20 Minutes Till Dawn

Surviving the night has rarely looked this good. 20 Minutes Till Dawn is what happens when a solo dev combines the pulse of Vampire Survivors, the flair of a bullet hell, and the atmosphere of a Lovecraft short story, all wrapped in a stylish, shadow-soaked aesthetic. It’s short. It’s brutal. It’s kind of beautiful.

The concept is simple: pick your hero, pick your gun, and survive 20 real-time minutes against a rising tide of squid-faced nightmares. But “simple” stops there. Each run is a procedural puzzle box of upgrade decisions, synergies, and controlled chaos. Will you coat the screen in fire with a flame shotgun build? Freeze time with Yuki’s frost butterflies? Or summon a pet dragon while dashing through the void as a sword-swinging deer?

Every kill drops XP. Every level-up feeds the build. Every second survived turns the pressure up. It’s a delicious, sweaty kind of stress, equal parts twitch reflex and long-term planning.

The arenas are plain, sure, but the monsters are not. Tentacled, creeping, exploding beasts swarm from every direction. Some blast, some dash, some detonate. And when they’re stacked so deep you can’t see the ground? That’s when 20 Minutes Till Dawn really sings.

Is it the deepest roguelike out there? No. But for a few bucks, it’s one of the sharpest. And when you finally clear a run, heart pounding, screen red, enemies frozen mid-charge, it feels like victory.

This is roguelike distilled. Fast. Focused. Freaky. And fantastic.