It’s November, and even though time really flies, let’s stay in the moment with a recap of all the recent new RPGs and Strategy Games releases. Everything new and exciting worth playing.

In the coming days, I’ll also publish the big November feature covering everything that’s on the way this month. But for now, here’s a roundup of the most interesting RPGs, strategy titles, and all things turn-based that you can already check out, whether they’re out in full, in demo form, or in early access.

DRAGON QUEST I & II HD-2D Remake

• Developers: Square Enix, ARTDINK
• Release Date: October 30, 2025
• Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch
• Steam Page

I can’t start the roundup of new releases without mentioning Square’s latest remake. Of course, I’m talking about Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake that brings the first two Erdrick adventures together in Square Enix’s HD-2D style, keeping classic command-based gameplay but layering on modern systems.

Dragon Quest I now supports multi-enemy encounters instead of strictly one-on-one fights, while both games add “Tactics” auto-battle behaviors, faster battle speed (up to 3×), autosaves, and other quality-of-life tweaks like a quick party heal, useful for cutting through routine skirmishes without losing that old-school pacing.

The package also includes refreshed audio and partial voice acting, with day-one updates tuning AI and adding more tutorial notes.

Beyond visual and UI upgrades, the remake folds in new content to tie the trilogy together. Dragon Quest II gains a fully explorable underwater region and a new playable character, alongside other scenario additions; Square Enix has even asked creators to hold late-game spoilers for a short period after launch to preserve surprises that connect back to Dragon Quest III.

The collection launched on October 30, 2025, for Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam and Microsoft Store), with an optional digital Erdrick Trilogy bundle that pairs this release with last year’s Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake.

The Book of Outcasts

• Developers: kamti
• Release Date: October 30, 2025
• Platforms: PC
• Steam Page

Now, let me spice things up. After all, what’s life without a little heat? This week, The Book of Outcasts brings the heat. It blends a dungeon crawler RPG with a light management layer and adult content.

Players take on the role of a disgraced soldier recruited by the Tsarina’s Sparrows to hunt a rogue mage across frozen forests and sweltering jungles, recruiting allies, gearing up, and keeping a remote village alive through winter.

Exploration feeds into party growth and resource upkeep, while combat is first-person turn-based, with weapons, arcane spells, and rare artifacts tied to stats, skills, and inventory management.

Expect strong narrative and visual-novel elements alongside mature themes; the GOG listing notes it as an 18+ dark-fantasy RPG and a sequel set 100 years after TKS: Conussia and The Book of Bondmaids.

The game was released on PC on October 30, 2025, and is available on Steam and GOG.

Plague Lords: Witch Hunt

• Developers: Red Unit Studios
• Release Date: October 30, 2025
• Platforms: PC
• Steam Page

This week also saw the debut of Plague Lords: Witch Hunt, the free prologue to the main game. It’s an RPG that blends survival mechanics with base-building elements, all wrapped in a striking pixel art style.

Red Unit Studios’ Plague Lords, dropping you into a plague-stricken barony with a small mercenary squad and a patron tangled in local witchcraft and opportunists.

It teaches the core loop through tactical encounters against the infected, light exploration, and a compact management layer.

You’ll set up a military camp, place fortifications, craft gear and consumables, and make practical use of traps and barricades while directing a disciplined squad, essentially a guided slice of the full game’s systems.

The prologue also lets you explore one of the five main cities planned for the full release, and it’s built to introduce skills and constructions from three of the broader game’s crafting disciplines.

As a bridge to the main game, Witch Hunt previews a larger tactical sandbox where settlement growth, squad training, and even the risk of permanently losing characters to injuries or infection are central pressures.

The prologue launched on PC (Steam) on October 30, 2025, and is published by HypeTrain Digital, while the full Plague Lords release is currently slated for 2026.

Stray Children

• Developers: Onion Games
• Release Date: October 30, 2025
• Platforms: PC
• Steam Page

In this weekly recap, there’s also a game that lots of you suggest I take a look at. Stray Children is Onion Games’ bittersweet, fairy-tale RPG where kids survive in a world overrun by “Olders,” monstrous adults driven by bottled-up emotions.

Exploration leads into turn-based encounters that let the party either fight traditionally or “use your words as weapons,” resolving battles by talking enemies down and touching their hearts instead of cutting them down.

The framing device drops a boy into a long-forgotten retro RPG, and the writing leans into that premise with oddball humor and a clear pacifist route, right down to a request from the developers to keep the ending secret.

It launched on October 30, 2025, for Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. If you want a concise label, it’s a story-driven JRPG that replaces some sword swings with well-worded whispers.

Earth vs Mars

• Developers: Relic Labs
• Release Date: October 29, 2025
• Platforms:* PC*
• Steam Page

Another noteworthy debut is Earth vs Mars, developed by Relic Labs, the experimental sub-label of Relic Entertainment, the studio behind Company of Heroes, built around a gleefully pulpy idea: splice “volunteers” with animals to field hybrid troops against a Martian invasion. Here is our review of it.

Battles play out on grid-based maps with a top-down 3D look, where commanders bring distinct active abilities and passives that shape your approach.

The Splice-O-Tron sits at the heart of the loop, letting you combine human soldiers with creatures to produce units like cheetah-fly skirmishers that rain acid, rhino-human shock troops for line-breaking, or squirrel-cow infantry that exploit cover, each with unique tricks that expand tactical options as the campaign escalates.

Progression unlocks new creature types, unit upgrades, and commander powers, while enemies evolve in kind, introducing threats up to the sentient bio-weapon nicknamed “the Creep.”

Beyond the story, it supports a VS mode against AI, a high-score Challenge mode, and a full map editor (“Map Lab”) for custom scenarios, plus 1v1 online multiplayer if you want to test builds against other players.

The game launched on PC via Steam on October 29, 2025 and it features more than 30 hand-crafted missions. Relic Labs frames this as a smaller-team strategy project meant to experiment outside the studio’s larger RTS work while still nodding to its heritage.

HARD VOID

• Developers: jejoxdev
• Release Date: October 29, 2025
• Platforms: PC (E.A.)
• Steam Page

Next one is HARD VOID. A Lovecraft-inspired 4X turn-based space strategy game about pushing a young civilization into a hostile multiverse.

The core loop mixes exploration across galaxies and dimensions with fleet-level combat and deep shipbuilding. A modular designer lets you assemble hulls, procedurally generated, with weapons, defensive systems, power sources, sensors, and tweakable parameters, then group ships into task forces for large engagements that can involve both orbital assets and surface forces at once.

Expansion leans on multiple FTL methods (warp, subspatial drives, wormholes), while colonization spans planets, asteroids, and more exotic layers where “unthinkable horrors” pressure your empire.

Progression runs through a multi-resource economy (iron, copper, hydrocarbons, energy, etc.), trade routes to feed industry and war, and a tech tree split across Physics, Engineering, Biology, and Sociology, with “forbidden knowledge” lines that trade power for sanity.

A procedural storyteller fires interconnected events, ancient artifacts, reality anomalies, and cosmic-horror crises that reshape each run.

The game is now in early access on PC via Steam, with a free demo, while the planned full version is targeted for late 2026 and includes ambitions such as custom race creation, multiplayer, admirals/commanders, megastructures, and expanded land/sea/air unit design.

Chains on Sand

• Developers: Tabula Forge
• Release Date: October 28, 2025
• Platforms: PC
• Steam Page

Another interesting title that debuted this week is Chains on Sand. A gladiator-themed, turn-based roguelite built around tactical, grid combat and a harsh legacy system.

Fights use hit locations and active defenses, dodge, parry, block, plus flanking, knockdowns, and limb damage, so positioning and action economy matter every turn.

You build a fighter with a point-buy system that shapes stats, skills, and traits, then scavenge weapons, shields, and armor from fallen opponents; durability and weight push trade-offs between protection and initiative.

A four-school magic kit adds control and sustain options, while elite champions carry legendary gear that only drops if you beat them. Between matches, you heal wounds, sell loot, take upgrades, and manage debt, all while the crowd’s mood tracks mercy or brutality and can influence how a run unfolds.

Death is permanent, but the game leans into legacy: killers can return as future opponents, and retired greats may step back onto the sand as bosses. Runs face procedural enemy lineups with distinct tactics and gear, aiming for high replay value.

Chains on Sand was released for PC via Steam on October 28, 2025, with a playable demo.

Decktamer

• Developers: Horizon Edge
• Release Date: October 27, 2025
• Platforms: PC
• Steam Page

With cards, you can recreate virtually any type of game, any genre or subgenre, and that’s exactly what Decktamer has accomplished by blending a roguelite deck-builder with a creature-collector loop set in a descending “abyss.”

Instead of drawing cards from packs, enemies you defeat can be tamed and added to your deck, and each card represents a living creature with its own moves. Battles are turn-based and built around per-card activations, so planning lines matters.

If a creature dies, its card is gone for the rest of the run. The twist is ability transfer: aberrant monsters can pass traits to others, letting you graft skills and assemble combo engines that only get wilder as you go deeper.

The Steam release arrived on October 27, 2025, for PC, developed by Horizon Edge and published by Assemble Entertainment, with a free demo if you want a quick trial.

Atre: Dominance Wars

• Developers: Ironward
• Release Date: October 28, 2025
• Platforms: PC (PlayTest)
• Steam Page

To wrap things up, there are two interesting demos worth checking out. The first comes in the form of a playtest you can sign up for.

Atre: Dominance Wars frames a 4X real-time strategy campaign (where you can pause) around godhood. Players become an Elder who builds cities, researches “God spells,” and fields armies led by immortal Avatars that gain levels, gear, and artifacts.

Unit design leans into dark fantasy tinkering: researched mutations reshape troops, gems bind into custom artifacts (you can even name them in Glagolitic script), and an envoy system lets you roam, claim cities, and raise monoliths as the map shifts.

The world itself reacts to your character’s magical attributes; events are written as lore-soaked “cases” with choices and consequences, and the setting spans four coexisting realms periodically torn and remixed by a cataclysm called the Merge.

Modes listed include single-player, online co-op, PvP, and even a level editor in the Steam feature set. A public playtest is available by request on the store page, while the full release is planned for 2026 on PC via Steam.

Of Grit & Graves

• Developers: Melted Monster Game Studio
• Release Date: October 24, 2025
• Platforms: PC (Demo)
• Steam Page

And the last project I need to mention, one that actually slipped past me last week, is Of Grit & Grave.

A turn-based tactical dungeon crawler that resolves actions with dice, leaning into tabletop-style risk and planning. You lead a four-hero party through procedurally generated dungeons where line of sight, range, and hidden traps matter, and every build choice affects outcome.

Attacks and defenses roll physical 3D dice (or instant results if you prefer faster pacing), with attributes determining how many dice you throw. The campaign spans seven dungeon tiers and lots of quest objectives, mixing layouts, traps, locked doors, and relic-filled chests across multiple environments.

Progression runs through a town hub between expeditions: spend experience to raise core stats, buy weapons and armor, slot powerful relics, and prep a limited spell loadout before diving back in.

Enemies use threat-based targeting and adaptive behaviors, while a demo is available now if you want a hands-on look. Planned release is March 6, 2026, on PC via Steam.

That’s all I had to share with you this week. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, have a great weekend, Ciao.