Rogue Voltage is a refreshing and very creative engineering roguelike

Rogue Voltage takes the idea of roguelikes and deck-builders and spins it into something incredible clever with a little engineering involving lots of wires. Note: key provided by the developer.

Here your deck is a backpack full of modules you build up during a run. You wire up power to modules to do everything from healing to attacking and more. The idea is just so refreshing and clever since there's a lot of room for all kinds of crazy combinations and over-powered chain reactions. It feels almost like a Zachtronics puzzle game turned into a roguelike.

Even though it can get just a tad complicated, it's still pretty accessible. I'm not particularly smart with this kind of stuff and yet I've been having a blast. Your backpack isn't exactly large, so there's not an overly ridiculous amount of things going on. Although, that said, there's multiple characters too, and what you do with all these wired up modules often needs to work in tandem across different turns to take down all those nasty creatures. With how many different combos there are, and I'm barely scratching the surface of getting good at it, there's going to be plenty of room for the developer to keep expanding on the idea.

Another clever feature is the timeline. The battles are based on turns but with your modules you can push people around on the timeline. There's just so many little strategies to find and use to your advantage here.

YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences.
Accept Cookies & Show   Direct Link

There's some really funny and surprising mechanics going on here.

At one point early on, which really made me appreciate the game and caused my brain to demand I play more, was an enemy throwing a Time Bomb at me. In six steps on the timeline it would explode, dealing damage to both characters. However, I could stick it in one of my backpacks, and wire up some power into it to reduce the damage. However, energy is precious. You have only a small amount (at least to start with). So you really have to think up a good strategy here to balance attacking, defending, building up some extra energy to unleash combos and more.

Rogue Voltage has a number of curious features like that.

In the case above, I was quite lucky. I had an Amplifier module I picked up from a previous encounter so I could double the 1 energy from the Generator, and then feed that into the Time Bomb therefore destroying it in a single step on the timeline. And leave my other character to attack the enemy. Nice.

You know it's really frustrating lately. There's too many games like this appearing that are just so damn good. I need a clone to work so I can play them all. Or maybe a time machine, so I can play Rogue Voltage for hours and hours and then go back in time to do some work. This is easily one of the best ideas for a game I've played so far this year.

The developer, Horizont Computergrafik, is a new Berlin-based studio with a background in simulation and visualization software. Rogue Voltage's unique wiring mechanics are inspired by music production with modular synthesizers. With the game currently in Early Access they said it's expected to stay there for around 1 year as they have plans to add in more characters, modules, play-styles and meta-progression.

It has Native Linux support that works perfectly on Kubuntu 24.04, and the developer said the build has been optimized for the Steam Deck.

Available to purchase on Steam. There's also a demo available which I seriously urge you to try.