Cosmic Call

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that arrives with no press kit, no review embargo, no YouTube ad spend - just a Steam page and a handful of screenshots. Cosmic Call is exactly that, and it turns out the thing hiding behind that quiet launch is a legitimately interesting action roguelike built in Godot by a single developer under the handle CosmicDev. The pitch is deceptively simple: you are trapped inside the prison of something called the Great One, and you shoot your way out, run after run, until either the game breaks you or you break it first. The clearest shorthand I can offer is Nuclear Throne translated into first-person 3D. That comparison was floating around the Steam forums early on, and it holds. You clear compact arena rooms, pick up weapons and powerup items between encounters, and watch the difficulty curve tighten around you. The weapon roster reportedly clears fifty entries, and the item pool stretches past one hundred powerups - numbers that, in a game this small, suggest genuine investment in build variety rather than quantity padding. The world also has what the developer calls a reactive chaos system: the longer a run goes, the harder the prison fights back. That single mechanic does more for replayability than a dozen random-number-seed generators ever could, because it turns every extended run into a slow pressure cooker. Community feedback from the demo period and post-launch Steam threads points toward a game that earns its difficulty honestly. Players noted a weapons feel that rewards experimentation, and at least one person logged over twenty hours hunting every skull unlock before seeing the final boss. The skull system itself is worth flagging as a meaningful progression layer: mythical skulls grant persistent power bonuses that give repeat players a foothold without softening the game into a walk. On the rougher side, some players found enemy density in later rooms crosses from challenging into overwhelming, and there are crash reports in early community threads that suggest CosmicDev still has some stability work ahead. For a solo project this is not unusual, but it is worth knowing before you commit. The visual style, described by one observer as scribbly-styled retro, leans into crunchy pixel aesthetics inside 3D environments - a signature look shared with CosmicDev's other work. It is lo-fi on purpose, and the intentionality shows in how the aesthetic reinforces the Lovecraftian dread of the setting. Tags like Demons and Lovecraftian on the Steam page are not just genre dressing; the prison-of-an-eldritch-god premise gives the whole run structure a fittingly bleak loop. The soundtrack has reportedly drawn comparisons to industrial and breakbeat electronic music, which fits the vibe of a game that wants you anxious and moving fast. For players who find Boomer Shooters hollow when stripped of run-to-run variety, Cosmic Call is the answer to that exact complaint. It is rough around the edges in the ways one-person passion projects tend to be, and it is flying well under the radar in ways that should not be allowed to continue. The publisher pickup by 2 Left Thumbs suggests someone else noticed it deserves more eyes. I agree.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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