Forgotten Mines

My first run through Forgotten Mines ended in humiliation somewhere around floor two, wiped out by a goblin pack I thought I had under control. That's not a criticism - it's the game's thesis statement. Solo developer Cannibal Goose, working out of Rio de Janeiro, has built a turn-based tactical roguelite where every decision carries weight precisely because the margin for error is so thin. Battles play out on a compact 8x8 grid, and each standard room gives you eight turns to clear it before reinforcements flood in and make the math catastrophically bad. That pressure-cooker clock is what separates this from slower dungeon crawlers: positioning, action-point allocation, and target priority all have to resolve in your head fast. The structure is four floors, five battles per floor, and a boss waiting at the end of each section - a run that sounds brief until the difficulty spikes hit. You field a squad of three, chosen from dozens of unlockable warrior classes spanning axe-wielding brawlers, agile rogues with rapid daggers, ranged snipers, and arcane mages. Between rooms you scavenge iron and gold to spend at shops, and rare gem boulders that appear occasionally feed the inter-run unlock economy. That meta layer, covering new classes, amulet slots, and guild bonuses such as increased XP gains or extra minerals, is where the long-term engagement lives. The first few runs feel cruel; by run ten, you start reading the mine like a resource spreadsheet, budgeting turns between killing, looting, and getting out before the clock expires. Shops are the only way to revive a fallen party member, and since there's no map telling you when the next one appears, every wound matters more than it would in a forgiving roguelite. The honest critique is that the difficulty curve has sharp, irregular teeth. Reviewers across the board flagged difficulty spikes that feel less like a fair challenge and more like a design gap, and the tutorial introduces the Magic Shop and amulet system but leaves a lot of mechanical nuance for players to discover alone - or not. Class balance is uneven, certain merchants feel like dead ends, and random events between combat can be underwhelming versus what you see in more event-rich genre peers like Into the Breach or FTL, games the developer cited as direct inspirations. Newcomers who bounce off the early runs without understanding gem farming for amulet unlocks will miss the actual game hiding underneath. If the game explained its own systems better, more players would reach that point where it all clicks. For strategy-minded players willing to invest the time, though, the depth-to-filesize ratio is genuinely impressive. Completing the main run unlocks kobolds as a playable race, and a harder Descent Mode strips away mercy for veterans who found the standard campaign survivable. The pixel art is clean, equipment is visually reflected on your characters, and the whole thing runs without friction on Steam Deck, making it a viable portable game for short sessions. Steam user reviews sit at around 78 percent positive, which feels accurate: there's a real game here, it just demands patience with its own opacity. If you treat the first three or four runs as a tutorial the game refuses to give you, and you enjoy the kind of min-maxed team-building that involves memorising which amulets counter which enemy type, Forgotten Mines will keep pulling you back for one more attempt. That loop is tight, the resource economy is genuinely interesting once understood, and the class variety gives each run a meaningfully different feel. Strategy players comfortable with trial-and-error learning will find more here than the retro visuals suggest.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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