
Expose, endure and expel evil from innocents on your hunt through a corrupted city. As Noah, former priest turned demon-hunter, you'll perform exorcisms, forge precarious alliances and strengthen your deck of arcane tricks in this unholy roguelite deckbuilder.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
Media

About

Exorcise the infernal and exact vengeance in this unholy roguelite deckbuilder from David Gaider and Summerfall Studios. The city teems with demons and among them lies your prey: Malys, a demon of extraordinary cunning and power.
As you pick your path through the city, you’ll encounter its denizens - some friendly, some not so much, and some possessed by demons that you’ll need to exorcise. Use your deck to expose the rot within. Find unique combinations and strategies to withstand the miseries. Help the hopeless and free the possessed, or die in the attempt… over and over again.
As Noah, former priest turned exorcist and demon hunter, you’re armed with your faith and a variety of tools ranging from the holy to the dark and arcane… but you’ll need much more for this hunt, and there will be precious few allies to provide them.
Written by David Gaider (former BioWare Lead Writer on the Dragon Age series and Creative Director on Summerfall’s own Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical), Malys is our unholy roguelite deckbuilder, with a beautifully hand-illustrated style.

Your cards reflect your actions - invoking holy and ancient powers through prayer and chanting, or equipment like holy water and purified salt. In order to play cards, you must burn cards first to light candles - making every hand a series of strategic decisions and sacrifices.
Succeed at exorcisms and receive a reward of Faith, a currency you can spend along your path. Use it to add, upgrade or remove cards, heal your Will, or buy Curios, run-long passive effects that add both power and different ways to play.
Improve your strategy and chance of success. Fail, die, and try again.

In an exorcism, your candles will light the way. You'll encounter a possessed host, desperate for your help. Burn cards in your hands to light candles, and use their holy power to play the other cards in your hand.
Every hand is a choice: Which cards will you burn and which will you play? Candles are persistent between turns, and become a strategic challenge; will you use all your remaining candles this turn, or preserve some for the next?
Manage your Will, Noah's capacity to endure evil. Completing an exorcism does not restore your Will, and you'll need to decide what sacrifices to make and what paths to take in order to succeed. Run out of Will and your night comes to an end.

Demons hide within their hosts to maintain their power, and the first step to wrestling that power away from more powerful demons is to reveal their True Name. You’ll need to Expose these demons in order to gain the upper hand and begin to take control of the exorcism.

Now revealed and threatened, you must Endure the full measure of the demon’s wrath. Use every part of your arsenal to destroy its Will while protecting your own. Fail, and lose yourself and the host to darkness.

Once weakened, the time comes to Expel the demon for good.
But beware — a desperate demon may draw on the life force of its host to power its most terrible abilities: protect the host or all is lost.

In Malys, death is not the end. Start the night over from the beginning, with only Noah and a select few aware of the horrors that have occurred. Noah must begin his hunt again.

A variety of playable cards each with custom art, abilities, and interplay
A hellish menagerie of demons, providing different challenges and encounters
Numerous adaptive stories that change and shift as you progress through the game
A new world, story, and characters from David Gaider, former Lead Writer of the Dragon Age series
A deeply reactive soundscape that shifts and changes based on your choices
...and much more to come!

We'll be posting most updates on our devlog online which you can find on our website, Otherwise, you can stay in touch with us via our mailing list, Bluesky, or TikTok!
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English**languages with full audio support
Engagement
Hours played at review time, across 40 reviews with recorded playtime.
Reviews
Themes across 40 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
This game is interesting in a really good way. The only real caveat is it feels like how you interface really needs to be touched up. The dragging to the candles should be something like hold left click. Little things. Just slight bit box issues etc. It makes the game feel sloppy. Like the work was done as a piece of art, but the mechanics of interacting with that art feel inept.
I really enjoyed the game - great roguelite deckbuilder, it has great music, art and ambience, everything comes together for the dark atmosphere of an Exorcist on his personal journey, exorcizing demons, doing his best to save people where he can. Story is quite good as well, fed piecemeal everytime you win :)
A pretty fun card game with some interesting decks. Biggest complaint is you get so much repeat dialogue that when you get new dialogue you only realize it's new after the second or third slide. I wish there was a way to look back. Overall pretty good.
At the moment, the game is very raw and artificially prolonged. I’ve reached the second boss, and with each new loop, the battles drag on more and more — it starts to feel really suffocating even by the end of the second area. The visuals and design are cool, but the starting decks are very unbalanced. Right now, I can’t recommend this game, but I’ll include the crash code below: Fatal error! Unhandled Exception: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x0000000000000450 0x00007ff741151336 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff741159ab5 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff741178067 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff741111f1b Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff74110ffa0 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff74111011b Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff7414d3213 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff741196fbc Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff73fa4902c Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff73fa6dbe0 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff73fa6db66 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff7422efdc8 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff7422f6fac Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff7422f702a Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff7422f7e50 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff742300134 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ff7444710e2 Malys-Win64-Shipping.exe!UnknownFunction [] 0x00007ffe9019e8d7 KERNEL32.DLL!UnknownFunction []
Fun narrative, interesting card system with cool combos. Runs can be very long and certain fights if not properly equipped with offensive cards can be grindy. Would still recommend.
This game has a great atmosphere. Art, Story, even the bit of voice acting, all great. I even like the gameplay, there are a variety of compelling strategies to carry out. However, there is quite a bit a jank going on. Sometimes the cards aren't clickable/sometimes it registers as a play, instead of just a click. Sometimes clicking and dragging activates an unintended play. There isn't an option to speed up animations, so Playthroughs are very long. Each venture into the city can easily take hours. There's a fun story imbedded mostly in easy skippable text, the demon designs are great, each character and enemy have their own feel, style and play. So, The Bad: Jank Control, Accessibility, and Quality of life stuff the Good: Atmosphere, Story, Game Mechanics, Character Design I like this game, not too sure if you would like it though. If you like John Constantine, or stuff like lucifer, preacher, supernatural, and have the patience to work around glitchy controls, then this is that game for you.
I'm confused by the end. Is it the end? I don't know, and it seems no one on the internet knows as well, this game is quite obscure.
It's a cool idea, nice mechanics, but the game doesn't have much replayability.
I'm kind of mixed about this one. I was interested because I do like roguelites, and the involvement of David Gaider and Liam Essler was of course a huge plus. Coming to Malys from Slay the Spire and similar, I felt myself noticing some balance weirdness - the glow/light deck feels so much stronger that I barely even tried the other two. A reliable source of regen, barring the few demons that can snuff your candles? Yes please. There's a reason that many roguelites severely limit availability of healing. Okay, so maybe it's not going to convert anyone who's already married to Slay the Spire, but Malys oozes style. From the gorgeous opening track to its magnificent boss themes, the music really shines. With some roguelites, I mute the soundtrack and listen to a podcast instead, but that felt weirdly heretical here. The limited voice acting (provided by Summerfall staff) is evocative and left me wanting more, with the exception of Noah's slightly too-frequent combat lines, since you do hear them quite a lot. And the character designs! Oh my goodness. The angel was far and away my favorite, for reasons I cannot touch on without enormous spoilers, but Lydia and Gideon really shone as well. Something as simple as turning merchants into characters who have a major role in your story added so much for me. I also very much appreciated Malys for its narrative and thematic dimension. The flashes of text prior to exorcisms hint at what you'll face, and enemy types repeat but on the whole are mechanically quite varied. Greater demons include creative abilities that reward the player's flexibility, and their designs are spectacular, as magnificent as they are grotesque. I guess my biggest complaint is that, depending on deck, some of the greater exorcisms especially can be really, really drawn out. This is more merciful than some games might be, in that rolling in with a so-so deck doesn't result in you heading back to the start, but it can unfortunately pall. So, tldr, this is one you play if you're the kind of freak who plays roguelites for the story and you don't mind it being effectively a one and done, rather than an endless game with a drip-feed of content. I appreciate that this is a game you can experience in full in a pretty reasonable amount of time while still being a fun one to pick up and put down. Do I recommend this game? I think so, but with reservations. It isn't going to compete with the big names in the genre, but that's fine, it isn't trying to. It's a gorgeously atmospheric and tightly-written story about the world's most dejected priest and his situationship with a nonbinary angel. If that appeals, you're probably the target audience.
I love Malys! Vibes are excellent, art is beautiful and creepy. Tickles my optimizey, min/maxy brain xoxo
Related
Related
Trends
Concurrent players on Steam, sampled daily since tracking started.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
Related
| Victoria I Complete | $82.4K | 267 | 70% | $9.99 |
| Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age | $82.4K | 179 | 91% | $19.99 |
| Trash of the Titans | $82.4K | 306 | 93% | $8.99 |
| I Hate Running Backwards | $82.5K | 245 | 75% | $14.99 |
| Ignite | $82.5K | 307 | 56% | $9.99 |
| Gargadusa's Tower | $82.5K | 239 | 90% | $8.99 |