reach Room 46 today. You’re trying to learn something today, and Room 46 falls out of enough somethings.

I’d argue the real ancestor is the old cassette-era adventure: the games I typed into a C64 in the eighties where you kept the map on graph paper because the machine wasn’t going to keep it for you, and the memory the game relied on was yours.Blue Prince is that idea rebuilt with a modern designer’s understanding of variance. The graph paper is back. Get a real notebook — the in-game journal does some of the filing, and it doesn’t do the thinking.

Where it fights itself

Two things chafe, and both come from the same source.

Variance can hand you a genuinely dead day. Not a hard day — anothing day, where the drafts come up cheap and doorless, you’re out of gems by row three, and you walk the corridor already knowing there’s no route north. Ten minutes of a game that has no combat and no failure state is ten minutes of walking. The design’s answer is that documents still drop, and the answer holds most of the time. It doesn’t hold all of the time.

And the late game asks a lot. Once you’ve cracked the surface,Blue Prince keeps going — considerably further than most players expect — into puzzles that assume you’ve been transcribing details for thirty hours and cross-referencing them off-screen. That’s not a flaw so much as a filter, and the game is admirably unbothered about who it filters out. It won’t tell you when you’re done. It won’t tell you that you missed something. It just leaves it there.

The verdict

Blue Prince is the rarest thing in games: a mechanic nobody has done before, executed by someone who understood exactly what it was for. The drafting isn’t a delivery system for the puzzle box; the draftingis the puzzle box, and the manor is the physical form of a decision tree. It is also gentle, funny, beautifully lit, and quietly sad about the family it’s describing — a game that could have been a pure abstraction and chose to be a house instead.

The step economy will frustrate anyone who wants a puzzle game to sit still and be solved. Everyone else gets forty hours of the specific, disreputable joy of realising that a note you skimmed on day six was an instruction. Play it on PC if you want the notebook open on a second screen; the console versions play identically and you’ll just want paper instead.

If it lands, go toLorelei and the Laser Eyes next for the same respect for your attention, orAnimal Well for the same conviction that the real progression happens in your head.

Spoilers below

The moment the game shows its hand is when you realise the forty-five-room count was never the constraint. Mount Holly’s grid has edges, and the game spends its opening hours training you to treat those edges as walls. They are not. Once the estate proves it can extend past its own footprint, the drafting rules you’d internalised as physics turn out to be conventions, and every “impossible” placement you’d written off becomes a question again.

That’s the structural rhyme with the story. The house is a document about a family that lied about its own shape — an inheritance built on a boundary that was drawn wrong on purpose. Simon is handed a floor plan and a puzzle, and the puzzle is that the floor plan is a claim, not a fact. Learning to distrust the grid and learning to distrust the paperwork are the same act, arriving at the same time, which is about as tight as a game and its theme ever get.

There is a version of this review that is four words long and reads “it costs four quid”. Poncle’sVampire Survivors has been on Steam since December 2021, went 1.0 in October 2022, and has spent the years since being the cheapest thing on anyone’s account that they have still somehow put a hundred hours into. It won the BAFTA for Best Game in 2023, which remains the funniest sentence in recent awards history — a browser game built in Phaser by one bloke in Italy, sat in the same category as budgets with a comma in them.

The joke has been told. What has not been examined nearly enough is the actual engineering. BecauseVampire Survivors is one of the cleanest pieces of subtractive design I have seen since the sixteen-bit years, and the thing it subtracted is the thing every other game in its lineage assumed was load-bearing.

The removal

You move. That is the input. The left stick, or WASD, and nothing else. Your weapons fire on their own timers, in their own patterns, forever, whether you are paying attention or not. Monsters come in from the edges in tides. Every kill drops an experience gem; every few gems is a level; every level throws up a small menu of weapons and passive items and asks you to pick one. Thirty minutes on the clock, and at thirty minutes Death arrives and takes the run off you regardless of what you have built.

Strip a twin-stick shooter of the aiming and you would expect to be left with nothing. Instead you are left withpositioning, and it turns out positioning was carrying the whole genre the entire time. The direct ancestor here is well documented — Galante has been open that he took the shape fromMagic Survival, a Korean mobile game from 2021 — but the deeper root is the arcade lineage that runs throughRobotron: 2084, where the second stick was really just a way of expressing which pile of enemies you had decided to be nearest to.Vampire Survivors noticed that the interesting decision in that genre was always the standing — the shooting was bookkeeping — and had the nerve to delete everything else.

What this does to the moment-to-moment is peculiar and specific. You stop reading the screen as targets and start reading it as terrain. A whip that fires horizontally means you want enemies on your flanks; a King Bible orbiting your body means you want to be inside the crowd rather than backing away from it; a Garlic aura means the correct play is to walkinto the thing that is killing you. Your build silently rewrites what “safe” means, and half the skill of a run is noticing that the geometry of safety changed two levels ago and you are still moving like the old build.

The economy underneath

The level-up menu is where the design does its real work, and it is worth being precise about why it lands, because “you get a choice of upgrades” describes a hundred games that feel like nothing.

You have six weapon slots and six passive slots. Weapons cap at level eight. A capped weapon plus the correct passive item unlocks anevolution, which arrives only from a chest dropped by a boss after the ten-minute mark. That is three separate resources — slots, levels, time — all converging on a single delivery window, and the effect is a run that has a genuine dramatic structure rather than a difficulty slope. Minutes zero to ten are you deciding what the run is about. Ten to twenty are the evolutions cashing in and the screen turning to soup. Twenty to thirty are you finding out whether the soup is thick enough to survive what is coming.

The screen-turning-to-soup is the part people describe as the game playing itself, and it is where the criticism usually stops. I would argue the opposite: the soup is thereward, and it is a reward the design has to earn by making the first ten minutes genuinely precarious. EarlyVampire Survivors, before your first evolution, is a horrible tense scrabble in which one bat can end you and the gems are always eight steps too far away. The power fantasy at minute twenty-two is only legible because you remember being nearly killed by a bat at minute two. Take away the fragile opening and the whole thing collapses into a screensaver, which is precisely what happens in the dozens of imitators that let you start strong.

Galante’s professional background before this — years designing for the gambling industry — is a matter of public record and he has talked about it openly, and you can see the fingerprints without needing to be rude about it. The gem-collection radius, the near-miss, the drip of small rewards between the big ones: this is somebody who knows exactly which frequency the reward loop wants to run at. The difference is that a slot machine’s schedule exists to extract, and this one exists to keep a decision interesting. Same tooling, aimed somewhere better.

Where it fights itself

The meta-progression is the weak joint. Gold from runs buys permanent PowerUps — more might, more speed, more luck, more revives — and it does the standard roguelite thing of making early runs artificially bad so that later runs can feel earned. It works, in the sense that it kept me coming back. It also means that a substantial chunk of your first several hours is spent losing to a wall that exists because a spreadsheet says you have not paid yet.Hades, which I have written abouthere, got away with this by attaching a story beat to every failed run;Vampire Survivors attaches a number.

The Arcana system, added at 1.0, is the more interesting late addition and the more uneven one. Arcana cards are run-wide rule changes — one makes your first weapon fire on a timer independent of cooldown, another converts recovery into damage — and the good ones are genuinely build-defining in the wayBalatro’s jokers are, a comparison I have leaned on before inthat review. The problem is that a few of them are so much better than the rest that the “choice” of two Arcana at the start of a run is frequently no choice at all. When your deck contains a card that trivialises the ceiling, the ceiling stops being a place you visit.

And the content has sprawled. Poncle has kept adding — Legacy of the Moonspell in late 2022, Tides of the Foscari in 2023, anAmong Us crossover, aContra one, and eventually the official Konami-licensedOde to Castlevania in 2024, which retroactively legitimised an aesthetic the game had been cheerfully gesturing at since the itch.io days. Each pack is generous and cheap. Collectively they have turned a game whose original virtue was that you could understand all of it into one with a collection screen you scroll. The free Adventures mode was an honest attempt to re-impose a shape on that pile, and it half works.

What it is actually for

Here is the read.Vampire Survivors is a game about the pleasure of a system you built becoming legible to you all at once. The reason it survives its own tedium — and there is tedium; minutes twenty-two to thirty of a strong run are frequently just holding a direction — is that the legibility arrives as asensation rather than as information. You do not read a stat sheet and conclude the build worked. You watch the screen fill with your own consequences.

That is a real, specific thing that games can do and other media cannot, and it is why the hundred clones that copied the auto-attack and the XP gems mostly feel hollow. They copied the loop. The loop was never the point. The point was the ten-minute window of genuine fear that makes the twentieth minute mean something, and fear is expensive to design and free to leave out.

Play it on whatever you have — it is on PC, Xbox and Game Pass, Switch, PlayStation, and free on mobile with ads, and it runs on hardware that would struggle to open a browser tab. Buy the base game, ignore the DLC until the base game bores you, and give it the first hour on the understanding that the first hour is meant to be a bit miserable.

If it hooks you, go toRisk of Rain 2 next, which does something structurally related with a clock that gets angrier the longer you dawdle, and which asks for rather more of your hands.

Spoilers below

The unlock tree is the real second game, and it is where the design shows most personality.

Moongolow is the trick everyone remembers: a stage that runs a fixed fourteen minutes and then ends in a cataclysm, dropping you somewhere considerably less pleasant, and it is the only moment inVampire Survivors that has anything you could call a set piece. It works because the game has spent hours teaching you that stages are inert arenas, and then one of them turns out to have a plot.

Green Acres and The Bone Zone are jokes — endless, arbitrary, essentially test rooms left in with the lights on — and their presence tells you something honest about the project’s origins. This was a browser toy that never fully stopped being one, and Poncle has declined to sand off the parts that give it away. The secret characters unlocked by typing nonsense into the main menu are the same instinct: a game that remembers cheat codes were once a folk practice rather than a store page.

The Randomazzo, the Yellow Sign, the escalating chain of relics that each unlock the ability to find the next thing — this is the structure that keeps people at four hundred hours, and it is essentially an ARG bolted to a screensaver. Whether that is genius or a cheerful mess depends entirely on how you feel about a game that hides its best ideas behind its worst ones. I lean towards genius, on the grounds that nothing else that came out in 2022 was this confident about what it could afford to leave out.

Roguelikes have always had a story problem, and it is a structural one. The genre runs on repetition — you die, you start again, the numbers reshuffle — and narrative runs on progression. Put the two in the same box and the story becomes something the player skips. Every roguelike before 2020 solved this by having almost no story, or by putting it in item descriptions and letting the community assemble it on a wiki.

Hades solved it by making the repetition the subject.

Supergiant Games put it into early access on the Epic Games Store in December 2018, moved it to Steam a year later, and shipped 1.0 on 17 September 2020 for PC and Switch, with PlayStation and Xbox versions following in August 2021. It won a BAFTA for Best Game and, in 2021, the Hugo Award in a one-off Best Video Game category — the first game to get one, voted on by a science-fiction readership that does not hand those out for combat feel. Five years and a sequel later, the thing it worked out about narrative repetition is still the most important design idea of its generation, and it is still barely copied, because copying it is enormously expensive.

Death is a commute

Zagreus is the son of Hades. He is trying to leave the Underworld. When he dies, he goes into the River Styx and surfaces in a pool in the House of Hades, which is his father’s office, and his father looks up from his paperwork and says something about it.

That is the entire trick, and everything else follows from it. Once dying returns you to aplace where people live, the run structure stops being a loop and becomes a commute. You leave home, you fail, you come home, and everyone at home has an opinion about your failure. Achilles is by the door. Nyx is in the hall. Cerberus wants attention. Dusa is dusting the chandelier and worrying. Hypnos — who is asleep at the reception desk and reads out your cause of death like a receptionist reading a delivery note — is the joke that makes the whole thing work, because he turns each death into an event the fiction acknowledges.

CompareRogue Legacy (Cellar Door Games, 2013), the closest ancestor, which made death diegetic first: your heir inherits the estate and the traits, and the castle persists. That is the right idea, executed as a frame.Hades runs the idea through the writing, and the writing is the part nobody wants to pay for.

The dialogue queue is the actual engine

Here is the machinery, and it is worth understanding because it is the whole answer.

Creative director Greg Kasavin wrote north of twenty thousand lines of dialogue forHades, all of it voiced, most of it by a small cast with Logan Cunningham carrying an implausible share of it. Plenty of RPGs have more words than that, so the volume is only half of it. The innovation is the priority system underneath.

Every character has a large pool of possible lines, each tagged with conditions: what boons you carried, who you last spoke to, which boss killed you, how many runs you have made, what you gave whom, what you have already been told. When you walk up to Achilles, the game queues the most contextually specific line that has not yet fired, and burns it. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and the game notices; die to your father twice in a row and he has a fresh remark about it.

The player-facing consequence is thatHades almost never repeats itself for the first forty or fifty runs, and by the time it starts to, you are deep enough that the story has moved. The illusion is that the House is reacting to you. The reality is a very large deck being dealt in an intelligent order, and it holds because Supergiant did the unglamorous work of writing enough cards.

That is why nobody has copied it. The mechanic is cheap. The content pipeline feeding it is not.

The run itself

None of this would matter if the combat were poor, and it is excellent for a reason that has nothing to do with the writing: the boon system creates a build, and the build is a conversation with chance.

Six weapons, each with aspects that alter them substantially. Boons from the Olympians — Zeus chains lightning, Poseidon knocks back, Aphrodite weakens, Ares does damage over time, Artemis crits, Dionysus poisons — and boons that combine into Duo effects when the right two gods have already blessed you. The Mirror of Night spends darkness on permanent upgrades. Keepsakes weight the pool towards a god you want. Chthonic keys, nectar, ambrosia, the Fated List of Minor Prophecies: every currency you bring home buys something.

The design pressure this creates is genuinely good. You cannot plan a build. You can only lean — take Artemis’s keepsake, hope she shows up, adapt when she doesn’t. It is the same tension I wrote about inBalatro: The Poker Roguelike That Ate a Year: the run gives you a hand and the skill is recognising what hand you have been given rather than the one you wanted.Hades is more forgiving thanDead Cells about this, because the meta-progression means a bad run still pays, and that forgiveness is deliberate — the design wants you to get home so the House can talk to you.

The accessibility work belongs in the same argument. God Mode grants 20% damage resistance and adds 2% every time you die, so a player who keeps failing keeps getting stronger until the story unlocks. Supergiant understood that the story was the reward and refused to gate it behind execution. The Pact of Punishment runs the other way for players who want the difficulty back, in increments they choose.

What it owes

The Amiga I got in 1987 had a port ofRogue on it — Epyx published one in 1986 — and the thing aboutRogue is that it had no story at all and did not need one, because the dungeon generated the anecdote. You told the story afterwards, in a corridor at school. That is the genre’s founding compromise: the game supplies systems and the player supplies meaning.

Every roguelike since has honoured that compromise.Spelunky (2008),The Binding of Isaac (2011),FTL (2012) — all of them make you the author. What Supergiant did was ask whether a roguelike could supply the meaning itself without losing the generative anecdote, and the answer turned out to be yes, at a cost most studios cannot bear. Supergiant had also solved half of it already: the reactive narrator inBastion (2011) was the same technology in an earlier and cruder form, a system watching what you did and commenting on it.Hades is that prototype, nine years of iteration later, pointed at the exact structural problem it was built to solve.

The verdict

Hades is the rare game where the literary ambition and the mechanical design are the same object. Take the writing out and you have a very good isometric action roguelike with a strong art direction from Jen Zee and one of Darren Korb’s best scores. Take the combat out and you have a soap opera about a dysfunctional family of gods. Together they produce something neither half could: a story that getsbetter the more you fail at the game, which no other medium can do at all.

Its limits are honest ones. The Underworld’s four biomes are fixed in order — Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, the Temple of Styx — so the variation lives in the boons and the room layouts, and after enough runs the geography is a hallway you walk fast. The bosses are few, and Theseus and Asterius carry more than their share. The moment-to-moment combat lacks the mechanical strangeness of the best of its peers.

It is on everything — PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch — it runs on a toaster, and it is a complete game that never asked for a season pass.Hades II followed the same early-access route and only widens the argument: Supergiant found a design position nobody else can afford, and they are still the only ones standing on it.

What to play next:Dead Cells: The Roguevania Blueprint for the harsher, more mechanically dense version of the same loop, andRisk of Rain 2: The Difficulty Curve as a Clock for a roguelike that solves pacing with time pressure instead of dialogue.

Spoilers below

The ending is the part people argue about, and the argument is a good one.

Zagreus escapes, reaches the surface, finds Persephone, and then dissolves — because he cannot survive outside the Underworld, and the game makes you do this repeatedly. Ten times, in fact, before the story concludes. Supergiant took the one thing a roguelike player wants (the winning run) and made it a chore you must grind, which sounds like a design failure and is instead the sharpest joke in the game: reaching Persephone is the beginning of the story, and the reunion has to be earned through the same repetition everything else was.

The epilogue lands the thesis. Persephone comes home, the family is assembled, and the whole thing closes on a family reconciling — Hades and Zagreus finally speaking plainly, Nyx’s role revealed, Demeter thawing. It is a domestic ending to a myth about escape, and the reason it works is that you have spent sixty hours in that hallway hearing these people slowly change their minds about each other, one death at a time.

Hypnos, who has been reading out your causes of death for the entire game with no idea what is going on, gets the last laugh. Correctly.

It’s April, and the year is over. Balatro came out on 20 February, a solo project from an anonymous Canadian developer trading as LocalThunk, published by Playstack, and it passed a million copies inside a few weeks with no marketing apparatus worth the name. Whatever else 2024 does, it will be doing it in Balatro’s shadow, on people’s phones, on their lunch breaks, in the tab behind the spreadsheet.

The reason is not poker. LocalThunk has been fairly open about barely playing poker; the hand rankings are a UI he borrowed because everybody already knows them. What’s underneath is something else entirely, and it’s the oldest trick in this business done better than anyone has done it in years.

What it is

You play a run. Each run is a ladder of antes, and each ante has three blinds — Small, Big, and a Boss Blind with a rule attached that breaks something you were relying on. To beat a blind you need to reach a score. You have a standard 52-card deck, a hand of eight cards, a small number of plays and a small number of discards. You select up to five cards, the game identifies the poker hand, and it scores.

The scoring is the game. Every hand produces two numbers: chips and mult. Your score is chips × mult. A pair is 10 chips and 2 mult, so 20 points, and the Small Blind of Ante 1 wants 300. So you play a few hands, you scrape past, and you go to the shop.

The shop sells Jokers. There are a hundred and fifty of them and each is a rule. One adds chips per club. One adds mult for every discarded card. One multiplies your mult. One doubles the effect of the Joker to its left. You have five slots.

Also on sale: Tarot cards that transform individual playing cards, Planet cards that permanently level up a hand type so that every future Full House scores more, Spectral cards that do something drastic with a cost attached, and Vouchers that change the run’s rules outright. Fifteen starting decks, each rewriting the opening position. Eight escalating stakes that layer restrictions on top.

You need 300 at Ante 1. You need hundreds of thousands by Ante 8. Do the maths on what has to happen in between.

The whole design is one multiplication sign

Here’s the argument. Balatro’s central insight is that chips and mult are on opposite sides of an operator, and almost every decision in the game is you choosing which side to feed.

Chips are the safe side. They add. A Joker that gives +30 chips is +30 chips forever, dependable, boring, and it will not carry you past Ante 6.

Mult is the dangerous side. Additive mult is a solid living. Multiplicative mult — the ×3s, the ×1.5-per-condition, the ones that scale off something you have to maintain — is where the run either explodes or dies, because a ×3 is worth nothing without chips to multiply and everything with them.

So the run has a shape, and it’s the same shape every time and it never gets old: the first three antes you’re building a chip base and it feels like admin; the middle antes you’re hunting for the multiplier that will make the base mean something; and then either you find it and Ante 7 evaporates in one hand for four hundred thousand points, or you don’t and you die at Ante 6 doing perfectly respectable arithmetic.

That escalation from “300” to “300,000” across forty minutes is the drug.Vampire Survivors runs the identical curve — trivial start, absurd finish, the player’s own build outgrowing their comprehension — and does it with no decisions in it at all. Balatro makes yousign every step of the escalation. You chose the Joker. You sold the other one. You are personally responsible for the number, and the number is ridiculous, and that combination is why people cannot put it down.

The boss blinds are the balance patch

The obvious failure mode for a design like this is the degenerate strategy: find the one engine, run it every game, watch the game die. Balatro’s answer is elegant and it’s built into the ladder.

Every ante ends in a Boss Blind, and boss blinds attack your assumptions rather than your score. One debuffs an entire suit. One only lets you play one hand type. One blocks your discards. One turns your cards face down. One demands you play five cards every hand.

What that does structurally is force every build to have a second gear. A run built entirely on flushes meets the boss that debuffs a suit and has to have an answer ready three antes before it knew the question. So the shop stops being a place where you buy the best thing and becomes a place where you buy insurance you hope to waste, andthat tension — optimise now versus survive later — is a resource-allocation problem dressed up as a card game.

It’s the same instinct behindInscryption’s willingness to break its own rules, though Inscryption breaks the frame for a narrative payoff and Balatro breaks it purely to keep you honest. Slay the Spire did the ancestral version of this with its elite and boss relics; Balatro tightened the loop until an entire Spire run fits in the time it takes to boil a kettle.

Why it feels like that

Talk to anyone who’s played it and within a minute they’ll do the noise. The score punch — the way the chips tally with a rising pitch, each card flipping and firing, the Jokers going off in sequence left to right, the number climbing in audible steps and then the whole thing landing with a thump.

That’s not decoration. It’s the payoff structure made physical. The hand is already resolved the moment you press play; the game could show you the total instantly. Instead itperforms the multiplication, card by card, so you get four seconds of accelerating evidence that the thing you built works. It’s a fruit machine’s reel-stop rhythm applied to a decision you actually made, which is the respectable version of the same neurology.

The presentation carries it. Everything is chunky, CRT-warped, curled at the edges, and the whole thing looks like a card game running on a machine that should not be running a card game — a deliberate and very well-judged bit of texture from someone who clearly understands that a slightly wrong phosphor glow makes numbers feel heavier.

Where it fights itself

The luck floor is real. There are runs where the shop offers you nothing, the Jokers don’t talk to each other, and you die at Ante 5 having played correctly throughout. That’s the genre’s tax and Balatro pays it more than most, because the multiplicative engines it’s built around are binary — you have one or you don’t. Slay the Spire could grind out a win on fundamentals. Balatro often can’t.

The higher stakes expose the seams too. Gold Stake asks for a level of consistency that the deck’s variance doesn’t really support, and the result is a fair amount of run-abandoning at Ante 2 when the opening doesn’t cooperate. That’s not a difficulty setting so much as a lottery with a longer queue.

And the game had a genuinely stupid month. In March it was pulled from several storefronts after a ratings body decided that pictures of playing cards constituted gambling content and slapped an adult rating on a game with no money, no wagering and no chance to lose anything but forty minutes. Balatro simulates a slot machine’sfeel precisely, which is worth being honest about — the reel-stop dopamine is engineered and it works on people. It also has no gambling in it. The rating was wrong about the object and accidentally right about the mechanism.

The verdict

Balatro is the tightest escalation engine anyone has shipped this decade, built by one person, running on a laptop, in a genre everyone assumed was solved. Its real achievement is structural: it found a way to make a number going up feel earned, by putting a multiplication sign in the middle of it and making you responsible for both operands.

Buy it on whatever’s nearest. It runs on anything, the console versions are identical to the PC one, and the thing you’re buying is a forty-minute loop you’ll run four hundred times.

If the escalation is what got you,Vampire Survivors is the same curve with the decisions removed, andHades is the same loop with a reason to press start.

Spoilers below

The endless mode past Ante 8 is where the design’s real character shows, and it’s the part I’d argue about.

Beat Ante 8 and you can keep going, and the required score stops climbing steadily and starts going somewhere the number formatting can’t follow. The game begins displaying scores in scientific notation, then in a naming scheme that gives up on dignity entirely, and the blinds ask for figures that no honest engine can reach. The only way through is to break the game — to find the specific Joker interaction that produces a genuinely unbounded loop and let it eat itself.

That’s a confession. Endless mode admits that the multiplication engine, given no ceiling, has no interesting equilibrium; past a point the game is only playable by exploiting it, and LocalThunk simply left the door open and let people find out.

I think that’s the correct call, and it’s also why Ante 8 is where the game actually lives. The eight-ante ladder is the designed object: a curve tuned so that a good run peaks exactly as it ends, which is the hardest thing in this genre to get right and the reason Risk of Rain’s loop and Spire’s Act 4 both wobble. Balatro gets to stop while it’s still beautiful. Everything past that is the developer showing you the machinery, with the panel off, on purpose.

Most games measure difficulty against you. You get better, so they get harder; you fail, so they ease off. Risk of Rain 2 measures difficulty against the clock on the wall, and the clock does not care whether you are ready.

There is a readout in the top-right corner. It tells you how long you have been alive and it tells you, in a word, how much trouble you are in. It starts at Easy. Given long enough it stops using words that mean anything and starts shouting at you. Nothing you do slows it down. You can stand perfectly still in an empty corner of the first map and the number keeps climbing, the enemies keep getting more numerous and more expensive to kill, and the run you were carefully building gets taken away from you by arithmetic.

That single decision — difficulty as a function of elapsed time rather than progress — is what makes this game work, and it’s why it has outlasted a good many slicker things released since.

What it actually is

Hopoo Games released Risk of Rain 2 into Early Access in March 2019 and hit 1.0 in August 2020, on PC and every current console. It is the 3D sequel to Risk of Rain (2013), a 2D side-scroller with the same architecture and a much meaner silhouette. Gearbox published both and later bought the property outright.

The loop is simple enough to explain in a lift. You drop onto a stage as one of a roster of survivors — Commando, Huntress, Engineer, MUL-T and a dozen others, each unlocked by a specific challenge. You kill things, which drops gold. You spend gold on chests, which drop items. Items are permanent for the run and they stack: two of a thing is roughly twice the thing, six of a thing is a problem for whatever is standing in front of you. Somewhere on the map is a teleporter. You activate it, survive the boss and the charge window, and move to the next stage. After five stages you loop back to the beginning with everything harder and everything you own still in your pocket.

Items are the whole texture. A white common item that gives a small chance of chaining lightning is a shrug at one stack and a screen-clearing weather system at twelve. The red-tier legendaries change the rules rather than the numbers — one of them, famously, lets you cheat death once per stage, and the run in which you find it becomes a different run. Lunar items are the interesting ones: they come with an explicit cost, a real downside written on the tin, and picking one up is the game asking whether you understand your own build well enough to pay.

The clock is the design

Here is the thing everything else hangs from. Gold scales with time. Chest prices scale with time. Enemy health and damage scale with time. So the more chests you open, the stronger you are — and the longer you spent opening them, the stronger everything else is.

That’s not a difficulty setting. It’s an economy with an interest rate.

Every decision in a run is the same decision wearing a different hat. There’s a chest on a ledge across the map. Getting there costs ninety seconds. Ninety seconds is worth a certain amount of enemy scaling, and the item in the chest is worth an unknown amount of power, and you have to price that trade with incomplete information while a horde is assembling behind you. Do it right and you leave the stage marginally ahead. Do it four times in a row on a stage where the chests roll badly and you leave the stage behind the curve, and being behind the curve compounds, because a weaker character kills more slowly, and killing more slowly takes more time, and time is the thing that is hurting you.

The genius is that the punishment for greed is never immediate. Spelunky’s ghost arrives at two minutes thirty and tells you off in person. Risk of Rain 2 lets you overstay, gives you the loot, sends you happily to the next stage, and then kills you eleven minutes later with a bill you signed without reading. You almost never die of the mistake you just made. You die of the mistake you made two stages ago, and by the time you understand that, you’ve internalised the pacing in a way no tutorial could have taught you.

Compare the timed doors inDead Cells, which do something adjacent and much more legible: run fast, get a reward, and the reward is gone the instant the timer expires. That’s a clean, honest bargain you can evaluate in a second. Risk of Rain 2’s bargain is smeared across an hour and you’re never quite sure you got it right. The uncertainty is the product.

Why the power fantasy lands

Roguelikes have a structural problem with escalation. If the player gets strong enough to trivialise the content, the game stops being interesting; so most designs cap the player, or scale the enemies to match, or reset the whole apparatus every run. Hopoo went the other way and let the ceiling off entirely.

By the third loop a well-built survivor is a war crime. The screen is a smear of proc effects, ricochets, mortars, satellite lasers and burning ground, and you are killing bosses in the time it takes them to finish their spawn animation. This is the same joy thatVampire Survivors later refined into a pure distillate — the pleasure of watching your own build outgrow your ability to follow what it’s doing.

The difference is that Risk of Rain 2 charges for it. Vampire Survivors ends at thirty minutes and hands you the victory lap. Risk of Rain 2’s clock keeps ticking past the point where your build is godlike, and the scaling curve is exponential where your item stacking is roughly linear. So the god phase is a phase. It has a shelf life. You are always, at every moment of the run, watching two lines on an invisible graph and trying to guess where they cross — and the right play is often to leave a stage with money in your pocket and chests unopened, which feels physically wrong and is correct.

Very few games make walking away from free loot into a skill.

Where it fights itself

The 3D translation cost something real. The 2013 original was a side-scroller, and a side-scroller tells you where everything is. In three dimensions, with a camera behind your shoulder and enemies spawning off-screen in every direction, the fair-fight legibility goes. Late in a run you will be killed by something you never saw, from a direction you had no reason to check, and the game’s answer to that is a minimap you don’t have and a sound mix that is already saturated. The tension between “readable combat” and “the screen should be chaos” never quite resolves.

The other cost is the ramp-in. The first ten minutes of a run are, by design, the least interesting ten minutes. Difficulty is low, items are few, and you are essentially doing paperwork to build a character. Once you’ve had four hundred runs, those minutes are a chore you tolerate. The scaling clock justifies it — you cannot skip the early game without also skipping the item economy — and I still think it’s the strongest argument for the design and the most obvious tax on your evening.

Multiplayer is where the seams show most. Up to four players share a stage, item drops don’t scale cleanly, and the difficulty coefficient rises with player count in a way that makes an uncoordinated four-stack a farm and a coordinated one a rout. It’s a joy to play with friends and it is not a balanced experience, and Hopoo were fairly upfront that it was never going to be.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches for Isaac or Spelunky here, and the resemblance is surface. The real ancestor of Risk of Rain 2 is the arcade timer — the coin-op design where the machine’s job is to end your session on a schedule, whatever your skill, and skill only buys you a longer schedule. Every one of those cabinets had a hidden rank system pushing back against a player who got too good.

The trick Hopoo pulled is exposing that clock, putting it in the corner of the screen, and making it the thing you play against rather than the thing that plays against you.Hades solved repetition by making the loop mean something narratively. Risk of Rain 2 solved it by making the loop mean something economically. Both are answers to the same question: why should I press start again? Hopoo’s answer is that last time you left two chests behind and you’ve spent the intervening hour wondering whether you should have.

The verdict

Risk of Rain 2 is the most honest tension engine in the genre. It gives you one number, tells you the number is your enemy, hands you every tool you need to manage it, and then quietly makes managing it the entire game. The combat is loose, the camera is a liability, the early minutes drag, the multiplayer is lopsided — and none of that matters much, because the thing it does is something almost nothing else does, and it does it for as long as you keep asking.

Play it on PC, where the mod scene has been carrying it for years and where the frame rate survives what the third loop does to the entity count. The console versions are complete and competent; they just wilt at the top end, which is where the game is.

Then, if the loop takes, go and see whatVampire Survivors does when you remove the ceiling and the aiming. It’s the same drug with the difficulty clock swapped for a shorter fuse.

Spoilers below

The reason the loop mechanic works — going back to Stage 1 with a difficulty coefficient that has never reset — is that it makes the map geography a memory test rather than a discovery. You already know where the chests are on Titanic Plains. You know where the shrine spawns cluster. So the second loop asks you to run a route you know at a speed you can’t quite sustain, and the pleasure flips from exploration to execution without changing a single asset.

The obliteration ending is the part I keep thinking about. You can end a run voluntarily, at the obelisk, by choosing to erase yourself. It’s the only exit that isn’t death and it costs you the run’s rewards. A game built entirely on the tension between greed and the clock offers you, as its cleanest ending, the option to stop wanting things. That’s a better joke than it has any right to be, and it took me a long time to notice it was a joke about me.

Dead Cells left early access on 7 August 2018, which makes this month its fifth birthday and a reasonable moment to ask a question the launch reviews couldn’t: does the thing hold? Plenty of 2018’s roguelites are now a footnote and a Steam sale. Motion Twin’s is still receiving expansions —Return to Castlevania landed in March this year — and is still the game every new hybrid gets measured against. The word they coined for it, “RogueVania”, has outlived the marketing that produced it, which almost never happens.

The reason is a weld. Two genres that should reject each other were joined, and the joint holds under load.

The two things that shouldn’t fit

A roguelike is about a run: procedural, disposable, and meaningful only because death erases it. A Metroidvania is about a map: handmade, persistent, and meaningful because you memorise it and come back with the double jump. One genre throws the level away. The other asks you to live in it. Welding them naively gives you a procedural map nobody can memorise, which is the worst of both — the tedium of backtracking with none of the mastery.

Motion Twin — the Bordeaux worker co-operative that made this, before spinning off Evil Empire to carry the post-launch work — solved it by separating what is random from what is fixed. Thebiomes are fixed: the Prisoners’ Quarters, the Promenade of the Condemned, the Ramparts, the Ossuary. Each has a fixed character, fixed enemies, fixed exits. Theinteriors are procedural. So the map you memorise is the graph of biomes and how they connect, and the corridor you’re walking through right now is disposable. You learn the country and improvise the street. That’s the whole trick, and everyone who copiedDead Cells copied that before they copied the sword.

The Metroidvania half is then delivered through runes. The Vine Rune, the Teleportation Rune, the Ram Rune, the Spider Rune and the Homunculus Rune are permanent traversal unlocks, earned once from specific fights, and each one permanently opens branches of the biome graph that were previously closed. This is exactly a Metroidvania gate — a door you couldn’t open, then can — laid over a structure that resets every death. You lose your gear. You keep your keys. It is a startlingly clean idea and it took the genre most of a decade to arrive at it.

The flask is a design argument

Here’s the part I think people undervalue.Dead Cells gives you a health flask with a small number of charges per run. It is the only healing you can rely on. Everything else in the economy — the cells you bank, the gold you spend, the gear you pick up — is abundant. Health is not.

That single scarcity does an enormous amount of work. It makes every trade legible: taking a hit costs a fraction of a finite resource, so “I’ll just tank this” is a decision with a visible price rather than a shrug. It converts the combat from a damage race into a bookkeeping problem you solve with your thumbs. And it makes thepace of the game non-negotiable in a way a health bar alone never manages.

Timed doors are the other half of that argument. Scattered through the biomes are doors that open only if you reach them under a time limit, and behind them is good gear. Nothing forces you through one. The game simply prices dawdling and lets you decide. That’s a far more elegant instrument than a chase sequence or a countdown, because it produces the behaviour by making it attractive instead of compulsory. You start speedrunning the early biomes for a reward, and by the time you notice, you’ve internalised a movement grammar — roll, hit, roll — that the later biomes require.

By the time you’re on 5 Boss Stem Cells, the difficulty tier that gates the true ending, Malaise makes the argument explicit: it accumulates over time, buffs the enemies, and is pushed back by killing things. Aggression stops being a style. It becomes the only sustainable metabolism.

Where the loop fights itself

The build system is the seam. Weapons scale with one of three stat colours — Brutality, Tactics, Survival — and you raise a colour by choosing scrolls at the end of each level. Commit early and hard, and the numbers explode. Spread across colours and you end a run with a broad, weak character who dies to the first elite that respects itself.

This is a legible, teachable system, and it’s also a tax on the thing the game otherwise does best.Dead Cells is at its finest when you’re improvising with whatever the floor gave you. The scaling maths quietly instructs you to stop improvising and start filtering: a purple weapon in a red run is litter, however interesting it is. The game hands you a toybox and then explains that three quarters of the toys are wrong today. Custom Mode, added in 2020, is Motion Twin’s own admission of the problem — it lets you delete items from the pool so the drops match the build you wanted anyway.

The other seam is the Collector. Cells are the meta-currency; you bank them at checkpoints and spend them on permanent unlocks, and losing a run before a checkpoint loses the cells you were carrying. The intent is tension. The effect, often, is that a good run’s most stressful moment is a bank transfer.Hades answered this better two years later by making death a narrative beat and the currency almost unlosable, which I’ve arguedat length elsewhere.Risk of Rain 2 answered it byputting a clock on the whole thing and letting greed do the rest. Both are downstream of this game’s willingness to put a real cost on the meta-layer.

The ancestors

The obvious lineage isRogue Legacy (2013) for the meta-progression andCastlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) for the map, andDead Cells nods so hard at the latter that it eventually licensed it. Fine, and true, and not the interesting answer.

The real ancestor of howDead Cellsfeels is the 16-bit European action-platformer, and specifically the Factor 5 lineage. I had a C64 from the mid-eighties and an Amiga from ‘87, and the thingTurrican understood in 1990 — the thing most of its imitators didn’t — was that a movement system is a rhythm instrument. You playedTurrican’s levels the way you’d play a phrase, with the run and the roll and the fire button as a chord.Dead Cells has that exactly: the roll’s invincibility frames, the way a weapon’s animation commits you for a fixed number of frames, the sound design snapping on the connect. It’s an instrument game wearing a roguelite’s clothes.

That’s also why the procedural interiors don’t hurt. When the pleasure is in executing a phrase, the room can be arbitrary. The run is the composition. The map is the key signature.

The verdict

Five years and five content drops on —Rise of the Giant,The Bad Seed,Fatal Falls,The Queen and the Sea,Return to Castlevania — it has the rare distinction of having been correct on day one and better every year since. The weld holds. The flask still hurts. The movement is still the best in the genre, and I include everything that has arrived since in that.

Its flaw is honest and structural: a colour-coded build economy that fights the improvisation it otherwise sells, patched over with an options menu. Live with it. Custom Mode exists for a reason and using it is not cheating, whatever the forums say.

It’s on everything — PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, mobile — and the Switch version remains the one I’d point at, because this is a game built in eight-minute phrases and eight-minute phrases belong on a handheld. Start on 0 Boss Stem Cells. Take the timed doors. Pick a colour and stay married to it.

If the movement is what grabs you,Metroid Dread is the handmade version of the same instrument — no procedural anything, every corridor authored, and a demonstration of what the fixed map buys when you commit to it fully.

Spoilers below

The Hand of the King is the fight the whole design points at, and it’s a deliberate anticlimax in the best way: after a dozen-odd biomes of improvisation, the final boss is a pure test of the grammar. No gimmick, no phase where your build stops working, just the roll timing you’ve been practising since the Prisoners’ Quarters, asked for at speed. Motion Twin resisted the urge to make the last fight a puzzle. It’s an exam.

The true ending needs 5BC, and that gate is the smartest editorial decision in the game. Everything the story has to say about the island concerns a plague that keeps reanimating what it kills, and 5BC is the tier where Malaise forces you to kill continuously to stay alive. You have to run the disease’s own metabolism before the game will explain the disease. A mechanic and a story agreeing with each other is a rarer event in this genre than the trophy list suggests, and Motion Twin got there by hiding the payoff behind the difficulty that proves the point.