Caveblazers

Caveblazers drops you into a cave that supposedly hides “unimaginable power,” hands you a sword, and lets a procedurally generated dungeon do the rest. It’s a platformer roguelike from Deadpan Games, and the pitch is simple: fight your way down, die a lot, learn something each run, and eventually get good enough to see what’s actually down there. Every attempt looks different because the layouts, loot, and enemy placement shuffle each time you start.

The game leans hard into old-school arcade roguelike structure. You explore hand-feeling but randomly assembled levels, picking up weapons, armor, and potions of unknown effect along the way, then push toward a boss fight before moving to the next area. Permadeath means a bad run just ends, no save-scumming your way out of a mistake. Combat is the part Deadpan clearly spent the most time on: it’s fast, physical, and bloody, closer to a proper action platformer than the slower, more methodical pace some roguelikes settle into. Enemies actively hunt you down instead of waiting around, while allied characters you pick up can tag along and back you up in a fight. Bosses show up between areas as genuine set pieces, screen-filling health bars and all, and each one asks for a different approach rather than just more hits. There’s also a rotating daily run that gives everyone the same seed and loadout for one shot at bragging rights, plus a set of standalone challenges for players chasing extra unlocks once the main loop feels familiar.

Who it’s for

If you like games that punish carelessness and reward pattern recognition, like Spelunky or Rogue Legacy, this is squarely in that lane. The appeal is in getting incrementally better at reading a run: knowing when to gamble on an unidentified potion, when to retreat from a fight, when a weapon pickup is worth the detour. If you enjoy that kind of steady mastery over flashy chaos, and you don’t mind restarting from scratch after every death, it clicks fast.

It’s a rougher sell for players who want a story to follow or a sense of permanent progression that carries between attempts in a big way. Roguelike fatigue is real too. If a handful of runs in your reflexes and decision-making aren’t the thing pulling you back in, this genre in general tends to lose its shine quickly, and Caveblazers won’t be the exception.

Is it worth grabbing?

For the roguelike-platformer crowd, yes, easily. It’s a tightly built entry in a genre where the good ones age well precisely because the core loop, run, fight, die, learn, repeat, doesn’t depend on trends or visual fidelity to stay fun. Since it’s been made available to claim for free, there’s essentially no downside to grabbing it even if you’re only mildly curious. Worst case it sits in your library; best case you find your next fifty-run obsession.

Quick facts

Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie. Developer: Deadpan Games. Publisher: Yogscast Games. Platform: PC (Steam). Released: May 24, 2017.