My favorite part of Dark Souls 1 is the fact you’re essentially playing as a walking, decaying, tired old reanimated corpse. This is a game about struggle, fatigue, dragging yourself forward despite the crushing burdens of battle. How fitting that you play a cadaverous former warrior, barely held together by dark magic and a suit of armor – the perfect metaphor for a decrepit, erstwhile world, clinging to the bitter embers of life. You take that mood, mix it with the party-based combat of Diablo 4 or Darkest Dungeon, and inject some seriously brutal kills and gore. Available now, in full 1.0 glory, this is a seriously nasty roguelike.
In Corpse Keeper, with every step you take, every battle you fight, you’re literally falling to pieces. Your entire party is composed (or rather, heh, decomposed) of dead soldiers reluctantly dragged back to life to fight another day. Deterioration is inevitable. You can delay your final purification using tinctures and spells, but death – or rather, re-death – comes for us all, and eventually, you need to replace your moldering party members with fresh bodies. Part RPG and part roguelike game, Corpse Keeper has a few other smart twists.
First of all, you don’t just find and recruit new party members – you build them using scavenged old bones and flesh lumps, and depending on the body bits you Frankenstein together, they’ll arise from the dead with different abilities and skills. There are seven different regions to explore and numerous seemingly friendly NPCs to meet – but like in Dark Souls, your interactions with them could have unforeseeable, terrible consequences.
Combined with its weighty combat, instantly recognizable 2.5D visual style, and gallons of bloodshed, Corpse Keeper is an in-depth and gleefully nasty roguelike reminiscent of videogames’ mid-’90s counterculture heyday. After a long time in Steam Early Access, the 1.0 version has just launched, and you can get it now via a 40% discount for $11.99 / £10.05. Just head here.
Otherwise, get some of the other best RPGs, or maybe the other best soulslike games, if you miss FromSoftware’s grueling fantasy series.
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