Thysiastery is an anime Legend Of Grimrock, and you can attack the dinosaur merchants if you’re a complete monster

One of my lesser quality tests for an RPG is whether the shopkeepers complain at you for not buying anything. Grumpy shopkeepers, good RPG. This most specific of litmus tests has served me well, although I must admit that I’d happily upgrade it to ‘shopkeepers you can attack’, would that not disqualify 99% of games. But not turn based dungeon crawler Thysiastery, it turns out. This “dungeon crawler RPG featuring traditional roguelike and turn-based gameplay” apparently trusts you enough to let you recklessly batter its friendly wandering lizard merchants. You’d be a monster for it, of course, but it’s nice to have options.

“Command a party of bearers of the Brand, drawn into a vast Labyrinth. Recruit while exploring the Labyrinth in hope of finding a way out, and its secrets will be revealed as you delve deeper,” reads the Steam page. The basic premise here should be familiar to anyone who’s played old-school dungeon crawlers like Eye Of The Beholder, or modern revivals like Legend Of Grimrock. Your party of four shuffles around in first person, turn-basedly slaying monsters with attacks like ‘femur breaker’ and ‘lobotomise’. You’ll level up, hoover up shinies, make discoveries. You know. Adventure shit. Here are some more details:

• Turn-based combat in which your choices allow you to capitalize on chance and weakness – or be similarly exploited.
• Classic roguelike features such as permadeath, procedurally generated areas and randomly generated characters that provide a highly replayable game.
• A great number of skills for characters to learn and discover, then teach further to other characters.
• A number of difficulty modifiers to amp up or down the difficulty.

No solid release date on this one just yet – it’s slated for “Q2 2025”. Maybe the merchant will tell you if you rough ‘em up a bit? There’s always Dark And Darker in the meantime if you like a little multiplayer looting with your dungeon crawling.