Roundguard has been bouncing around Steam since March 2020, and Wonderbelly Games built it around dungeon crawling and pinball. Your hero doesn’t walk from room to room, they get launched into it, ricocheting off walls and monsters until momentum runs out, the gold gets collected, or the wrong bounce sends everything sideways.
Throw in four classes, more than 200 items and trinkets, a fully randomized castle, and modes built specifically for people chasing leaderboard spots, and there’s a surprising amount of depth sitting underneath all that bouncing.
Combat Runs on Momentum, Not Buttons
Rather than attacking directly, you aim your hero and let go, sending them bouncing through the room to pick off monsters, knock into treasure, and occasionally clip a hazard nobody warned you about. Each launch counts as a turn, so a shot that pings uselessly off a wall isn’t just wasted, it’s a turn something else on the board gets to use against you.
Monsters range from slow, wobbling slimes to enemies placed specifically to punish a careless angle, and the randomized layout means the safest line through a room rarely looks the same twice. Reading where a shot will actually end up is most of what Roundguard asks of you.
Four Classes, Hundreds of Ways to Bounce
Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, and Druid all move through the castle using the same physics, but each comes with its own abilities layered on top. More than 200 items and trinkets can be found along the way, and how they interact with a run built entirely around ricochets and momentum is where most of the variety comes from, whether that means chaining bounces together, detonating on impact, or turning one well-placed shot into a cleared room.
Runs still end in permadeath, though the gold collected along the way carries over and unlocks more trinkets for the next attempt. A run that ends on an unlucky bounce still leaves something behind, even if the castle itself resets around you.
A Castle Full of Oddballs
None of this plays out with much menace. The monsters are colorful and cartoonish rather than genuinely threatening to look at, the dialogue leans comedic, and the castle itself feels more like a slightly chaotic theme park than somewhere anyone should be scared to visit. It’s an odd match for permadeath and turn-based positioning, but it keeps a genre that can get punishing feeling a lot more approachable.
That approachability carries over to how Roundguard can be played, too. It made the jump to mobile not long after launch, landing on Android for anyone who’d rather work through a room or two between other things than commit to a longer session at a desk.
There’s Always Another Run Worth Chasing
Beyond the main climb through the castle, Roundguard adds leaderboards, daily and weekly challenges, and several difficulty tiers for anyone who’s already cleared it once and wants a reason to go back in. It’s built less for one long sitting and more for the kind of game people keep opening for a single quick attempt.
More than five years after release, Roundguard still holds a Very Positive rating on Steam, with 80 achievements for anyone determined to master every angle the castle throws at them. Between the classes, the trinkets, and the modes stacked on top, there’s still plenty here for anyone who hasn’t picked it up yet.