Kaamos: Puzzle Roguelike

Steam's own pull-quote for Kaamos, credited to the outlet Qualbert, calls it "Bejewelled but make it Dark Souls." That's a better summary than most marketing copy manages, and it points at exactly what's interesting here: a puzzle mechanic everyone has already mastered, repurposed as the entire combat system of a grim, permadeath roguelike. Pepperbox Studios' bite-sized duel-roguelike, out since April 2025 from Finnish developers under publisher indie.io, spends its best ideas on the board itself and its weakest on everything that's supposed to keep you coming back to it.

A match-3 board that fights back

The core loop replaces the genre's usual tile-swap with something structurally different: instead of swapping two adjacent tiles, you drag an entire row or column, and it loops back around on the opposite edge like a conveyor belt. Matching same-coloured tiles resolves into attacks, blocks or dodges depending on which colour you've lined up, and because you can see the enemy's next move in advance, every drag is a response to a specific, telegraphed threat rather than a blind cascade chase. It's a genuinely different way to read a grid than swap-based match-3 asks for, closer to solving a sliding puzzle under a countdown than clearing gems for points, and it's the single best reason this game exists rather than being one more skin on a fifteen-year-old formula.

Equipment does real work on top of that board rather than sitting beside it as a stat sheet. Over 180 weapons, armour pieces and rings are described on the store page, and reviewers who've spent real time with the game back up that looting a new item changes which tile colours and shapes you're working with, not just the numbers attached to them. Swap from a heavy two-handed weapon into a dual-wielding, multi-strike build and the board itself starts behaving differently under your hands — a meaningfully different puzzle, not a re-skinned one. Three broad archetypes get name-checked across the marketing and the reviews that engage with build variety: a dual-wielding berserker stacking small, frequent matches; an evasive duelist leaning on dodge tiles; and a heavily armoured knight who can absorb hits the other two can't.

Where the puzzle turns into a slog

The trouble starts exactly where a defence-heavy build should feel rewarding. Kaamos gives both sides access to defence, armour and dodge stats that refresh in successive turns, and the negative-review corpus — seven reviews out of 65 total, spanning launch week in April 2025 through mid-2026, so this isn't a one-time launch complaint — converges on the same specific failure mode: building defensively, or facing an enemy who does, can lock a fight into what one reviewer called "a 1 damage/turn loop," where neither side can meaningfully progress the match. Another put it more bluntly: "the game turns out to become extremely slow paced because of the existence of multiple defensive stats you have to break through to actually do damage." The community's own workaround, repeated across several of those reviews independently, is to abandon defensive builds entirely and just maximise damage output — which is a reasonable strategy, but it means an entire stat category the game hands you is, in practice, a trap.

Steam's global achievement data backs this up with numbers rather than anecdotes. The first four milestones — reaching the early game, landing a big hit, encountering the first real threat, and a damage-focused clear — sit between 66% and 89% completion, showing the opening hours land well for almost everyone who buys in. From there the curve falls off a cliff: the next tier of achievements, several of them tied to defensive playstyles like "Defensive Entrance" and "Unyielding Defense," sit in the low-to-mid twenties, and the achievements gated behind actually finishing the game — "We Are Heroes," "Peerless Peasant" — sit at 1.8% and 1.7% respectively. That's not simply a hard game; it's a specific, measurable point where the design stops rewarding the strategy it spends its early tutorializing teaching you.

A small world for a big item list

The 180-item loot pool is real, but it's built on a noticeably small structural frame. Multiple reviewers converge on the same count: five playable characters and three short zones, each recycling the same handful of bosses at every checkpoint rather than introducing new ones as you progress. One reviewer with over 20 hours logged summed it up as being "bare, with only 5 characters and 3 short areas, each having the same exact boss per checkpoint." A separate, independent critical review made a related but distinct point: because the underlying stat pool attached to those 180 items is comparatively narrow, item variety reads as more cosmetic than structural once you've cleared a run or two, and the seven starting characters (across both versions of the roster reviewers describe) don't differentiate as sharply as their names suggest. For a genre built on replaying the same short loop dozens of times, a small map with recycled encounters is the one place content depth can't be faked by a big item count alone.

Presentation carries more weight than the mechanics alone

Where Kaamos consistently earns its praise is atmosphere. The pixel art commits to a stark, near-monochrome palette against black backgrounds — genre outlet The Geekly Grind, in a 7/10 review, called out the "two-color palette against black backgrounds" as doing real work to sell the "sunless medieval world" premise, and Inverse's coverage separately praised how convincingly the game "portrays a bare-bones journey aided with little more than a sword and shield." Several Steam reviewers single out the soundtrack unprompted as "surprisingly good at keeping you focused," which is a rarer compliment than art-style praise for a game this size. None of that fixes the pacing problem in the back half of a run, but it's a real reason the opening hours land as well as the achievement data says they do — the mood is doing genuine work, not just decorating a mechanic that would carry the game on its own regardless.

Price, platform and where the money goes

At $9.99 (NZ$14.99), Kaamos is priced honestly for what it delivers: a one-time purchase with no DLC, no in-game currency and nothing to buy once you've checked out. Several critical reviewers explicitly weigh the price against the amount of content rather than against the quality of the idea, and land on "a hard sell" or "too minimalistic on pretty much every front" rather than calling it overpriced outright — the complaint is thinness, not the number on the price tag. It's Windows only; Steam lists Linux system requirements on the store page but doesn't tick the Linux platform box, and there's no Mac build. With 65 total reviews at the time of writing and an 89% positive "Very Positive" tag, the sentiment is real but the sample is still small enough that it should read as encouraging rather than definitive.

The verdict

Kaamos found a genuinely clever new thing to do with a genre everyone assumed was fully explored, and the looping-grid combat is worth the price of admission by itself. What it hasn't found yet is enough content, or enough of a fix for its own defensive-stat stalemate, to keep that idea feeling fresh across a full roguelike's worth of runs. Play it for a handful of short, sharp sessions and it's one of the more interesting $9.99 puzzle games on Steam. Ask it to be a long-term roguelike and the cracks — three zones, five characters, and a wall most players never climb — show through fast.