Erosion Preview - Finally! A Roguelike With Fresh Ideas (Summer Game Fest 2026 Exclusive)
Are there too many roguelikes these days? The answer is yes and the data backs it up. In 2026, there has already been over 1000 games released on Steam with the roguelike tag. However, I strongly believe that no matter how crowded a market is, there is always room for more with caveat that it’s doing something original, but the problem is that 99% of these releases aren’t attempting anything new or innovative.
Erosion on the other hand, feels like a breath of fresh air in the roguelike genre. More than the refreshing isometric voxel western aesthetic, Erosion is also attempting something very unique with its time loop mechanic. Every time you die, time fast forwards a decade and the consequences to the timeline can be drastic as you try to rescue your daughter before it’s too late.
WHAT IS EROSION?
Erosion is the sophomore game from Plot Twist, the Polish indie studio behind The Last Case of Benedict Fox. Benedict Fox was a promising looking title that was overly ambitious and didn’t fully deliver. However when speaking the creative director at Plot Twist and Game Director of Erosion, Bartek Lesiakovsky we learned that the company isn’t backing away from being ambitious and after playing Erosion, that’s evident because it has some grand ideas
Erosion is a genre buffet with a little bit of everything for everyone. It’s an isometric western twin stick shooter roguelike with open world and dungeon crawling elements where your daughter has been kidnapped, every death costs you a decade of your life and every decision you make has butterfly effects that drastically alters your timeline. I was told that the no one is expecting how deep the time mechanics will go and will likely surprise people.
The team has a lot of passion for twin-stick shooters from Enter The Gungeon to nearly all of Housemarques titles and while the first thing the studio did was to make sure the core gameplay was fun, but the big, back of the box feature in Erosion is that dying doesn’t just reset the run. It moves time forward a decade, shifting the timeline you were on and greatly altering the world. The studio isn’t shying away from the roguelike moniker as they feel strongly about offering something new to the genre.
After playing Erosion, although there are a lot of elements incorporated into the experience, it all blends together seamlessly and with so many choices, each decision and outcome felt bespoke to me. However, these were very early and I want to see just how far down the rabbit hole goes. As a massive fan of the classic twin stick shooters, I can’t wait for this game to erode my free time.
INTERVIEW AND VIDEO COMING SOON
