The Excrawlers

My instinct with a game this small and this quiet on the internet is to sit with it a little longer than usual before saying anything. What I found in The Excrawlers was something genuinely modest in the best sense: a top-down, twin-stick action-RPG roguelite built around five handcrafted chapters, each ending in a boss fight, each populated by its own distinct enemy roster. You play as a Huntress dropped into a dungeon prison, and the game's central tension is figuring out why you are there and whether the other trapped champions scattered across its corridors are worth saving. The combat loop is satisfying in a compact way. You toggle between a melee sword and a ranged bow, and the early sessions will punish anyone who charges sword-first without reading the room. Enemy types vary enough across the five worlds that developing situational habits matters, and when three different varieties converge on you at once, things get genuinely lively without tipping into unfair. The modifier system is where the game shows its most interesting hand: fire arrows, explosive arrows, doppelganger effects, and combinable crystals that can be stacked in sets of five to improve stats mean you are quietly building something that feels like yours, even within a short run. Permanent stat progression survives death, which keeps the roguelite loop from feeling punishing rather than instructive. Players who replayed for different character builds and NPC outcomes found real reasons to return, with one reviewer noting they ran through the game four times chasing each companion's story thread. The rough edges are real and worth naming. The writing lands somewhere between charmingly rough and outright baffling, and if you come in expecting tight narrative craft you will be disappointed quickly. There are no difficulty options, and the early chapters can feel spiky before your stats accumulate. Loot variety is thin, with rewards that begin to feel samey across multiple runs. The boss fights, interestingly, land on the gentler side of challenging, which will either be a relief or a mild letdown depending on what you came for. None of this is catastrophic at this price point, but it does mean the game works best if you approach it as a mood piece with teeth rather than a systems-deep roguelite. What saves it is the art. The pixel work is genuinely beautiful, environments shift from steel caves crawling with medieval automatons to something that reads like a fractured parallel dimension, and the whole thing carries a dark-fantasy atmosphere that punches above its production weight. Community sentiment on Steam sits around 87 percent positive across roughly 97 reviews, which for a game this small and this far outside the press cycle is a meaningful signal. The Excrawlers knows it is a few-hour vignette and commits to that shape completely. For players who are tired of games that refuse to end, that restraint reads as a virtue.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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