The Way Home

Waking up stranded with a cat named Cheese isn’t how most roguelikes start, but The Way Home doesn’t care about convention, it’s too busy giving you procedurally generated dungeons, 80+ monsters with unique attack patterns, and a tiny joystick that controls your fate.

On paper, it’s a pixel-art RPG with permadeath, base-building, and skill trees. In practice, it’s a delightful cycle of risk and reward where every floor cleared dangles the tempting question: Do you go deeper, or bank your loot? Because if you die, you’re not just dead, you’re resource-bankrupt and emotionally wounded.

Combat is breezy but tactical, layering randomized upgrades with up to 15 equippable skills that can swing a run from doomed to god-tier. Meanwhile, building up your island base with wood, coal, and existential dread adds that satisfying metaprogression juice, your failures feel like progress. Also, yes, your cat can craft.

Party Mode lets you swap Cheese out for any of 21 characters and tag-team the chaos with a squad of four, transforming solo dungeon crawls into skill-combo sandbox mayhem. It’s part Moonlighter, part Into the Breach, and somehow still its own thing.

It’s not flawless, controls can wobble and healing is stingier than you’d like, but The Way Home nails the essentials: satisfying combat, slick pixel vibes, and a quiet narrative heartbeat that beats beneath the carnage.

The Way Home is a roguelike that doesn’t just want to challenge you, it wants to charm you. And it mostly succeeds, one teleporting dungeon at a time.