Bosorka

I keep a soft spot for games built by small studios under difficult circumstances, and Bosorka earns that attention honestly. Sengi Games, a Ukrainian indie team, put together a top-down action roguelite that draws clear inspiration from Risk of Rain, Enter the Gungeon, and Dead Cells - but filters all of it through Eastern European folklore in a way that feels genuinely fresh. Horpyna, your young witch protagonist, rides a broom she actually selected before the run began, and that choice shapes the entire session. Each broom carries its own active ability on top of movement feel, so the selection screen is less a cosmetic choice and more a quiet build decision. The core gameplay loop is twin-stick shooting threaded through procedurally assembled biomes, each with its own atmosphere and creature roster drawn from Ukrainian and broader Slavic mythology. You clear rooms, collect gold from fallen demons, and spend it on chests that offer runes or spells pulled from mirrors scattered across levels. The rune system is where the game earns its replayability: individual runes do one thing each, but stack the right combination and you tip over into something genuinely chaotic - a poisonous shell feeding into a whirlwind aura, or companion familiars buffed to absorb boss aggression while you stay mobile. Eleven spell types give each run a different flavour, from insect swarms to lightning strikes to the very silly toad barrage. Spells are finite, though, which means resource discipline matters more than the cheerful visuals suggest. The criticism that surfaces consistently is fair: the game is short. Players settling into a strong build can find the credits rolling before the system fully stretches its legs. There is also no meta-progression between runs, so the familiar loop of unlocking permanent upgrades that keeps Hades or Dead Cells endlessly playable is absent here. What Bosorka offers instead is a clean, low-friction session game - one that respects your time precisely because it does not demand five hours of groundwork before anything interesting happens. Post-launch patches added adjustable difficulty settings that scale enemy count and damage without locking achievements behind the harder modes, which is a thoughtful quality-of-life call. A DLC called Witchrise later expanded things with a wave-survival arena mode and a new broom called Skeletica, adding some longevity for players who exhausted the base campaign. Boss fights are the highlight throughout - several encounters demand genuine pattern reading, and a handful can make almost every inch of the arena hostile in ways that force real positioning decisions rather than mindless kiting. The art direction is stylised top-down 3D with a colour palette that stays readable under chaos, and the soundtrack has been repeatedly singled out as a genuine asset - atmospheric rather than generic, which matters in a genre where music is often the last thing developers budget carefully. The local co-op mode is a smaller-studied bonus that changes the tension of resource sharing and revives add a meaningful wrinkle. If you are looking for a forty-hour commitment with branching skill trees, Bosorka will leave you wanting. If you want a punchy, handcrafted roguelite with a distinct cultural identity that you can finish in an evening and replay across different broom builds, it delivers that cleanly and without apology.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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