House of Necrosis

Most dungeon crawlers borrow from fantasy tabletop tradition or abstract their horror into stat blocks. House of Necrosis, developed by Warkus and released October 6, 2025, refuses that abstraction entirely, instead rebuilding the aesthetic and feel of 1990s 32-bit survival horror within a turn-based roguelike structure. The result is a procedurally generated mansion rendered in retro 3D with pre-rendered backgrounds, where the layout reshuffles on every run.

Play is split between two modes that reinforce each other. The mansion’s interior is navigated as turn-based dungeon crawling, with combat and exploration governed by RPG mechanics: characters level up, and weapons can be upgraded as runs progress. Outside the dungeons, the game shifts to a tank-controlled hub world that completes the period-accurate presentation, moving and handling like the fixed-camera games that inspired it. These two registers — methodical dungeon combat and clumsy, deliberate overworld navigation — are both deliberate homage and functional design, making resource and positioning decisions carry the same weight that limited inventory and save ribbons once imposed.

The procedural mansion is the central variable. Halls and rooms change configuration on every entry, so knowledge of enemy behavior and upgrade priority matters more than memorized routes. Character and weapon progression persists within a run and shapes how deep into the house a player can reach before the horror overwhelms them.

Warkus ran a public demo through early 2025, issuing at least five labeled demo builds between February and April, suggesting active community feedback shaped the game before launch. The full release arrived October 6, 2025, followed immediately by a cluster of patch updates through October 8, 9, and 11, and two further updates in November, indicating sustained post-launch maintenance in the game’s first weeks.

Where Darkwood builds dread through resource scarcity and an open world, House of Necrosis channels the same genre anxiety into the tighter, more legible structure of a run-based RPG.