Everwarder is a fresh tower defense roguelite hybrid about clearing the darkness

Everwarder asks: how long will your light last? Not very long in some of my attempts. It's a fresh feeling spin that merges tower defense with a bit of roguelite action together, as you attempt to break through the darkness.

You assume the role of a mystical guardian charged with protecting a crystal that houses their trapped friend. Darkness expands, enemies emerge and it's up to you to sort out the defences. It's not a plain tower defense game, since you have direct free movement to float around and explore too. You're also not just protecting this crystal but trying to expand through a changing map.

As the developer explains: "Every run presents unique challenges and evolving mechanics, ensuring no two sessions feel the same. Players unlock new abilities, artifacts, and tools, with opportunities to create overpowered builds. Each decision—whether upgrading units, collecting resources, or combining artifacts —matters. Failure is simply another step forward in the game’s overarching progression system, where resources earned unlock new unit tiers, artifacts, and upgrades, allowing players to return stronger and last longer against the darkness."

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It has a really vibrant neon-infused style, with a nice little intro to pull you in and after the tutorial it really opens up into something you'll likely end up spending quite a number of hours in. The way you mine through the darkness to reveal enemies and progress through the map is pretty fun, as is dealing with the different enemy types with their strengths and weaknesses requiring some good planning to deal with.

The upgrade system is an interesting one here too. You get to upgrade towers directly during a run when you build up enough resources, you also get the meta spiritual limbo world inside portals you find to upgrade various things further and then there's another layer on top of that where you collect enough of a certain resource to evolve yourself. The evolving system gives you a choice of three cards to buff a particular type of tower, but it will also help affect other types on future evolutions. There's so many things going on in this one. Enemies evolve too, the longer they're going and the move time they have to get to you, the stronger they will end up as they too can transform into a stronger tier.

While you can upgrade your "towers", you also get overall upgrades

While quite simple in terms of the style, what the developer has achieved with it is impressive. Thanks to some wonderful music and sound effects for everything plus lots of little animations going on, it really all flows together nicely that it's real joy to watch when it gets going.

"With Everwarder, I wanted to create something that breaks away from the static nature of traditional tower defense games,” said Oleh, the solo developer of qLate. “The core of this game is that you control the flow of enemies, making it entirely your responsibility if they overwhelm your defenses.”

I would say they've succeeded on their vision here.

The Linux version tested works perfectly.