Soul Knight

You drop into a floor, clear a room of enemies, and pick up whatever the last one dropped, which might be a sensible rifle or might be something that fires laser cats.

A pixel dungeon built for a thumb

ChillyRoom’s dungeon crawler still carries its indie fingerprints, and that is the compliment. Pixel art with actual expression, a virtual stick that does not fight you, and an enormous pile of characters and guns to pull from on the way down. Every character comes with its own skill and shield behaviour, so switching changes how you approach a room rather than recolouring the sprite.

How a run actually goes

Energy powers the strange guns, the shield regenerates when you stop getting hit, and the tension comes from deciding whether to push one more room or take the safe exit. Death is cheap. You lose the run, keep the unlock progress, and go again, which is the right call for a game people play standing up.

Weapon rolls that keep arriving

The pool is the reason the early and middle hours stay lively, because odd combinations keep turning up and some of them are broken in your favour. Finding out what a gun does by firing it is half the fun.

A co-op lobby that actually works

Multiplayer is properly implemented rather than bolted on, and dragging a friend into a floor changes the pacing of a fight instead of just doubling the damage. Updates keep arriving with new characters, and what is sold skews towards cosmetics and convenience rather than power, which is unusually restrained for the category.

When the rooms start repeating

Play long enough and the layouts begin to look familiar, which is the fault that eventually ends a run of evenings. A roguelite survives on the sense that the next floor might show you something, and when you start recognising a room from its doorway, the unlock path is the only thing left pulling you forward. That path then slows to a crawl, clearly hoping you will consider a purchase rather than another twenty runs. The controls, good as they are on glass, are also noticeably better with a controller, which is worth knowing if you only ever play on a phone.

For a free action game this punches well above what the price suggests, and the first stretch of hours is close to flawless. The late grind is worth knowing about before it arrives rather than after. The listing sits below, and your first few runs should be spent trying every character it hands you.