GRAIN ROT

Posting this as of September 13, 2026: I was pleasantly surprised to find that I absolutely love this game. I honestly initially thought I was not going to like this game at all. Games like R.E.P.O. honestly just feel too punishing with not enough content to be exciting or rewarding for me. I like the idea of difficulty scaling but not to a point where it feels like you hit a wall and you know you'll lose all your game progress. This game fixes or adds everything that R.E.P.O. and other similar games are missing or do wrong. For context, I've played R.E.P.O. for ~15 hrs since release and dread when people ask me to play. I've played GRAIN ROT for 40+ hours while only having owned it for just under a week, and half the time its on my own. Let me explain what I like so much about this game compared to similar games: ----------THINGS I LIKE ABOUT THE GAME!------------ - Not just a fill the quota, escape, rinse and repeat game: The player is given a sort of safe haven (the house) that is fully customizable with furniture, items you collect, and by decorating, you can boost PERMANENT UPGRADES TO PLAYER STATS. This allows the player to enjoy more passive / 'cozy' gameplay if they so choose. - Some players may choose to stay at the house while others descend and complete a floor. YOU CAN TAKE A BREAK FROM THE CHAOS WITHOUT WORRYING ABOUT GETTING KILLED OR DRAGGING THE TEAM DOWN! WHILE STILL GETTING TO PLAY THE GAME! - Player stats / buffs ARE SHARED!! Oh my god I hate it when games force you to share money but then only allow player upgrades to be per player. I love you devs. - Unlockable content via completing floors: players can find purple coins or blueprints to unlock more furniture or vessel options. Players can also find various cosmetics. - Choice of maximizing building material vs money gain: instead of just bringing items to a collection point, players have the option to destroy items to get building material. I love this. - Quota scaling doesn't feel impossible: the scaling caps at 100 coins (as far as I'm currently aware - I've gotten to floor 15(?)), which is incredibly fair and easy to just find coins without having to extract anything. - Storyline, lore, questline (all actively being worked on): help to feel more immersed in the world. - Interesting setting and art style: honestly just really unique and was part of what intrigued me. - Completing a floor = ability to rest: every time you complete a floor, the elevator returns you to your home, allowing you to decorate or simply enjoy the environment for a bit before having to go back. - Enjoyable as both single or multiplayer game: I have a solo save, and a group save. The solo save is more difficult to make progress on but is just as rewarding. - NO PERMA DEATH! One of my biggest gripes with similar games is that death means you lose *everything*, which honestly feels way too punishing to be enjoyable for me. In this game, if everyone who descended the elevator dies, they are simply returned to the house, lose their held items, lose any items/coins gained on the attempted floor, and the floor level is reset to 1. Player upgrades and house decor are all saved. I honestly love this so much, because in my solo save when I feel things are getting too hard for my current stat levels, I can reset it to floor 1 to collect more resources in an easier environment to survive in. Very player friendly. - Expanding on Player Death: when someone 'dies' within an elevator level, their spark is ejected from their broken body, and they have the ability to find an empty vessel and still escape. This gives the player some leeway if they suddenly get jumped, and feels much more interesting and fun rather than just dying, since they are able to help alive players with their attributes as a spark. If all of the players are sparks and none of them can find a vessel in time, then everyone dies, which I think is more fair than the game slowly picking people off one by one with no way to assist teammates who are still alive. If you like games similar to R.E.P.O., this is worth your time. And if you DON'T like games similar to R.E.P.O., this one is definitely worth a shot if you or your friends want to enjoy a game with a similar gameplay loop. ----------THINGS I FEEL SHOULD BE CHANGED / ADDED / ADDRESSED----------- - More player customization - I would love to be able to find different body parts / shapes for each part of my robot. Different chest/spark enclosure, different heads, different limbs. All of it. (also shoes/boots would be funny.) - Current questline is very short - but I know this is actively being worked on. I would've liked to be able to access the full house but I believe this is going to be added within a month or so. - More to do in the wasteland. As of right now, its mostly just to loot the houses and do the few collection quests out there. It would be cool if later down the line there was a way to activate and interact with the radio towers or other POIs. - NPCs pushing furniture while trying to set it up. Please add some sort of way I can pause their movement without just needing to kill them. I was getting ragebaited by 'little buddy' in the basement while trying to place furniture. Every time I needed to adjust a bar table, it would become unanchored or something, and the NPC wouldn't register it as an obstacle, run into it, and fling it, causing all the other surrounding furniture to also become unanchored, causing a domino effect of lost time and frustration. (I didn't know it was killable until after I had finally succeeded in setting up my furniture). - Ability to lock / anchor furniture with a toggle. See above "NPCs pushing furniture as to why." I like that when visiting other players or friends that have grief protection on, I dont have to worry about accidentally ruining their setup. I would like if that could also apply to myself in my own home. Please as the ability to anchor an object regardless of a player grabbing it. - More house customization. I would love it if we could paint the walls - I think it would be neat if you had to find paints or wallpapers, similar to how players currently have to find hats, with the ability to customize each individual wall. Of course, I would also like more constructs, but I figure that will come with time. - Pets / Companions / 'NPC' Assistant robots. I would love to have a customizable little robot that follows you around each level. I would also love to have different vessel types for these pets, such as different animals/items, with each one having a different ability. I imagine these would be at least half the size of the player controllable vessels, or smaller. Some abilities they could have based on their body type could be: extra storage slot(s), ranged attack (weak), melee attack (weak + fast / less weak + slower), teleport with cooldown (if player is in danger, they could activate their pet's ability to randomly teleport them away from the danger they are in), once per floor can repair/partly repair an item, or other abilities to spice up gameplay. I think it would be cool if the way you got these pets was this: every robot needs a spark to work right? It would be cool if there was a part of the questline where you needed to kill a certain type of enemy to harvest their corrupted spark for a certain type of pet (or just have the pet be randomized idk). You'd need an item to grab/contain the corrupted spark, and return to the house with it. There would then be some other POI where you could take it and do puzzles to slowly uncorrupt the spark + needing some resources. However, since these sparks have been corrupted so long, they are unable to speak or function like player or other NPC characters, behaving more similarly to little buddy with chirps and whirrs, and being much weaker than a regular player. If they are ever destroyed in a level, you can revive them using some coins and scrap at the POI that you uncorrupted them.