PLAGUN – The Plague Goes On

A doctor turned monster, and the collective behind him

PLAGUN – The Plague Goes On is developed and self-published by Talkinguns, a small collective that began earlier in 2025 as the personal alias of a solo developer before growing into a small team of developers and creatives. It released 5 November 2025 on PC and Android. The premise casts players as a masked survivor, once a doctor, now transformed by a failed cure for death into one of the very monsters he set out to fight — armed with plague-infused "Plaguns," biomechanical revolvers and melee-hybrid weapons that mutate his build as runs progress. Structurally, it's an auto-shooting, wave-based roguelike blending tight 2D platforming with bullet-hell combat, built specifically around short fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions rather than the hour-plus runs common elsewhere in the genre, with permanent progression carried between attempts through collected corpses that unlock new gear and meta-abilities.

A strong first impression for a small team

The praise that recurs most consistently across PLAGUN's review corpus concerns atmosphere and pacing. Reviewers repeatedly describe the pixel art as gritty and distinctive, with more than one specifically noting the style's rough, homemade charm as adding rather than detracting from the game's grotesque tone. The mask-and-weapon build system draws real, specific credit for genuine variety within a small package — reviewers report finding multiple viable playstyles even in a handful of hours, crediting the combination system with making short runs feel meaningfully different from one another rather than just faster repeats of the same loop. The game's short session length draws its own repeated praise as a deliberate, successful design choice, with several reviewers specifically framing PLAGUN as a "pick-up-and-die" experience well suited to quick sessions rather than long-form commitment. Developer responsiveness earns specific, credited praise from at least one detailed review that documents a follow-up visit after a 1.1 patch, describing many of their original complaints as meaningfully resolved and their overall recommendation becoming considerably less tentative as a result.

Where the bugs get in the way

Set against that praise, a smaller but specific and consistent thread of criticism concerns stability and pacing friction. The most serious complaint describes the game occasionally failing to register player inputs for several seconds at a time, an issue at least one detailed review says directly cost them a hard-won run against the game's final boss — a particularly damaging failure mode in a genre built around permadeath runs. Boss encounters draw a related, specific complaint: several reviewers report the same lengthy dialogue sequence replaying in full on every single attempt at a difficult fight, without any way to skip past material already seen, a friction point that compounds rather than softens the sting of a lost run. Smaller technical issues recur across multiple reviews, including a persistent screen shake effect reported as not fully disabling even after being turned off in the settings menu, and dialogue boxes that linger noticeably longer than needed before allowing the player to dismiss them and continue.

Enough to fill an afternoon, not much more yet

A related, more structural complaint concerns overall content volume. Reviewers who've cleared the main run describe wanting more distinct areas, bosses and weapon behaviours to meaningfully vary repeat attempts, with one detailed review specifically citing a lack of variation in what enemies and environments a build actually has to contend with as the game's clearest current shortcoming. That's a common growing pain for a small team's first roguelike rather than a fundamental design flaw, and it's notable that the same reviewers raising it generally still recommend the game, treating thin content as a reason to want more from Talkinguns rather than a reason to walk away from what's already here.

A grotesque frame around a familiar loop

It's worth dwelling on how deliberately PLAGUN leans into its body-horror premise rather than treating it as surface dressing. The masks players unlock aren't cosmetic skins layered over an otherwise neutral character — they're framed narratively as the physical result of the plague reshaping its host, and reviewers who engage with the game's environmental storytelling and cryptic logs describe a real, if understated, sense of dread building alongside the mechanical build-crafting. That pairing of tone and system is a genuinely sound design instinct: rather than a generic fantasy or sci-fi skin over a standard survivor-style shooter, the plague framing gives every equipment choice a small narrative justification, and reviewers who specifically single out the "dark lore and atmosphere" pillar of the game's own marketing report that it holds up in practice rather than existing only in the store description. That said, the game's short individual run length means players rarely spend enough uninterrupted time in any one biome to let that atmosphere fully breathe before the run ends and resets — a tension a couple of detailed reviewers gesture toward when asking for more content and area variety, since a stronger sense of place would likely make repeat runs feel less like variations on the same fifteen minutes and more like genuine exploration of a fully realised, rotting kingdom.

Value

At NZ$7.50, PLAGUN sits at a genuinely modest price for a roguelike shooter with this much atmosphere and build variety already in place, and multiple reviewers explicitly credit that price as fair or generous even while documenting real bugs and thin post-clear content. The review base remains small — 21 positive against 5 negative across 26 total reviews at the time of writing — which is worth noting plainly: PLAGUN hasn't yet accumulated the volume of feedback that makes a Steam aggregate score fully reliable, and its reception may shift meaningfully as more players weigh in and the developer continues patching. For players drawn to short, intense roguelike sessions and comfortable supporting a small, actively developing team through some rough edges, PLAGUN is a reasonable, low-cost pickup; for players wanting a fully polished, content-rich roguelike today, it's worth checking for further updates before committing. </content>