Endor Awakens: Roguelite DRPG

A mobile game that changed screens, not habits

Endor Awakens doesn't hide what it is. Its own store description calls it "a thrilling evolution of Depths of Endor," the developer's earlier mobile title, and that lineage explains almost everything about how the game plays on Steam. Solo developer Javier Hernández Torres — credited as both developer and publisher — has carried over a genre that Steam still under-serves relative to demand: the turn-based DRPG, where you build a party from scratch, choose their races and classes, and send them down procedurally generated dungeon floors one careful decision at a time. That's a real gap to fill, and on paper this fills a lot of it for free.

Character creation is the strongest single pitch here. You pick each hero's race — which carries its own racial bonuses, the kind of asymmetry that games like World of Warcraft built entire class fantasies around — their class, their guild, and their portrait, which can be a custom image pulled from your own device rather than a preset from a gallery. One reviewer with over 1,300 minutes logged sums the whole loop up as "like MMORPG dungeon crawler," listing off race, class and guild systems that mirror an MMO's character sheet compressed into a single-player roguelite. Hardcore mode removes the safety net entirely: die there, and that character stays dead, no morgue resurrection available.

The hub does a lot of work

The city that surrounds each dungeon run is where the free-to-play scope becomes obvious. The store page lists seven distinct systems living there: a shop for weapons and armour, an inn that hands out quests and carries the main story, guilds that unlock each hero's skill tree, a bestiary that tracks every monster you've fought, a bank for storing items you don't currently need, a daily login chest, and a morgue for reviving anyone who dies outside hardcore mode. That's a genuinely full loop for a project with one developer's name in both the developer and publisher fields, and it's the reason several long-session reviewers — one logging 917 minutes, another 791 — describe it as a comfortable, low-stakes game to return to "when you are bored," in one reviewer's words, rather than a title that demands sustained attention.

Combat itself is turn-based and deliberately unhurried: attack, cast, use an item, or defend, with traps and random events layered into the dungeon floors alongside the fights. More than one reviewer flags it as easy rather than punishing for something billing itself a roguelite — "for a roguelike it seems very easy," as one puts it — which tracks with a design built to be played in short mobile sessions rather than around the tense, single-mistake-ends-the-run tension the genre label usually promises outside hardcore mode.

The interface never got a PC pass

Here's the complaint that shows up, independently, across nearly every critical review: nothing about the menus was redesigned for a mouse and a monitor. One reviewer who liked both this game and its mobile predecessor is explicit about it: "when you transition to a PC release like this there should definitely be some PC UI. The UI/UX is really uncomfortable for shopping, and changing weapons, moving things around." Another calls it "a much uglier and clunkier version of Monster's Den," a genre touchstone this game invites the comparison to just by existing in the same space. A third notes the game stores its save files in Documents rather than the Windows-standard AppData folder — a small technical detail, but exactly the kind of thing a straight mobile-to-desktop port gets wrong that a PC-first release wouldn't.

That friction isn't just a matter of taste — it shows up in Steam's own achievement data. The "explorer" achievement, presumably an early-game milestone, sits at 47.1% of the tracked player base. "Guilds" — the achievement tied to the skill-tree system the store page and the positive reviews both single out as a highlight — sits at just 6.9%. Fewer than one in fourteen players who have earned any achievement at all have engaged with the system most reviewers call the game's best feature. A menu that's genuinely uncomfortable to navigate is one plausible reason a strong system goes this unused.

Free, but not free of complaints about money

Being $0 to download is Endor Awakens' clearest advantage over almost anything else in its genre, and Steam's own category list doesn't flag an in-app-purchase feature the way it does for plenty of other free-to-play games. That makes it notable that more than one reviewer still raises money as a concern. One calls it "light on detail or depth, and heavy on micro-transactions"; another takes aim specifically at a meta-currency — described elsewhere as a blue gem used to reroll item stats — as "more of more Skinner Box number-go-up tripe." Whether that currency is purchasable with real money or purely earned through play isn't confirmed by anything Steam surfaces publicly, but the fact that multiple, unconnected reviewers reached for the same monetisation-shaped language about a free game is itself worth flagging to anyone deciding whether to commit hours to the reroll grind.

A genuinely good accessibility list

One thing this review can state with more confidence than most: Steam's own category tags for Endor Awakens list Camera Comfort, Custom Volume Controls, Narrated Game Menus, Playable Without Timed Input, and Save Anytime, alongside the more expected Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud support. That's five distinct accessibility-relevant features officially catalogued for a game built by one person, which is a meaningfully longer list than most solo dungeon crawlers ship with, and it deserves credit independent of the interface complaints above — turn-based combat with no timed input requirement and full narration support removes real barriers that a lot of bigger-budget RPGs still don't bother with.

Verdict

Endor Awakens has the bones of a genuinely deep free-to-play RPG: race-and-class character creation with real mechanical weight, a hub with seven working systems, procedural dungeons, an optional permadeath mode, and an accessibility feature list that outperforms its budget. Where it falls down is specific and well documented by its own players — an interface carried over from a touchscreen without redesign, a save-file quirk that betrays the port, and a meta-currency system that draws unflattering comparisons despite costing nothing at the door. None of that erases the depth underneath; it just means a fair number of players are bouncing off the wrapping before they reach the guild skill trees the achievement data shows so few of them ever touch. At zero cost the downside of trying it is low, and returning fans of Depths of Endor clearly still find plenty here. Anyone coming in cold, expecting a PC-native roguelite, should know exactly what they're getting into first.