Boneraiser Minions

I have a soft spot for the one-person studio that quietly ships something better than it has any right to be, and caiys has done exactly that. Boneraiser Minions wears the Vampire Survivors comparison like an ill-fitting coat: yes, you move around a chaotic arena while your forces handle combat automatically, but the moment you start assembling an army of skellies, Giants, Deamons, and the gloriously unhinged Bros, the genre comparison stops mattering. This is its own strange, funny, surprisingly deep thing. The core loop is elegant and slightly devious. You dash around collecting bones dropped by fallen hero waves, then spend them on a "boneraise" - a three-option pick that might offer a new minion, an upgrade for an existing one, or a sacrifice pathway toward a more powerful tier. Minions split across melee pulverisers, ranged archers, magical missilers, supporting hexers, and utility augurs. Each base type can evolve along multiple upgrade branches: an archer might become an Enboned Giant archer, a Possessed Deamon variant, or a gelatinous Meldus sniper, which means every run shapes differently depending on what the randomness hands you. Single-use spell scrolls - fire storms, invulnerability snowmen, and weirder things - sit in reserve for emergencies, while relics provide permanent passive bonuses that stack into builds you didn't plan but end up defending fiercely. The Architect Mode adds placeable environment constructs like scarecrows that slow enemies and altars that spawn overhealing hearts, which is a whole extra design layer most games in this genre skip entirely. The class system is where serious mileage hides. The Liche floods the field with quantity, the Deamologist chases massive deamonic minions, the Doll Maker raises human minions instead of undead (which creates a genuinely funny friend-or-foe readability problem when the screen fills up), and a rotating cast of stranger classes unlock through the Class Heritage meta. Between runs, you spend coins in a refundable meta upgrade tree, bolster your own hero enemies through the Heroic Force meta to generate better bones, and chip away at class-specific perks. There is also a secret card game clearly inspired by Triple Triad, which I mention not as a selling point but as evidence that caiys simply cannot stop adding things. Steam reviews sit at 96% positive across nearly four thousand players, and the community is still producing strategy guides and class tier lists years after launch - that kind of sustained attention tells you something. The caveats are real but minor. The lo-fi pixel art, while charming and purposeful, does become visually noisy during late-run crowded stages - telling your minions from enemy projectiles requires some adjustment time. The humor leans juvenile with genuine commitment: the first minion type is called a Boner, an upgrade path produces something named the Fister, and the achievement list reads like a thirteen-year-old's notebook. If that register irritates you, it will irritate you consistently. The campaign also softens noticeably once the meta upgrades compound, which makes the journey to the final boss more accessible but slightly less tense. Harder challenge runs and the Steam leaderboard exist specifically for players who want the difficulty to stay punishing. The chiptune soundtrack deserves its own sentence. It shifts from cheery to dark depending on wave intensity, and the transition is handled with enough care that it registers as mood design rather than background noise. For a game that costs what a coffee costs, the soundscape alone shows more intentionality than most releases at ten times the price. If you have any affection for the survivor-like format and want a version that actually rewards you for thinking about your army composition rather than just watching numbers go up, Boneraiser Minions is the answer you were looking for.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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