A rabbit-run roguelite that turns backpack management into the best fight in the game.
Official art · via Steam
I bought Sephiria expecting a solid afternoon of button-mashing from the Dungreed team's second game. Six bucks less than a case of beer, about as much investment. That changed on July 31, when the game hit 1.0 and four days disappeared that I don't remember agreeing to lose.
The setup is a top-down tower climb: you die, you bank a currency called sapphires, you buy your next run a little softer landing. Standard roguelite bones. The inventory is what makes it worth your money. You're not collecting gear so much as placing it on a grid where position changes what it does. Slot a ring next to the right artifact and it turns into something else entirely. Slot it two spaces over and you get nothing. I lost an embarrassing number of hours rearranging a backpack in a video game, and enjoyed every goddamn minute of it.
Six weapons, each with fifty-plus upgrades, and every one earns a spot in your rotation before the run's over. The greatsword swings like a car door. The daggers argue back. Sixty types of demon showed up to ruin Bunnyville, and I killed most of them wrong on my first ten tries, on purpose, to see what happened.
The bosses are the weak link. A few attacks come from off-screen with barely a tell, and getting clipped by something you never saw coming is the cheapest kind of hard in the genre. The mandatory cutscene before and after every fight gets old fast too, and by run thirty you'll be mashing through it out of muscle memory instead of watching it.
The bosses don't change the verdict. I went in expecting a decent follow-up from a studio with one good game behind it. Instead I got one of the best combat systems running in this genre right now, co-op that holds up, and quality-of-life touches like loadout presets and unlockable starting artifacts. Even the soundtrack earns a mention: Studio Mosso wrote something that's been stuck in my head for a week straight. Ninety-seven percent of almost twenty-two hundred Steam reviewers back me up on this, and that number almost never happens for anything, let alone a fourteen-dollar indie game about rabbits saving their own town.
Buy it. Get a friend to buy it too, because the co-op is good enough that you'll want the company.