Spin Realm: The Sovereign's Doom playtest

About Spin Realm: The Sovereign's Doom

Spin Realm is an exploration roguelite where you, alone or with a group of friends, fight to end the tyranny of the Sovereign across the maps of this land.

MMost things in these lands are decided by luck or by your reaction time, but always on a wheel.

Every fight is one spin built from both fighters' stats. Power widens your arc. Luck feeds the contested band in the middle, and Speed carves a darker strip inside your own arc that grants a critical hit if you land on it. Lose the spin and the wheel might come back as a Parry, one press to save yourself, with your Guard as the width of the target. Chests have their own wheel. So does running away.

Nothing is rolled behind your back. If a stat matters, it changes the size of an arc you can see before you commit.

So heroes chase gear that widens the odds or makes the timed presses easier to hit, and every decision you make is a bet placed against your own fate.

Like a wheel, Spin Realm keeps turning. You can always come back to the same map and face stronger foes on it.

Dying sets you back. It does not end you. You wake up in the main city of the map with your gear still on, and you start again from there, and you keep starting again until the Sovereign is defeated or until the clock on the run runs out with the throne still occupied.

Every run is an invitation to try a different hero, a different kit, and to raise your Renown high enough to unlock better gear, consumables, and the ancient sets the realm forgot it ever made.

The Sovereign will not face you until the Herald has posted five contracts and you have settled them. How you answered picks the statline it wears when it finally wakes up.

Settle all five and it stands at lower Power. Settle three or four and it is a bit higher. Settle one or two and it is at maximum Power and tougher, most heroes do not walk away from that.

Every death adds six rounds to its ramp, awake or not. The throne ages while you recover in the city. By the end of the run, the Sovereign stops sitting still and starts hunting you, and the last stretch of a losing run is played with that thing somewhere on the board.

59 monsters across 29 races, each deciding on its own turn whether you are worth it. They weigh your Power against theirs, how many of their kin are within two tiles, whether you are wounded, whether your purse is fat enough to bother with, and whether you are standing somewhere they consider theirs.

So they hunt you, or they shadow you at two tiles and wait, or they hold their ground, or they run. Frostwolves stalk in a pack and commit the moment a fourth wolf joins them. Ice Trolls charge a fully armoured Warden and die for it, because that is what an Ice Troll is.

Four hand-authored worlds, six regions each. No procedural generation, no invisible walls.

Roads cost half a movement point and forest costs two. Hills give +1 Power to whoever is standing on them when the wheel spins. Ash takes a Heart for ending your turn in it and lava takes two. Sealed chests sit near the routes people actually walk. Waystones cut the map in half if you can reach one.

Every world also has four darker faces: eclipse, pestilence, acid rain and blood moon. The same ground you learned, under weather that wants you dead.

Renown banks to your profile when the run ends, win or lose, and stays there.

It buys heroes, each priced on its own. It buys the doom faces of every world. It is the reason a bad run is still worth finishing, and the reason the next one starts further along than the last.

The same board runs as a race for up to four players, on one couch or online, with couch and online seats in the same session. Same wheel, same monsters, same maps. The question changes: whoever holds the most Renown when the round counter stops takes it.

Gold you are carrying can be taken off you. Nobody is ever knocked out. Every Wipe leaves a Scar, so the player who has been beaten hardest is the one nobody wants to meet late.

Chunky 24 pixel tiles, a fixed 34 colour palette, no glow, no bloom, no fine print anywhere. A turn takes 20 to 40 seconds.

FEATURES

• An exploration roguelite: five contracts, six champions per map, a Sovereign whose strength you set
• Death returns you to the city with your gear, and ages the crown instead
• Persistent Renown that unlocks heroes, doom faces, and forgotten gear sets
• Four hand-authored worlds, six regions each, four doom variants apiece
• 59 monsters running one readable behaviour engine
• Twelve equipment slots, consumables, shops and a vault. No levels, no XP, no grinding
• A race mode for up to four players, couch or online, on the same maps
• Keyboard plus up to four controllers, through Steam Input
• English, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish

From the game's Steam page.