Necropolis (Brutal Edition)

Necropolis: Brutal Edition is a third-person action roguelite set inside an ever-shifting tower of procedurally generated dungeon floors. You pick one of two adventurers - the standard robed figure or the Brutal Edition addition, The Brute, a heavier melee-focused fighter - and descend through increasingly hostile levels, scrounging for weapons, armor, potions, and scrolls while a sardonic AI deity narrates your inevitable deaths. Combat is deliberate and stamina-adjacent: you block, dodge, and time your strikes rather than spam attacks. There is a rhythm to it that, in the right mood, can feel satisfying. The headline addition in the Brutal Edition is the Black Forest, a completely new outdoor environment that breaks up the interior dungeon monotony. New enemy types populate it, and the visual shift from torch-lit stone corridors to a dead, skeletal woodland genuinely works on an atmosphere level. The art direction overall has a kind of hand-carved, woodcut quality that I find quietly beautiful - dark greens, deep blacks, and creature designs that lean into weird fantasy rather than generic hack-and-slash. The soundtrack matches that mood: sparse, low, occasionally unsettling. For a 2016 indie title, the art team made smart choices under what was clearly a tight scope. Here is where the honest accounting starts, though. Necropolis has a Mixed rating on Steam for reasons that are real and worth knowing before you commit. The procedural generation feels thin after a few runs - floors repeat their visual grammar quickly, and the loot variety, while expanded in the Brutal Edition, does not sustain the kind of build excitement you get from comparable roguelites. The moment-to-moment combat is competent but rarely thrilling in solo play. The game was designed with co-op in mind, supporting up to four players, and most people who found lasting enjoyment here did so with friends in the party. Alone, the pacing drags in the mid-floors and the lack of meaningful character progression between runs stings more than it should. The Brute class is a genuine improvement over the base game's single option. Slower, hits harder, tanks punishment better - the playstyle differentiation is real even if it is not deep. The new traps, armor pieces, and scrolls added in this edition give experienced players slightly more to experiment with, but if you burned out on the original release, the Brutal Edition additions are unlikely to rekindle things on their own. Who is this actually for? Players who enjoy atmosphere-first action games and have a reliable co-op partner (or three) will find something here worth a few evenings. Solo players hunting a satisfying single-player roguelite loop will almost certainly bounce off. Harebrained Schemes clearly had a vision - the woodcut aesthetic, the dry narration, the oppressive tower premise all cohere - but the systems underneath that vision never fully delivered on the promise. It is the kind of game you respect more than you love.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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