Devil Jam

Selling your soul, one riff at a time

Devil Jam is developer and publisher Rogueside's survivors-like roguelite, released 3 November 2025 for Windows and macOS. The premise casts players as a rockstar whose band, after signing a cursed contract, is dragged into the underworld and forced to perform "the gig of your afterlife," fighting off endless waves of deranged fans, vicious mobs and hellish rivals armed with possessed instruments. Structurally, it's a familiar bullet-heaven loop, automatic attacks, escalating enemy waves, and periodic upgrade choices, filtered through a music-industry lens, with players unlocking additional playable band members, including lead guitarist Falco, singer Amy and bassist Lydia, as they progress, and building toward encounters with a rotating cast of Sin-themed bosses and, eventually, Death himself.

A Hades-and-Vampire-Survivors mix reviewers say gets the vibe right

The single most consistent thread running through Devil Jam's review corpus is enthusiasm for how well its presentation executes a genre mashup other games have attempted without quite landing. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically praise the game's hand-drawn hellscapes and character designs, describing Sin, Devil and enemy artwork as varied and genuinely striking, while voice acting draws its own consistent, specific credit for adding real personality and menace to the cast. The soundtrack earns particularly enthusiastic praise, with one detailed review admitting they're "pretty sure I'm playing this game mostly for the riffs," and several reviewers crediting the whole package for reading as the work of "bonafide rock fans" rather than a surface-level theme applied after the fact. More than one detailed review explicitly frames Devil Jam as succeeding where other games attempting to blend Hades' presentation with Vampire Survivors' combat loop have fallen short, crediting Rogueside specifically for "getting the vibe right" even where individual mechanical elements draw more mixed reactions.

A distinctive build system, and complaints it explains itself poorly

Devil Jam's central mechanical hook, a 4-by-4 grid where players arrange up to 12 weapons and amplifiers to maximize positional synergies, draws specific credit from reviewers as a genuine point of difference from more conventional survivors-likes, offering meaningfully different build approaches once a player understands how adjacency and item placement interact. That same system, however, anchors one of the corpus's most consistently repeated complaints: multiple detailed reviews describe the grid's underlying logic as poorly communicated in-game, with one reviewer noting they had to consult community-written guides to understand basic positioning strategy after finding progression "painfully slow" without that outside help, adding they'd "never had to do that in a survivors game before." A related, independently repeated complaint concerns overall content volume, with reviewers describing a limited number of maps, playable characters and enemy types relative to established genre peers, with one detailed review summarizing the game as "stylish and well-made, but feels more like a vertical slice than a full release title."

A specific bug, a missing story, and reviewers split on how forgivable both are

A further, specific and pointed complaint concerns a recurring bug tying combat directly to the game's music: because attacking and defending are mechanically linked to the soundtrack, reviewers report the game becoming completely unplayable when music unexpectedly stops, with one detailed review describing the issue recurring even after reinstalling, ultimately leading to a refund despite genuine enthusiasm for the game's concept and style. A related, smaller but specific complaint concerns narrative depth: reviewers note the premise of a band bargaining away their souls to the Devil is set up with real potential but never meaningfully explored beyond flavour text, a gap more than one reviewer calls a missed opportunity given how much personality the art and voice work otherwise establish for the cast. Notably, several reviewers who report these same frustrations still frame their overall verdict positively, explicitly asking the developers not to abandon the game and expressing hope that continued updates will round out its content and fix its rougher technical edges, a pattern that recurs often enough to suggest much of the corpus's patience is tied to genuine confidence in what Rogueside has already built.

A genre-hopping studio's first swing at bullet-heaven

Devil Jam arrives from Rogueside, a Belgian studio based in Kontich that has built its catalogue by moving fluidly between genres rather than specializing in one, with prior releases spanning the run-and-gun co-op shooter Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef, the cozy hidden-object series Hidden Through Time, and the real-time strategy title War Party. That history of genre-hopping helps explain the specific shape of Devil Jam's review corpus: reviewers extending patience toward its thin content and rough edges frequently frame those gaps as understandable growing pains for a studio trying its hand at the crowded survivors-like space for the first time rather than as a lack of underlying craft, pointing to the strength of the game's art and audio design as evidence the team's execution skills transferred even where genre-specific systems design, balancing power progression and communicating a build system clearly to players unfamiliar with the format, still needs refinement. Whether that context extends to reviewers unwilling to overlook a bug that can render the game briefly unplayable is less consistent, but it recurs often enough across the corpus's more forgiving reviews to be a genuine factor in how Devil Jam's overall reception reads.

Value

At NZ$11.79, Devil Jam sits at a modest, genre-typical price, and most of its review base considers the game's art, music and voice work a fair trade even where its content depth and system clarity draw real, repeated criticism. The Mostly Positive score, 76 positive against 29 negative across 105 reviews, reflects a review base broadly won over by presentation and a distinctive rock-and- roll take on the survivors-like formula, tempered by a specific, repeated complaint that its build system needs better in-game explanation and its content set needs to grow to match its style. For fans of Hades-style presentation and bullet-heaven combat looking for something with a distinctive theme and strong audio-visual identity, Devil Jam is worth a look at its low price, with the understanding that its deeper systems and content volume are still catching up to its ambition.