As a busy person, and also as someone who frequently opens their Steam library and then spends most of their available game-playing time trying to decide what to play, I’m a fan of roguelikes. I love a game I can play whenever I have a free moment, without having to remember a plot or keep learning new mechanics. So I really enjoyed the Wanderburg demo, a game where you play as a mobile building battling it out against increasingly terrifying fortress foes.
You start off as a pretty simple castle, with some auto-attacks like archers who fire small volleys of arrows and some basic cannons. At first you just rampage around the game’s arena, crushing sheep and fields and tiny soldiers. As you do, you get gold that lets you upgrade your auto-abilities or choose special ones that you trigger with a button press. I was particularly fond of the ability to drop a cluster of mines, given my favored strategy of running away once the enemies started getting bigger and tougher.
At a point during a run there’ll be a “swarm,” where a ton of enemies fill the screen, and there will also be a particularly nasty boss. Things start to get frantic, as your once-powerful building is now dwarfed by the even bigger, more powerful buildings coming to get you. Your building isn’t terribly fast, and your cannons and arrows fire from the side, so as a round ramped up in intensity I often found myself thinking most about my positioning, staying out of harm’s way while still getting some shots off, all while trying to roll over the smaller enemies to get the gold needed to get more abilities.
If you beat the boss, you’re rewarded with your castle getting bigger and more powerful, but of course the enemies and bosses get bigger and more powerful too. You keep going like that until you’re bested; it’s all a pretty simple idea, but there’s plenty of strategy to dig into based on which upgrades and abilities you choose.
What I like best about Wanderburg is how ridiculous the whole thing feels: rumbling around as a castle covered in tiny guys, fleeing from the gaping maw of an oncoming fortress while sucking up a flock of sheep that are just doing their sheep thing in the middle of the battlefield, as rolling houses and windmills amble around. The way a round shifted from me being the biggest thing in sight to the smallest always kept me on my toes, and gave the game a comedic undertone that meshes nicely with its cartoonish art style. Wanderburg is set to come out in 2026.
Riley MacLeod
