Sword of the Stars: The Pit

Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a turn-based roguelike RPG set in the Sword of the Stars sci-fi universe, though you don't need any familiarity with that franchise to enjoy what's on offer here. The premise is lean and functional: a plague is devastating the surface, a mysterious alien facility called The Pit sits below, and somewhere deep inside it is a cure. You pick a class, you descend, you almost certainly die. That loop is the whole game, and for the right audience it works surprisingly well. Character selection gives you a handful of classes - Marine, Engineer, and Scout among them - each with distinct stat spreads and equipment affinities that genuinely change how you approach rooms. The Engineer can fabricate gear from scraps and hacked terminals, which opens up a crafting layer that rewards players who pay close attention to item descriptions. The Scout leans on stealth and evasion. None of these are deeply complex by CRPG standards, but the build differences hold up across runs in a way that justifies replaying. Combat is tile-based and tactical at a light-to-medium difficulty of decision-making: position matters, ammo is scarce, and eating a bad hit on floor three can quietly doom you thirty floors later when you have nothing left in reserve. The roguelike structure is where the game earns its Very Positive rating despite a modest Metacritic score. Floors are procedurally generated, enemy variety is reasonable for a game of this scope, and the loot system has enough randomness to keep early runs feeling fresh. The sci-fi skin - alien enemies, energy weapons, futuristic crafting recipes - gives it a distinct aesthetic that separates it from fantasy dungeon crawlers without doing anything dramatically inventive with the setting. The writing is light and functional rather than layered; do not come here expecting reactive dialogue or branching narrative. This is a game about systems, not stories. Where The Pit stumbles is in pacing and visual presentation. The floors start to feel repetitive before you reach the midpoint of a full run, and the art style, serviceable as it is, was not pushing boundaries even at release. There are also stretches where the difficulty spikes feel less like clever design and more like the game taxing your food and ammo supplies because it can. Players who bounced off early roguelikes for feeling punishing rather than fair will likely bounce off this too. But players who find permadeath energizing rather than exhausting, who like comparing builds across runs and optimizing crafting queues, will find a game that respects their time without overstaying its welcome. Each run clocks in at a couple of hours if you know what you're doing, less if the RNG is unkind, which keeps the loop tight. This is not a deep RPG by any measure I care about - there are no choices that matter beyond tactical ones, no character arcs, no worldbuilding worth quoting. But it was never trying to be that. It is a brisk, competent sci-fi dungeon crawler with enough class variety and crafting depth to sustain a few dozen hours for dedicated fans of the genre. If you like your roguelikes with a genre twist and a permadeath sting, The Pit delivers without much fuss.

Monika · Scout Team

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