Sunken Realms

Nine hours and three separate builds in, the number that sticks is 109 — the count of hand-crafted rooms the game draws from and rearranges every time you go back down. That's a real amount of built content behind the shuffle, and it shows early: the first few descents rarely repeat a room in a way you'd notice. By hour eight, on a fourth run through section three, a corridor came back with the same dead end and the same chest placement, and for the first time the "procedurally rearranged" framing felt like a marketing line more than a lived difference.

The camp is carrying more weight than the dungeon

Alric's story — a son going after a father who walked into Aedaria and never came back — is told almost entirely at the surface camp, in short exchanges around a fire between runs, and it's better paced than expected from a solo six-year project. The Soul Forge sits at the center of that loop: gold and materials from a run get spent on stat upgrades, gear crafting, and potions before the next descent, and deciding what to prioritize with limited spoils did more to shape how each run felt than the combat itself. A run built around ranged spellcasting and one built around melee-and-block played like genuinely different approaches to the same rooms, which is the roguelite promise actually landing.

Runs completed

11

Deaths

17

Spells learned

6 of 14

Combat is competent, not distinctive

Melee swings and ranged casts both read clearly and hit with real weight, and dodging has a fair, readable window rather than a forgiving one. What it doesn't have yet, nine hours in, is a signature move or system that separates it from the pack of Hades-adjacent dungeon crawlers it's clearly drawing from. Enemy variety in the first three sections is real but not large, and by section four the same three or four enemy types were showing up in new combinations rather than new forms.

Where it slips

The room repetition noticed at hour eight is the main one — the rearranging is convincing for a while, but the 109-room pool means a long session can outrun it. Load time between the procedural room transitions is short but noticeable, with no way to skip the beat, which adds up across eleven runs. And while the campfire writing is good, there isn't much of it per run; two or three lines between descents is enough to keep the thread alive but not enough to carry hour nine the way it carried hour one.

The verdict

Worth it if you want a well-crafted, single-developer take on the camp-then-descend roguelite formula, with a Soul Forge progression loop that genuinely rewards planning and a father-son story told with more restraint than these games usually manage. Go in expecting the room variety to thin out past the halfway point rather than staying inexhaustible, and treat the three build archetypes as the real reason to keep playing once the shuffle stops surprising you.