Pixel-art 2D Metroidvania-style roguelike (or roguelite) with Soulslike combat. That’s a combination of words anyone who’s even glanced at the indie sphere has heard a thousand times—sometimes separately, often together. Dead Cells is still the reigning champ of that mash-up; if you’ve somehow missed it, fix that. It’s graduated to “indie-darling” status, and as always happens, a freshman class shows up trying to remix the formula just enough to feel new. Enter Katanaut, a pixel-art 2D Metroidvania-style roguelike (roguelite?) with Soulslike combat. Easy to overlook in the September avalanche of heavy hitters, so let’s see if it deserves a second look or should stay lost in the void.
STORY
You play Naut, the poor sap tasked with scrubbing a cosmic infection off the space station you’re supposed to guard and making sure it doesn’t punch its ticket to the rest of the universe. The plot never gets chatty—genre standard—but drip-feeds just enough context to keep you moving. Think Dead Space on a B-movie budget: story is told by the walls, the corpses, the things that used to be human and now just want your face. One minute the crew’s throwing a party, the next the corridors are wearing fleshbunting and something that used to be your coworker is crawling through the vents. Scientists and traders holster the exposition and sell you power-ups between loops, and the game hand-waves permadeath with “time loop.” Sure, works for me.
GAMEPLAY
The loop is classic roguelike: carve through rooms, grab toys, die, spend currencies, repeat. Melee, guns, time-slows, black holes, tornadoes—arsenal’s wide and only gets sillier the deeper you go.
“Soulslike” is doing some heavy lifting on the store page. Yes, there’s a stamina bar and a roll, but that’s the whole list. Attacks are fast and floaty; enemies barely flinch, so half the time you’re not sure you’re even connecting. It’s like slashing wet newspaper—looks brutal, feels weightless. The real threat is headcount: the game loves to vomit a dozen fodder enemies at once, and without meaty hit-stop it’s easy to lose track of your own sword. Gunplay? Serviceable. Doesn’t offend, doesn’t sing.
Upgrades are pricey, but that just nudges you to scrounge every corner. Slow time when you’re swarmed, black-hole a hallway, watch the stamina bar so you don’t get caught with your dodge down—once I learned that cadence the bar felt generous, not punitive.
AUDIO & VISUAL
The missing hit-stop is the only thing keeping combat from feeling truly vicious. Everything else revels in the gore: bodies bisect, blood decorates the walls, chunky particles fly. When the screen fills with neon giblets it can get unreadable, but most of the time it’s controlled chaos.
The station itself is a chrome-and-neon graveyard, all flickering signs and abandoned experiments half-digested by meat-creep. Shadows do heavy lifting—every corridor feels like it’s hiding something ready to pop.
Soundtrack’s a slam dunk: bass-heavy, synthy, uneasy outside the game, perfect inside it. Flesh squelches, distant thuds in empty rooms, the whole audio package sells the horror as hard as the visuals.
CONCLUSION
Katanaut will never escape Dead Cells’ orbit, and it doesn’t need to. It’s confident enough to borrow the blueprint and scribble its own notes in the margins. My gripes are small: attacks need more crunch, particle storms can turn into soup. None of that kept me from “just one more run.” If your backlog is already buckling under $70 titans, throw this cheaper, meaner option on the pile. When you finally come up for air, Katanaut will still be here—waiting, looping, and ready to let you slice space horrors into wet confetti.
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