By Aimee Rogers 
A year. That’s how long one developer spent building Starfish ROOM: Defend the rooms on an old smartphone, working entirely solo, before finally pushing their 2D sci-fi musou roguelite onto Steam. Not in some cozy indie studio with funding. On a phone.
The game tasks you with controlling Kibo Wave through an endless alien invasion scenario, armed with card drafting mechanics and ridiculous combat synergies. You slash through hundreds of enemies while building synergistic card combos. It’s arcade-adjacent roguelite design, leaning hard into pixel art and score attacks.
The smartphone angle is easy to treat as a novelty, but it says something about the state of indie development. The barriers to making games have never been lower, yet actually finishing one remains brutally difficult. Plenty of projects start with ambition. Far fewer survive long enough to reach a Steam launch. Building an entire game on ageing hardware doesn’t automatically make it good, but it does suggest a level of persistence that’s hard not to respect.
What’s particularly interesting here is the developer’s willingness to gut entire systems post-launch. Those speedrun mechanics mentioned in early testing? Gone. Completely stripped out to tighten the core combat and card-drafting loop. That kind of surgical decision-making separates the thoughtful indie projects from the ones that ship half-baked and never recover.
It’s also a reminder that good roguelites live and die by focus. Every mechanic has to justify its existence. Every system has to contribute to the run rather than distract from it. Removing a feature is often harder than adding one, especially after you’ve already spent time building it.
If you’ve got any passing interest in tight action-roguelites with actual thought behind the systems, this might just be a game worth checking out.
Steven Andrew