there's something quietly devastating about a game that asks you to plan everything, and then takes the controls away.
medium-rare games announced dungeon automata this year, and a demo is already sitting on steam, patient and waiting. the genre they've invented for it — or maybe just named, because it was always going to exist eventually — is "autologic." auto battler meets logic-based visual scripting. you write the behavior of golems before they descend. and then you watch. you cannot intervene once they've gone in.
that detail keeps staying with me.
the levels are handcrafted, not randomly generated. so this isn't a roguelike. it isn't chaos dressed up as strategy. it's something more deliberate than that — more like writing a letter to someone you love and then folding it up and sliding it under a door you can't open from your side. you've said everything you can say. now it's up to them.
yuzo koshiro is attached as a composer. the man who made the streets of rage soundtrack feel like neon rain on warm asphalt. who gave ys its impossible momentum. who touched sonic the hedgehog and shenmue and somehow made each one feel like its own kind of dream. his presence here isn't a marketing bullet point to me. it's a feeling. it's a promise that the silence between golem footsteps will be filled with something that actually matters.
medium-rare games calls it "a new twist to the dungeon crawler genre." that's understated in a way i find kind of beautiful. because what they've actually built — at least in the demo — feels less like a twist and more like a question. what does it mean to care for something you can no longer control? what does it mean to program love into a creature made of stone and send it somewhere dark?
the demo is on steam right now. no full release date has been announced yet. i keep thinking about the golems, walking through handcrafted corridors, doing exactly what i told them to do, or failing to, in ways i should have anticipated.
i don't know if that's a game mechanic or a feeling i've had before.
[Original Source](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/do-a-bit-of-visual-programming-and-watch-your-party-of-heroes-conquer-an-evil-tower-in-dungeon-automata)