A two-person Swedish studio dropped a pirate-themed expansion on a six-year-old dungeon crawler today, and it's still one of the fairest deals in the genre.
Official art · via Steam
Chronicon shipped a pirate-themed DLC called Cosmic Curse today, the kind of thing a six-year-old budget ARPG has no business still doing, and that's the whole point. Developer Subworld, a two-person studio out of Gothenburg that's been running this game since before it graduated Early Access in 2020, keeps adding real content instead of milking a finished game for one more expansion pack nobody asked for.
The itemization is the reason people stick around this long, spread across five story acts and an endgame mode called Anomalies where difficulty modifiers stack until a run either pays off or falls apart. Cosmic Curse folds in fifty new blessings, twenty new bosses, and a Cosmic Sea sailing mechanic on top of that, and none of it costs more than six bucks. There's no cash shop here, no premium currency nagging you between runs; the paid DLCs Subworld has shipped since 1.0, this one included, add actual systems rather than reskinned loot tables. Steam agrees at scale, sitting at 91 to 95 percent positive depending which snapshot you catch, a number that's held steady for years rather than spiking on launch week and drifting down.
The combat hasn't aged well, and Subworld knows it: you still can't move while attacking, which was a dated choice in 2020 and feels worse in 2026 next to everything that's shipped since. There's also a save-corruption bug that's been reported on and off since the alpha, the kind of thing that should've gotten squashed years ago in a game this actively maintained. Only about thirty percent of players finish the full campaign, and roughly one in ten manages to max out a class, numbers that point to a game whose depth is real but whose on-ramp is rough.
That didn't stop Cosmic Curse from being a smart bet on Subworld's part. Six years in, most budget ARPGs this size have shut down or turned predatory. Chronicon added pirates instead, and that's worth a damn sight more than another reskinned loot table.