One action roguelike is surging to the top of the Steam charts this holiday week courtesy of an update, with little room-based dungeon crawler Tiny Rogues holding strong player numbers for an indie after the release of its Heaven & Hell update added oodles of new stuff. Released late last year, Tiny Rogues is an action roguelike that punts you from room to room dodging nasty traps and enemy attacks while building up a set of unique equipment and abilities that synergize well enough to get you through 10 dungeon floors and their nasty bosses.
Over the holidays Tiny Rogues has now reached nearly twice its all-team peak concurrent players, per SteamDB. It’s the kind of climb we sometimes see before a game gets truly, explosively popular—though even without sudden viral growth this one’s on a steady upward trend.
The latest update left Tiny Rogues with 34 quite unique classes, 20 themed dungeon floors with 40 different possible bosses, 500-some pieces of equipment, 400 different weapons, 100 different level traits, and a thick layer of meta-progression and world-changing objective quests on top of it all.
It’s reminiscent of a classic dungeon-crawling setup, but has the linear element of a modern roguelite where you pick one of a couple rooms and their matching rewards and the only way to move is forward. That’s more like Binding of Isaac, while the comparable Brotato energy is achieved by the variety of weapons to pick up multiplied by the weirdo synergies of all the class powers and level-up traits.
From there, of course, you can also specialize the classes into melee, magic, and ranged builds—some of which get increasingly strange when you find an odd charm or accessory that hybridizes your build. Magic-powered rocket launcher/dual uzis build? Yeah, I’ve done that one, and it kicks ass.
Tiny Rogues is—for me—an ideal Steam Deck game. Crank down the CRT filter to account for your smaller screen, accept that it’s better with autoaim on, and I think you can find a lot of time and fun with it.
You can find Tiny Rogues on Steam, where it’s $10.