Steam is home to stacks of new indie games, but roguelike In Woods caught our eye.
It offers a charming back to basics gaming experience, but also one that has hidden depths.
So What Is It?
As with any roguelite, your core goal is incredibly simple. Just survive.
Where it gets complicated, of course, is that there’s a host of enemies everywhere you look in the grasslands that the game dumps you into.
But death is not the end of the experience. Instead every time you die, you have the chance to improve and get stronger.
How So?
The grasslands in the game host a number of items you can grab, and forging these to craft loot is essential if you’re to progress further - that is to say, survive longer.
Craftables need wood to be made for example, with these ultimately boosting your key stats such as health, attack power, and pick-up radius.
You’ve got a large number of items you can equip to make fighting enemies simpler every time you play, and if you get strong enough there’s even a final boss to face off against.
A Few Surprises
So that’s the core gameplay loop, but In Woods offers a few surprises that we found very welcome.
One is that there are bonuses for surviving a specific amount of time, but more intriguing are the Magic Cards you can find from time to time - that can often make core or even very subtle changes to the gameplay. To explain any of them would be to ruin the surprise.
Then there’s the fact there are 60 unique Steam achievements to work through, meaning that this is a roguelike with a lot more meat on its bones than you might expect.
With In Woods getting regular updates this is a game we’d recommend getting on board with for the long run - and you can find it on Steam right now.