Brews & Bastards

I keep a soft spot for the small studios that build something genuinely odd and commit to the bit completely, and Mune Studio out of Dunedin, New Zealand fits that profile. Brews & Bastards is a top-down, twin-stick dungeon crawler with rogue-lite runs through brewery-themed dungeons beneath the Muneshine Tavern, and the whole thing is wrapped in a pub-crawl aesthetic so committed it almost dares you to take it seriously. That sincerity is exactly why it works as well as it does. The structure is straightforward: pick one of several class-based champions, each carrying a distinct weapon and playstyle, then descend through progressively stranger cellar levels. Rhine brings a rifle, Oak hauls a flamethrower keg on her back, and Mugg is the melee bruiser of the bunch. Every cleared room drops reward kegs you crack open to collect Brews and Artifacts. Brews are single-use elemental power-ups - fire, cryo, damage multipliers - that can completely flip how a fight feels mid-run. Artifacts are passive buffs covering attack speed, range, max health, and more. The Bartender NPC acts as your mid-run shop, spending the ingredient currency enemies drop. None of this reinvents roguelite design, but the theming is consistent enough that the familiar loop feels fresh. Room layouts are handcrafted while enemy spawns, rewards, and item shops are randomised, which strikes a reasonable balance between authored encounters and run variety. There are also optional Pneumatic Rooms, pipe-connected sublevels with randomised layouts and higher risk-reward ratios, that give you a reason to explore rather than dash to the exit. The bosses are the genuine highlight. Rather than handing you a health sponge and stepping back, each one reframes the fight as a pub mini-game. One iconic encounter has you literally playing beer pong against a heavily armoured knight - lobbing balls into cups while monsters swarm and half the floor periodically explodes. It is ridiculous, it is clever, and it lands with the kind of physical comedy that only works when the whole game has already bought in on the joke. That said, the platforming sections that occasionally interrupt the top-down flow drew consistent criticism from reviewers: the jump feel is imprecise and the camera can struggle when the perspective shifts away from the isometric default. It is a small studio, and those rough edges show. The co-op implementation has divided players. The couch co-op for two to four people reads as the intended experience, and the chaos of a four-player session reportedly shifts from tactical to full power-fantasy mode by design. But the absence of built-in online multiplayer at launch frustrated a chunk of the audience, and the camera zooming to accommodate multiple players can push characters off-screen when the spread gets too wide. Steam Remote Play offers a workaround for online sessions, though it requires all non-host players to use a gamepad. The runtime sits around two to three hours for a main story run, which is short but probably the right call for a game that knows what it is. The developer has flagged plans for a separate mode that strips the story and randomises room connections entirely for extended replayability. For a solo run, Brews & Bastards is a punchy and mildly chaotic afternoon. For a room full of people sharing a screen, it turns into something warmer and louder than the sum of its parts. The craft is uneven in places, but the intention behind every design choice reads clearly, and that matters to me more than polish at the margins.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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