The Last Flame

I put this one on my radar the moment I saw the words 'hex grid auto-battler' paired with a build-diversity pitch that actually had numbers behind it. Hotloop, a solo developer, spent a year in Early Access refining The Last Flame before the January 2025 full release, and that polish cycle shows. This is not a game you watch play itself while you scroll your phone. The combat resolves automatically once encounters begin, yes, but every decision leading up to that moment sits squarely on your shoulders. The structural loop works like this: you draft a party of up to five heroes from a roster of 65, then guide them through a branching map toward a final boss, picking up items, relics, and origins along the way. Those four layers of customisation, 325 items, 150 relics, 60 origins, and the hero roster itself, stack combinatorially in ways that keep the min-maxing brain churning. Pre-combat, you manually set formation positioning on the hex grid, which is where the strategy actually lives. A tank-forward brawler build plays completely differently from a backline-caster composition stacked with damage-amplifying relics, and the game gives you enough information to plan several moves ahead rather than just reacting to what drops. Difficulty scaling is handled through five ascension tiers, so newcomers are not thrown into the deep end. The lower difficulties function almost as an extended tutorial, easing you through the resource-management layer without punishing every suboptimal path choice. If you have bounced off other auto-battlers because the early game felt impenetrable, The Last Flame is the friendliest entry point in the genre right now. Once you have internalised the synergy logic, the endless mode opens up a pure score-chase that can genuinely eat weekends. The run-to-run variance from procedural generation keeps that mode from going stale faster than you might expect. The criticisms worth flagging are real but manageable. The presentation is functional rather than striking, and players who want a rich narrative or atmospheric world-building will find almost nothing here. The automated combat can also feel punishing in the mid-to-late ascension tiers if a build pivot goes wrong, not because the game is unfair, but because the difficulty ramps assume you are actively theory-crafting between runs. The recent dip toward mixed short-term Steam reviews suggests post-launch updates may have shaken up some established meta builds, which is honestly a healthy sign for long-term replayability even if it stings experienced players in the short term. For the genre audience, this is a confident, deep indie release from a developer who clearly played hundreds of hours of Slay the Spire, Teamfight Tactics, and their spiritual cousins before sitting down to build something of their own. The 91% lifetime Steam approval on over a thousand reviews is not noise. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 5 ProtonDB community reports.

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