Dragon Fin Soup

I have a soft spot for games that swing wide and land crooked, and Dragon Fin Soup is one of the crookedest swings I have watched a small studio take. Grimm Bros. built their entire debut around a drunken, amnesiac bounty hunter named Red Robin, who wakes up in a village on the back of a giant space turtle, takes mercenary work to pay her bar tab, and slowly unravels a past soaked in betrayal. The setup is genuinely strange and charming in equal measure, drawing on Little Red Riding Hood and a vague Discworld-adjacent cosmology that rewards players who lean into the absurdity rather than trying to make narrative sense of it. The combat is turn-based and grid-based, with a rhythm that feels slow for about forty minutes and then clicks into something pleasingly tactical. Every step you take advances enemy turns, so deliberate movement matters in a way that casual button-mashing punishes immediately. You bring pets and hired mercenaries into the procedurally generated dungeons, manage a loot-heavy inventory of weapons and armor, and supplement your runs with crafting and fishing systems layered on top. There are three modes on offer: Story, with its campaign arc and scripted beats; Survival, which strips the narrative and drops in full permadeath; and an Endless Labyrinth with unlockable characters for pure dungeon-grinding sessions. The procedurally generated maps are notably better than the genre average, with named landmarks and enough spatial variety that repeated runs feel meaningfully different rather than just reshuffled corridors. Here is where I have to be honest about the rough parts, and they are real. The UI is a genuine problem. The crafting screen is clunky enough to feel like a separate, unfinished game. Menu navigation requires oddly specific inputs, the inventory and equipment screens are redundant in ways that slow everything down, and combat gives you frustratingly little information about enemy or pet health in crowded rooms. The PC version landed in better shape than the console ports, which suffered from crash bugs that, according to community posts still visible on Steam, were never fully resolved after the studio went quiet. A promised update called the Extra Chunky Edition was announced, discussed in developer forums, and then quietly dropped. The game as it currently exists on PC is functional and playable, but it carries the slightly melancholy atmosphere of a project that ran out of runway before it reached its own potential. For a specific kind of player, none of that is a dealbreaker. If your reference points are Shiren the Wanderer and Dungeons of Dredmor, if you genuinely like learning an idiosyncratic system by dying inside it, and if you have patience for a UI that demands your tolerance rather than your affection, there is a real game in here. The soundtrack holds the whole thing together with a fairy-tale lightness that makes repeated deaths sting a little less. The story mode is a long commitment, twenty to thirty hours depending on pace, and Survival adds replayability past that. The ambition was real. So was the under-cooking.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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