Catacomb Kids

10 Years in early access. Very little progress. Dev comes back March 1st 2025 and drops a tiny update (to clear the Steam abandonment warning). Update literally says: He abandoned the game to work on UF0 50. He has formed a new company with a colleague. He is returning to abandoning CK so he can put out that new company's new product. Promises to come back and finish CK someday. DO NOT BUY>

Back in 2015 this game showed a lot of promise, enough to justify a $16 price tag for a very early access experience. A decade later, it's embarrassing how little has meaningfully changed. The first five floors—the titular Catacombs—are pretty much the same game they were in 2015; compare footage from [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j13cFvUTo2M&t=2039s]then[/url] and [url=www.youtube.com/watch?v=l77fHfp_vsQ&t=39s]now[/url]. Not much to say here that hasn't been said a decade ago: it has its moments and it's mostly fair. The [strike]second[/strike] [i]remaining[/i] five floors—Anticropolis—are a massive difficulty spike. New enemies are much tougher, the player has a bomb strapped to them, scouting is severely limited and there are traps everywhere. Loot doesn't scale with floor depth, so you'll need dedicated practice if you want to survive for longer than two minutes before going back to grinding out the first five levels for 40 minutes again. The game features three bosses, all painfully unforgiving, generally ending the run in 1-2 hits. Getting through them requires either hours of dedicated practice or plain old cheesing, and their rewards are pathetic. To make this unfairness palatable, the first two bosses are completely optional, and you don't have to care about the final boss because statistically you're never reaching it. The vast majority of loot you come across is utter garbage, which makes fighting enemies unrewarding, though there's little to do except fight enemies. Food mechanics don't really do anything beyond basic healing. Potions, spells and skills aren't so much limited by scarcity as by the lack of creativity in their design. Floor generation doesn't have much to offer in terms of variety, it never gets more inventive than an occasional secret room, which half the time is a generation glitch. And, perhaps least surprisingly, the game doesn't run all that well and certain interactions cause crashes, with the developer seemingly permanently stuck fixing and introducing glitches instead of adding content to the game. This game will never be finished, in part because of the mountain of technical debt, in part because all the funding for it dried up years ago and in part because the developer somehow doesn't have any ideas beyond making the game hard. If you're looking for a complete punishing well-balanced roguelite for $16, just find another dollar and buy Spelunky 2.

After over 10 years the dev has made two entirely different games and not added content to this for 6 years

The dev is super awful at honoring his commitment to the Kickstarter and players who purchased this in EA, he's repeatedly done very minimal spaced out updates, and recently released news saying that after working on UFO 50, he was not directing his attention back to this game, but rather making a WHOLE NEW GAME. Please do not support any of this guys future games or this one until he locks the ♥♥♥♥ in and stops being a terrible dev.

It's an understatement to say that this game had potential. It's such beautiful mashup of platforming, rogue-like, metroidvania games that it should have been a major success. From the unique mechanics to the insane level system, again it should have been a major success. But the dev abandoned this gem. It's been in early access for over 10 years at this point. At one point you could tune in to the dev's stream and see him reworking class abilities & fleshing out the new levels, but now all that's left is a decent game that gets "updates" every couple of months so Steam doesn't mark it as rightfully abandoned. Catacomb Kids is a fantastic game for 2015, but a terrible choice in 2026.

I enjoy this game. I really do. Great game with pretty good and well intertwined mechanics with foods, magics, fighting styles, weapons, armors... Nice little particle effects AND physics with some random stuff most probably never see or care about. Lost an arm, leg? Replace arm or leg with torch. Watch out though, it hurts (alot). Eat 5 bats and gain light weight buff for a while to boost jumps and/or falling? Eating different stuff in the "meals" or eating 5 of the same thing gives certain types of buffs, good or bad. Using salt and/or pepper on food buffing the food item then bottling the food and then cooking it with fire or apparently steaming food. Some over heal mechanics too. How about throwing a bottle of poison and the fire/brazier its next to (or falls on to) makes it bubble out and there is a cloud of poison gas in the room. Mystery liquid in bottle you just picked up? Chug it, throw it, empty or cook with it. if you are intelligent enough you can find out the contents of the bottle via some reliable descriptors of the contents in the bottle. Bottle some mushroom gas and combine with food and toss at enemy? maybe they take and eat it, or it just hits them causing damage, effect, and them to aggro. maybe you just hit them in the face with a bottle of purple goo and now they are blind and possible stationary or swinging a weapon in the air. Purple goo stopping a trap for a few seconds, or a bone or torch on a pressure plate and allows safe traversal? Green goo bounces objects? the possibilities are surprisingly vast in this little game. yeah, lots of weird little stuff that makes me love this game. I still launch it and play a bit every few months. The music is good, pixel art style is good and almost has a retro feel now, ten years later. (10!) main bosses on a certain level and then the reaper-mini boss who is triggered by going into it's area of a random level below a certain floor. some different colored torches and a rune on the wall, very obvious when you encounter it once or twice. very tough, but can be avoided by traversing around the torch circle. Unless only way forward is through that zone. youre then going back to the door you walked through and regenerating a new level on that floor you are currently on. ive barely seen the mech other than in videos, i know of the twins and reaper-mini boss and i think another boss too. Loot is given by chests, and going through the enemy equipment. how? by picking up the chest and opening it, easy, straight forward. enemy? pick up a grumble or whatever and then it has an inventory that is almost hidden but if you press a button it brings up a few boxes that you can select up and down or left an right, a center one too. gear is designated in one of those boxes. Loot advances in a way where there are more powerful descriptors and adds effects like of reflect (reflect some or all of certain types of damage) and of force (increased knockback / physics objects come to you or a pushed away from you as a passive effect) and of the void (sap magic energy from around you) that kind of thing. yes even trap avoidance effects. Cant forget the soul chest, kill enemy, feed the chest. it open, it give good, enough said. There are some stars in the walls, idk what they do. Tried bottling them but im not sure other wise. I exclusively play on controller so keyboard settings and gameplay are unknown to me. The two main areas (there are supposed to eventually be three? possibly more...) are generated on the fly using rooms that then connect to other rooms. you sometimes get impassable routes that you then have to tread back to your starting door and then regen a new level on the current floor you are on. Annoying but sometimes funny because you get stuff that is in areas inaccessible but may actually require a certain magic or magic spell book that can be useful to teleport or move beyond certain boundaries so it seems broken but some of the time is not. No there is not an end, you fight and fight, eventually circling back to the starter floors, just more difficulty and better loot it seems. Magic is kinda basic but at the same time has potential to be quite in depth and varied it the abilities presented that also combine with each other if your char has the leveled certain skills to do it. There used to be some good cheese strats but for some reason they were nerfed. cant quite remember but it was luck based that allowed luck to bypass luck cap chances and cause infinite or near infinite triggers of certain effects, and then some other strats with magic that allowed really high stats. unintended so it got nerfed... games hard enough bro... y da fuq... Checked on this game here and there and sometimes watched the dev streams while he's worked on the game over the years. Small little updates and fixes. Reworking the menus, reworking the save systems, reworking pixels... typical but taking so long. Great looking stuff but it's glacier pace. I can not say there is little done, but we are waiting on new areas for years and years.. Yes i hear some of you think/say/type "go play something else", yes "there are thousands of" games/slop "i could play". sure, but after so many years i think it is time to voice my opinionated garbage opinion since steam asked so kindly over and over again. I payed for this so long ago, still in early access. barely remember it. (i drank alot then) there wasnt a second level (anticropolis), there was the bully and one or two classes. there was no floor saves, one and done. Sometimes you would start a game and be stuck inside of a 1x1 that generated the door but you are stuck in the single space of a square and cant re-enter the door to generated a new floor lol. It's a fun game and im sad to see it bake away in the background with updates that do fix and add some stuff but ultimately have added conveniences vs content, imo. In the grand scheme though; anticropolis, new class(es), fixes, save states, better pixels, multiplayer (local) and a host of other things i can't remember. Now he is working on ANOTHER game AGAIN. Created a dev team with the music composer for this game, and is working on another project and CK will have a "lull in updates." But he still manages to squeeze time out for a hotfix to remove the box stating its been while since the game had an update on the store page. (felt like years check patch notes lol) Way too much time working and reworking sprites and mechanics, the "new" areas (still not a thing after years and years), menu layouts, multiplayer issues, while working other jobs irl and being hired on to other teams. Too much stuff going on and keeps putting it on the back burner. I know it was his passion project or something along those lines. He said it during a stream years and years ago... and that he didn't want to burn himself out on it by working on it all the time, but it's been ten+ years m8. You don't work on something that passively without either being burnt out or not able to finish due to technical or creative debt .. I will continue to play and watch the updates and info about this game, ive played it on and off for a long time and it's one of my favorites of the genre. Unfortunately with the current state of development i just can't recommend it. Check back in a few years lol.

Probably one of the worst devs out there. I bought this game back when northernlion first tried it and it looked fun... that was 10 years ago. 10 years of "development" and they have abandoned this game and any update you may see from them will be negligible and only pushed out to clear the "this game hasn't been updated for X months" warning from steam. I can almost guarantee that the game he started working on instead of this one will also suffer the same fate. This guy was ahead of the curve in creating one of the first games like this only to fumble by letting it die in development hell.

If you're here in 2026 looking at the game as it is of writing, you should definitely not be buying it at a full price of $15.99. it's the shell of what could be a great game, but it is not finished and unlikely to be.

It's basically abandonware at this point. Avoid or at least buy on a heavy discount.

I'm long overdue with reviewing this one. In short, its a gem. Out of all roguelites, Catacomb kids probably has the most ROGUE to it, despite being a 2d platformer. Its packed to the brim with cleverly implemented mechanics and interactions. "I keep discovering new things whenever i come back to it :D" is unironically the case here, I just wish the game somehow hinted towards certain things better. The difficulty is brutal, the game wants you dead, but it also gives you plentiful of ways to approach fights, avoid danger and restore health. It doesn't kill you by attrition which so many roguelites love to do. You can also turn off permadeath if you feel like it. Being a very complex passion project developed by a single (1, uno) person, i don't see this game leaving EA anytime soon, but whats already there is much more impressive than 99% of complete games of this genre.