the best thing to happen to roguelikes since Hades

Polygon Summer Game Fest 2026

Polygon
Summer Game Fest 2026
Live game reveals, world premiere trailers, and what’s next from 40+ developers, publishers, and hardware makers.

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Nearly six years after its 1.0 release, Supergiant Games’ Hades still stands as one of the most innovative narrative-driven roguelikes ever released. While the genre had historically minimized bespoke narratives, leaving storytelling to emergent moments, Hades proved you could piece together a compelling story across repeated runs to create an unforgettable narrative.

Since then, many other roguelikes have echoed Hades’ approach to storytelling, but few have continued to innovate it further. Erosion, a forthcoming roguelike from The Last Case of Benedict Fox developer Plot Twist, is shaping up to be the next game that could evolve storytelling in the genre, leaning back into how those emergent choices can inform a narrative.

That’s according to a recent demo of the game I played at Summer Game Fest. The demo, which spanned 30 minutes, mostly focused on Erosion’s tightly designed twin-stick shooting combat. And even in that brief period, I could tell that the game is doing something special with its structure.

In Erosion, the main character’s daughter has been kidnapped and dragged to the bottom of a dungeon. Players have to delve into the dungeon and fight to get her back, but time progresses forward by a decade after every three deaths when attempting to clear the dungeon. There’s a vast overworld outside said dungeon, and as time passes, the decisions players make there will radically change the overworld as the main character’s daughter also gets older, too.

Most of my time with Erosion was spent in the dungeon fighting enemies. Unlike Hades, my character and the bosses I encountered weren’t constantly talking or quipping at each other to make the plot move forward. Instead, the gameplay was given room to take center stage, and it impressed. If you enjoy twitchy twin-stick shooters like Enter the Gungeon or Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, then you’ll feel right at home playing Erosion.

It felt silky smooth to move around the game’s procedurally generated dungeon levels, weaving between enemies as I unloaded attacks on them with everything from a whip to a laser gun. After every encounter, I was rewarded with some sort of buff or modifier to make me a little stronger, whether that be through increasing my own character’s stats or allowing my attacks to ignore any armor enemies were wearing.

The player fights in the dungeon in Erosion

Erosion’s voxel art style supports its destructive gameplay, and it was a retro-inspired visual spectacle to see parts of the environment fall apart every time they got hit with my laser. I got some pretty good RNG luck on my run, too. The shopkeeper appeared twice, which I was told had only a 3% chance, and I got the laser gun very early on. (Ironically, a powerful late-game build the developer would later show me before wrapping up the demo was pretty close to the one I gathered in my own run.)

If Erosion solely offered this satisfying twin-stick shooting gameplay, it’d already be a very good roguelike. What truly intrigued me, though, is that time moves forward when the player dies too often. For the purposes of my demo, I let a developer do some time-jumping for me.

In one decade, I cleared a bandit camp on a farm. In the next, the farm lay desolate and abandoned. Marketing for the game has shown that the farm can grow into a giant bandit compound if left unchecked, a major divergence based on the different choices players might make in their playthroughs. As there’s a vast overworld players need to explore to unlock new weapons to find in the dungeon, I’m sure there will be no shortage of world-impacting actions for players to take.

Conversely, really skilled players might never interact with this system. While Erosion is very difficult and upgrading throughout decades gives players a much better chance at succeeding, the developer showing Polygon the game did confirm that it’s possible to beat the game on the first run. That proves to me that Erosion will have a very dynamic-feeling story delivery, without my demo ever needing to mutter a single word of dialogue.

Hades achieved narrative innovation for the roguelike genre through clever writing and tricks of presentation. A playthrough of that game truly feels like your own because you encounter well-written and meaningful dialogue exchanges in a way that feels unique to your journey. In comparison, Erosion puts less focus on writing and more emphasis on player choice, as the player’s actions in the overworld and success in the dungeon will directly have an effect on how their journey plays out. It’ll be equally as innovative for roguelike narratives, but in a more emergent way that harkens back to the genre’s roots.

I only got to see a very limited slice of Erosion in action, and already loved what I saw. I can’t wait to see how it impacts the roguelike genre.

Erosion will be released on Windows PC and Xbox Series X in early 2027. If you want to try it, a public playtest will be held on Steam between June 23 and June 30.