Ring of Pain

Most card-based roguelikes spread encounters across a board or a linear path you walk toward. Ring of Pain inverts this: every enemy, item, and event arranges itself in a circle around your character, and the dungeon comes to you. Developed by Simon Boxer and Twice Different and released on October 15, 2020, it is a turn-based crawler where movement is a decision about adjacency rather than navigation.

Each step around the ring repositions every other element on it. Creatures telegraph their next action visibly, so the player is always reading a board state rather than reacting to surprises mid-combat. The real pressure is positional: moving toward loot may place you beside something that was previously dormant, and the ring can cascade into ambushes if routes are misread. Backstabbing a creature by approaching from behind is a legitimate strategy, and sneaking past threats to preserve health is equally valid.

Gear drives build identity across a fifteen-slot inventory. Over three hundred items combine through passive properties, supporting approaches built around evasion and acid damage, raw durability, or explosive fire affinity. Mimics offer high-stakes item trades. The dungeon structure runs sixteen core path dungeons with two branching endings, supplemented by more than twenty-five optional detours containing stronger loot and stranger encounters across four distinct environment regions. Unlockable difficulty modes and a Daily Dungeon mode with over forty modifiers extend replayability. Lore arrives in short rhyming fragments, and the visual style was shaped by Aphantasia, giving the artwork an unusual raw quality.

The game’s update history shows sustained post-launch investment. A Community Content Update arrived in mid-2022, followed by a series of minor patches through late 2022. The most substantial addition came in October 2023 with the Multiclass Update, version 1.6.00, which had been in beta since at least May of that year. Maintenance patches continued into late 2023 and as recently as October 2025. Twice Different also announced a separate title, Winnie’s Hole, in mid-2023.

For players who found Slay the Spire’s linear path too abstracted from spatial reasoning, Ring of Pain offers a more geometric and positional take on the card-crawler form.