Also: rollerzombies

Image credit: Three Friends

Earlier tonight, The Game Awards 2025 briefly ceased funnelling trophies into Sandfall Interactive’s pockets on a heavily sponsored conveyor belt to reveal Decrepit: a horror-flavoured, dungeon-dwelling soulslike that’s the debut project of solo dev outfit Jämmerdal Games. It’s being published by Three Friends, they of Romestead and ex-Mojang/Ghost Ship Games note, and aims to be out in 2026.

Why give two hoots about yet another difficult, dark fantasy ghoulbasher? Firstly, there’s a bit in the trailer where an undead, still shackled to the medieval torture wheel he died on, attacks by rolling himself across the floor like a bigger, blunter homage to Dark Souls’ Bonewheel Skeletons, and it might be the funniest thing I’ve seen all night. Second, the setup does sound intriguing: your end goal is escaping a vast castle, and dying will dump you right back at the start – but in a different corner of the fortress each time. A successful breakout, Three Friends say, will rely on you learning the layout and unlocking shortcuts over successive runs; "spatial mastery over power creep", to use their words.

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"That’s a roguelike, not a soulslike," an imagined antagonist would argue in my head. It definitely sounds like there’s a bit of that, with weapons and armour needing to be gathered mid-run, though they’ll be pinched off corpses instead of presented as boon options every time you clear a room of twitching monsters. The castle itself remains a constant, in contrast to the semi-randomised zones that come to mind when one thinks of roguelikes; memorizing enemy patrols in certain areas is apparently emphasised, though some recurring baddies might pop up in multiple spots to catch you out.

The influences namedropped by Jämmerdal Games – a.k.a. Starbreeze and Avalanche Studios alumnus Olof Hagelin – include classic first-person magic shooter Hexen: Beyond Heretic and dungeon crawling RPG Eye of the Beholder. “In Decrepit I’ve tried to recapture that feeling of dread and excitement I felt when I played the old classics for the first time," he says.

I’m too youthful and vibrant, as you can tell from looking at me, to have played these in their prime. But I am keen on further exploring first-person soulslikes, after a friendly first meeting with Napoleonic swordswinger Valor Mortis, and it’s rarely a bad thing when a game manages to make a location feel more than meshes and textures. I want Decrepit’s castle to be a villain, almost as much I want to see more cartwheeling zombies.