The annual Steam Winter Sale once again had numerous offers ready. As every year, I of course browsed the shop page in the hope of finding one or the other interesting game for the Christmas season. Normally discounts don’t tempt me to look for something to spend money on, but the Christmas sale is kind of different.
So I browse through Steam, see well-loved games like Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, now also Cyberpunk 2077, but nothing really appeals to me. The discovery list, in which Steam suggests some games that I should like based on my preferences, does not deliver any results either. I switch to the different game categories. Under Rogue-like I can see that I already own the best-rated genre representatives, and under New & Hot most games can already be found in my library. In desperation, I turn to the “interactive recommender”. Here you can set a few parameters, such as games played that Steam should consider for the recommendations, the period in which the titles were published, and whether I prefer popular games or niche titles.
The slider moves to the right and suddenly a game pops up that I’ve never heard of before: Tiny Rogues. About 2,000 ratings were given for the game, 98 percent of which were positive. Despite this crowd, Tiny Rogues is still categorized as an absolute niche by Steam, and despite being tagged as an action roguelike, Steam’s genre hub lacked any trace of what appears to be a fairly popular game.
Tiny Rogues is my absolute Christmas hit
The combination of one of my favorite genres, the thousands of good ratings and a fairly low price managed to convince me and a little later Tiny Rogues also found a place in my Steam catalogue. Over the next two days I spent quite a few hours playing Tiny Rogues.
The game is actually pretty simple. You choose one of the many unlockable characters, each with a unique passive ability and starting equipment, explore ten rooms lurking with monsters, items, taverns, shops, and much more, and finally defeat a boss opponent. The whole thing is repeated ten times in order to conquer death itself at the end of the journey.
Of course, along the way you strengthen yourself with equipment and weapons, and by collecting attribute points, which in turn also grant a passive ability and other bonuses. The various weapons can also be enchanted, for example with a ten percent increase in the critical hit chance, or you can give your own dagger an element so that it causes fire damage from now on.
In addition, there are also numerous potions that, for example, increase the damage caused for the next ten rooms, and every now and then you will find a shrine that has some bonuses to distribute. That’s quite a lot, but I’ve only just scratched the surface of Tiny Rogues with this list.
With all the bonuses, Tiny Rogues is also pretty easy to start with, but a recent update introduced optional modifiers that make the whole game a whole lot harder. The rogue-like is currently still in Early Access and only recently reached patch 0.1.9. So there will be a lot more updates in the future, and the developer has already published a small roadmap of what the near future will bring to Tiny Rogues.
However, there is already enough to do in the title to fill a few hours of fun, even if all you want to do is collect the various trophies. The general replay value of a roguelike is of course also present and on top of that there are already numerous Easter Eggs. For example, Cloud Strife’s Buster Sword can be found, but recently there have also been some references to YouTubers in the game. Including the Hand Of Blood, named after, um, well, Hand Of Blood, which deals bleed damage to any weapon.
In addition, there are already a few secrets in the game, including hidden rooms that can be revealed with a bomb and a kind of quest line through which you can forge a truly legendary blade from a broken sword. According to the Steam page, there are more than 220 different weapons in Tiny Rogues and in any case so much content that the one-time purchase of 4.99 euros was definitely worth it, at least for me.
As some of you may have already gleaned, Tiny Rogues is pretty good. Sure, the roguelike genre has some pretty tough competition with titles like Hades and Dead Cells, but Tiny Rogues is unique enough to stand out from the crowd. It’s not surprising that the title received so many positive reviews from happy gamers, but at this point I have to ask myself: why did I only find out about this game now?
Tiny Rogues was released on September 23, 2022 and may not have died out completely, after all at least 2,000 people played the title. But neither in my discovery list nor anywhere else was I made aware of the game by Steam. After a closer look, I found Tiny Rogues among the top sellers, at least in the action roguelike genre hub. For this, however, I had to expand the list until the game showed up.
How many games exist on Steam that would give me at least a few hours of enjoyment that I’ve never heard of? Should gamers spend hours sifting through the nooks and crannies of Steam just to stumble across the game of their dreams?
And how many actually great indie games never got the attention they deserve? At least Tiny Rogues I was actually able to find it after a little search, so I now recommend that all of you roguelike friends should at least take a look at the game.
