The 7th Circle - Endless Nightmare

My first few hours with The 7th Circle felt like finding a half-forgotten Amiga game at the back of a drawer - rough around the edges, strangely confident, and way more interesting than it had any right to be. You build a single "Alter Ego" from scratch, picking classes like Soldier, Rogue, or Summoner, then spend the rest of your run distributing stat points into attributes that govern everything from stamina drain per swing to your success rate when typing in one of the game's 60-plus spells. Yes, typing. To cast magic you press a key, enter a four-letter sequence, and confirm. It is exactly as old-school as it sounds, and for a certain kind of player that framing is catnip. The combat system is the game's most divisive element, and honestly the community feedback reflects that split. Exploration follows first-person grid movement - tiles, walls, hidden buttons, teleporters - but every fight rips you out of the dungeon into a separate turn-based encounter screen. Think less Grimrock, more Dragon Quest, then add a positional distance mechanic where closing the gap on a ranged enemy or avoiding combat traps changes your action economy. Melee builds can lean into a combo rush that, when it lands an overkill, is genuinely satisfying. Spellcasters have to budget their Specific Magic Skill stat carefully, because botched casts are a very real punishment. The stat-driven debuff and buff durations, mana regen rates, and bleeding effects give the system more texture than a first look suggests. Where the game stumbles is a difficulty curve that bends sharply in the player's favour once a build hits its stride. By the mid-floors of the dungeon, a melee character with the right perks and a couple of the collectible magic Skulls (hidden relics scattered across levels) can one-shot most enemies without breaking a sweat. A game that opens with genuine tension - the Scarlet Tide mechanic gives you only 12 moon phases per floor before it floods the level and cuts your rest recovery rate - gradually softens into a repetitive march through corridors. Players who love optimising and extracting every advantage from a permadeath loop will find the run-to-run inheritance system compelling: resources and unlocks pass between Alter Egos, so even a death carries forward progress. But players hoping for escalating strategic challenge past floor 8 may find the tension they paid for has quietly left the building. The atmosphere, to its credit, does not quit. The horror-tinged art, the creepy dungeon tone, and the sound design all punch above the budget. There is a genuinely unsettling premise underneath the numbers - each Alter Ego is a fragment of your subconscious descending into psychological darkness - and the world-mix of medieval weapons, strange demons, and out-of-time elements gives the whole thing an eerie, uncategorisable feel. The Forgotten Limbo endless roguelike mode and the Inferno post-game difficulty add replay hooks. Crafting medicines, upgrading weapons with scrap, and managing consumables give sessions a light survival texture that fits the tone well. It is a one-developer passion project, and that ambition is visible in every slightly-rough menu and every corner of lore. If you are an old-school dungeon crawler fan who can forgive a mid-game power plateau and an unconventional turn-based screen, there is real soul here. If you need your combat to stay interesting across 19 floors, the tension tapers off faster than the level count.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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