It’s a roguelike deckbuilder. Your deck is the setlist, your band is the damage. Every run you scrape together a different group of disasters and find out how deep they get before the set ends — and it always ends.

Four Strikes a fight. Three on the stakes that hate you. That’s the whole thing.

Between Strikes you load the hand — riffs that jack a member’s attack, utility to keep everyone upright, embers to pay for it. Embers refill every Strike and cap at four, so it’s the same small budget every time and a different problem every time.

Then you Strike and the whole band swings at once. Cards, chains, artifacts, pedals, pacts — every multiplier you stacked pays out in one cascade, one contributor at a time, and whatever’s left at the end is what the boss actually eats.

Run out of Strikes and it’s over. No overtime. Nine circles, twenty-seven fights, and something at the bottom that wants you dead.

Eighteen of them across nine roles, and five spots on the stage. Most of them never play.

Ten keywords decide how they do play, and they stack — FRENZIED, BLASTBEAT, DISSONANCE, DIRGE, ANCHOR, TRICKSTER, and more. The keywords are the actual game.

They work on each other, not just on themselves. A drummer doubles whoever’s standing either side of him and does nothing at all for anyone else, so his slot is worth more than his stats. Some of them cut what the boss hits back for, recalculated every single Strike — lose one mid-fight and the damage lands harder that same turn.

Nobody dies down here. They get Too Stoned, sit the rest of the set out, and everything they were holding up goes with them.

Play the right two cards back to back and they lock together. SHRED STORM. DEATH WISH. CROWD KILL. ETERNAL ENCORE.

They multiply. So do the artifacts. So do the pedals, the pacts, and whatever you bought off Sly that you probably shouldn’t have. Stack four in one Strike and the damage stops being a number and starts being a phone number.

Sly deals three things and only the most expensive one is safe. Shrooms if you’re scared. Aether if you’re committed. Prism if you want to find out what this game looks like from the inside — and Prism’s the one that never goes wrong, which should tell you something about the other two.

None of the chains are printed anywhere in the game. You find them the way a band finds a song: playing it wrong until it’s right. There’s a Chain Hints toggle in the options if you’d rather just be told.

Two phases. 6,660 HP. He heals to full between them and comes back with fresh Strikes, because of course he does.

About one run in a hundred puts him down. He isn’t a difficulty spike, he’s the entire point — everything you built all run either works right here or it doesn’t, and mostly it doesn’t.

Pull it off and you get one line back:

“Impressive. I’ll be seeing you again. Soon.”

Play the demo, then tell me what you broke. Discord’s where the suggestions land and where the balance arguments happen. “This member is useless” and “this combo is stupid” are the two most useful things anyone sends me, and both are usually right.

Pitch something brutal enough and it ships. Get it really right and your name might make it in the credits — or you could end up a secret unlockable band member, if the suggestion is truly epic.

A lot of what’s already in the game is in there because somebody said a number felt wrong.

Free demo first. Six gigs, all the way through Circle II, no strings.

Early Access opens Friday October 30th — straight out of Next Fest and one day before Halloween. Nine circles, twenty-seven fights, five decks, six stakes, the whole band and Lucifer, all built and running right now.

It isn’t finished and it won’t pretend to be. Every number in it has been argued over, rebalanced, and argued over again, and the part that’s left is the part only real players can finish. Everything added between now and 1.0 is free.