Most roguelikes give you a dungeon, a character, and a reason to go back down after you inevitably die. Elin gives you all of that too, but it also lets you run a farm, open a shop, raise livestock, get married, have kids, and steal from the very townsfolk who were kind enough to sell you a house. The dungeon is still in there somewhere, it’s just no longer the only thing competing for your attention.
Developed and published by Lafrontier, Elin is the spiritual successor to the long-running roguelike Elona, and it entered Early Access in November 2024, with the studio expecting another one to two years of development before a full release. The pitch is a sandbox roguelike where the traditional dungeon crawling is just one system among many, all built on top of a world called Ylva that’s shaped as much by what you choose to do in it as by what the game generates for you.
A World Built From Dungeons and Everything Else
Ylva mixes procedurally generated dungeons with handcrafted locations, so the parts of the world built by hand sit right alongside areas that look different every time you visit them. The setting follows humans and a species called the Elea, and the framing throughout is that your actions leave actual scars on the land rather than just affecting your own save file, giving even small decisions a bit more weight than usual.
Housing plays into that idea directly. You’re able to build and customize your own home, and eventually expand into managing property and town affairs beyond it, turning what starts as a personal base into something closer to a settlement other people actually pass through.
Farms, Shops, and Families on the Side
The systems layered around the dungeon crawling are where Elin truly stands out as a roguelike. Farming, fishing, and livestock breeding all exist as legitimate ways to spend your time, and running a shop turns whatever you’ve gathered or crafted into a source of income that doesn’t depend on surviving one more floor. Tourism and music are in there too, giving you ways to interact with the world that have nothing to do with combat at all.
Then there’s theft, marriage, and childbirth, which is about as far from typical roguelike systems as it gets. Raising a family becomes part of your long-term progression alongside pets and companions, and none of it feels bolted on, mostly because Elin treats all of it as equally valid ways to spend a life in Ylva.
Still a Roguelike Underneath All of That
For everything going on around the edges, the dungeon crawling itself hasn’t been softened to compensate. Character creation lets you shape your own build from the start, and exploration leans on classic roguelike structure, with permadeath and procedurally generated floors that punish carelessness the way the genre always has.
Loot and difficulty scale with how deep you’re willing to go, and the game doesn’t do much to hold your hand once you’re down there. It’s a difficulty spike that sits in sharp contrast to the more relaxed pace of farming a field or running a shop upstairs, and switching between the two is very much the point.
An Early Access That’s Already Sprawling
Elin already holds a Very Positive rating on Steam, with 34 achievements scattered across its dungeons, its town systems, and whatever else players manage to stumble into. Updates have continued to expand the world since launch, and with a year or two of development still ahead, there’s a reasonable chance it only gets bigger from here.
Whether you spend more time in the dungeon or upstairs running a shop is entirely up to you.