Gatewalkers (Alpha)

I went in expecting another half-baked survival RPG that throws the word 'procedural' around as a substitute for design. What I found instead was a Polish indie from Poznan that has clearly been listening to its community since the open alpha launched in 2020, iterating in public and earning goodwill along the way. The Alpha build sitting at 83% positive across nearly 800 Steam reviews is not an accident. It reflects a team that knows what it wants to make and is grinding toward it. The core loop is straightforward but has more grip than it first appears. You drop into a procedurally generated world with up to three other players, given a mission from the Guild, and immediately the environment starts working against you. Ice biomes freeze you out without fur armor or a nearby campfire. Toxic worlds demand gas masks. Darkness worlds strip away visibility in ways that shift combat entirely. Each biome carries its own survival tax, and the moment you think you have a formula figured out, the next gate drops you somewhere that invalidates it. That per-world survival mechanic is the most interesting idea in the game, and it scales well in co-op because dividing survival responsibilities between players genuinely changes how a group operates. The character building is where Gatewalkers has its biggest identity play. There are no locked classes at all. Every skill you carry is tied directly to your equipment, meaning a full suit of heavy armor turns you into a front-line tank, but swap the chest piece for a healing staff slot and you shift role on the fly. A healer in plate armor is not a paradox here, it's a strategy. In a four-player squad this creates real flexibility in how roles are distributed, and it rewards players who actually read item tooltips rather than chasing the highest damage number. The combat itself is skill-shot based, no target-lock, every ability can whiff, which adds urgency to positioning in a way that most isometric ARPGs skip. That said, this is still an Alpha, and the label is honest. The story is deliberately thin, the questline from the Guild amounts mostly to fighting large groups of enemies and surviving long enough to complete objectives. Players looking for narrative depth or rich worldbuilding will find the plot a thin wrapper around the mechanical loop. Repetitive audio design was also flagged in multiple reviews, and the character creation at the start feels sparse. Solo players can technically run the whole game, but the design breathes in co-op, and going it alone flattens what makes the biome-to-biome pressure interesting. For the right audience, this is a genuinely promising game from a small studio that earned its positive reception through iteration rather than marketing. If you have two or three friends who like the idea of Diablo-adjacent combat with a survival layer on top, each gate run giving you a world that demands a different strategy, this is worth the time. Just enter knowing it is still being built.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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