Tiny Rogues

Some Early Access games feel unfinished the way a house feels unfinished with the drywall still exposed. Tiny Rogues feels unfinished the way a favourite restaurant feels unfinished when it still hasn't added the dessert menu it's been promising for two years -- everything that's actually on the table is good, sometimes very good, and the wait is the only real complaint anyone has. Nearly four years after launching into Early Access, that's still roughly the shape of this game's reputation: a bullet-hell dungeon crawler with real depth and a devoted following, running well behind the update schedule its own developer set for it.

The loop that earns hundreds of hours

Strip away the meta-story and Tiny Rogues is a tightly built roguelite: clear a room, choose a reward, move to the next, and eventually face one of more than 40 boss fights spread across 20- plus floors. What separates it from the pack of Isaac-likes it's obviously indebted to is the sheer width of its build space -- weapons, traits, stat combinations and character classes that can be pushed toward wildly different playstyles. Reviewers who love it tend to love it in very specific, mechanical terms: "scratches the exact same itch as Enter the Gungeon," reads one from July 2026, praising "lots of different item/stat combos to play with" and controls that feel "satisfying and well tuned." Playtimes back that up in a way few genres can match -- multiple reviewers in the sample, on both sides of the recommend line, report playtimes in the hundreds of hours, and one positive review lists over 900 hours logged. That's not casual engagement; that's a game a real chunk of its audience has made part of their regular rotation.

Depth that some players say tipped into clutter

The same width that wins the loop so much praise is also where its harshest recent critics land. As the item and stat pool has grown across updates, a cluster of reviews from 2024 and 2025 describe the game's systems outgrowing their own clarity. "Too many stats," reads one from January 2025, arguing that potentially interesting synergies get "stretched so thin among other items and stats that you basically never see them come into fruition." Another, more pointed, puts it more bluntly: "Last year I had a lot of fun with this game. Now it is completely ruined, you need a 4 years degree in Tiny Rogues to understand what is going on, too many mechanics." These aren't complaints about difficulty in the abstract -- several of the same reviewers explicitly separate "hard" from "hard to parse," and it's the latter they're objecting to. A related, smaller thread of complaints goes the opposite direction, calling early floors too easy to the point of boredom, which is its own signal that the difficulty curve the developer has been tuning across updates hasn't settled into a shape every part of the audience agrees with.

The absence that shows up in nearly every negative review

If there's one design gap that unites an otherwise scattered set of complaints, it's the lack of a mid-run save. Runs commonly take 45 minutes to an hour, and there's currently no way to stop and resume one later. "The inability to save is a dealbreaker for me," reads a representative December 2024 review; another from November of that year makes the practical case directly: "If something comes up and/or you play on the go, and don't have 45-60 mins at a time, you can't exit the game and continue later." It becomes considerably more painful paired with the game's other recurring technical complaint -- freezes and crashes mid-run, including at least one report of the game becoming totally unresponsive except for background audio, with the in-progress run lost entirely. One reviewer from January 2025 puts the two complaints together directly: "Genius dev takes 4 years to add saves mid-run." It's a fair joke built on a real and specific frustration.

An Early Access saga, told mostly by the developer himself

The most useful context for all of this doesn't come from reviews at all -- it comes from the developer's own Steam news posts, which are unusually candid for a small studio. At the start of 2025, RubyDev wrote plainly that "at the end of 2023 I expected to add far more content throughout 2024. On the contrary, 2024 was spent cleaning up," before announcing that work on the long-promised "Into the Abyss" expansion would finally begin. An April 2025 post set a target of beta content arriving in two to three months, landing the full release around October or November 2025. That didn't happen: by August 2025 the developer had hired a second programmer to speed things up, and by mid-2026 was posting about "reimplementing" the game's entire player-side content from scratch -- weapons, traits and equipment -- with no release date attached. A May 2026 post also revealed a genuine reason for part of the delay: the developer underwent gallbladder surgery, an ordeal described as having "seriously killed our development velocity" for the following month. None of this reads like abandonment -- the posts are frequent, specific and honest about setbacks rather than going quiet -- but it does mean that a meaningful slice of the recent review sample, including several with thousands of hours logged, now describe the game as feeling stalled or "in limbo" while they wait for an update whose scope has grown well past its original timeline.

Value, as it stands today

None of the above changes what NZ$13.99 currently buys: more than 20 floors, over 40 boss encounters, dozens of classes and hundreds of items already live in the build, with no microtransactions or DLC asking for more once you're in. One reviewer, arriving relatively recently, makes the value case plainly: "Payed 10 bucks for a game that says its in early access despite having more content then half the games in my library, some being full on triple a games." That's a fair read of the game as it exists right now, separate from whatever "Into the Abyss" eventually turns out to be.

Final verdict

Tiny Rogues is a genuinely excellent bullet-hell roguelite wrapped in an unusually long, if transparently documented, Early Access cycle. The core loop earns every bit of its Overwhelmingly Positive rating -- deep build variety, tight controls and a scale of player devotion that speaks for itself. What keeps it from scoring higher is exactly what its most dedicated fans are currently frustrated about: a missing mid-run save that turns crashes into real losses, a difficulty and complexity curve some longtime players feel has drifted past the point of clarity, and a headline content update that has now slipped past more than one of the developer's own public targets.

7.5 out of 10. Recommended, especially at this price, for anyone who enjoys the genre and wants to get in early on something with real long-term potential -- just go in treating the current build as what it is: a very good, unfinished game, with a developer who communicates well about delays but hasn't yet managed to stop having them.